March was quieter: cold lingered, but its hold eased; evenings stretched, and winter seemed to waver around Xavier's mansion.
The morning unfolded with the unhurried rhythm of a day with no pressing destination.
Ethan came downstairs. Rogue sat with coffee and guitar, her fingers idly drifting over the strings. Jean read, truly absorbed in her book. Raven, with her second cup, stared out the window with her usual morning focus.
Ilyana was in her usual chair.
He poured himself a cup of coffee and joined them. The morning flowed on with the quiet comfort of people who had mastered the art of sharing space. It meant nothing beyond simple presence.
At some point — after the second cups, after the conversation had moved through a few of its natural subjects — he set his cup down and looked at the table. "The afternoon has a plan," he said. "We're going to look at houses."
Rogue's hand stilled on the guitar strings. "Today?"
"This afternoon. I want to start with the Starks — Howard knows this area, and I'd rather go in with informed expectations than find out what we missed after we've already seen things."
Rogue set the guitar aside decisively. "I want to see the garage. Whatever we look at, I'm seeing the garage first."
Jean looked up from her book, thoughtful. "Are you actually looking, or are we deciding today?"
"We'll know if we find the right one."
Jean looked at him with the precision she brought to statements she was assessing for accuracy. She apparently found this one satisfactory and returned to the last page of her chapter.
Raven turned from the window. "I'll want to see the land more than the building. The building is remediable. The land is what it is."
Ilyana, remaining in her chair, had listened attentively to the entire conversation about the group's future. She did not speak, but when she deliberately set her coffee cup down and met Ethan's eyes for a moment, her intent gaze made it clear she was fully engaged and considering the implications, a silent signal of her investment in the discussion.
---
Howard Stark opened the door, dressed for basement work, unfazed by five unusual visitors. He welcomed them in, resigned to surprises at this address.
"Maria," he called toward the back of the house. "Ethan's here. Bring the folder."
Maria Stark appeared with the folder, expecting this visit and ready for business. "Looking for property, right?" she said.
"Something substantial. Land — forested ideally, or adjacent to it. Private enough to feel independent but close enough to Xavier's that we're not isolated. More than twenty rooms."
Howard raised an eyebrow. "That's not a house. That's an estate."
"We're a large group with varied needs."
Howard looked at the five of them and visibly ran a count that did not quite match the word 'large'. "How varied?"
"We'd need a library, music room, gaming room, space for animals, several bedrooms, and enough acreage that nobody needs to know about any of it," Rogue said.
Howard looked at her for a moment. "Are the animals the challenging part, or is that the list in order of priority?"
"The animals are Raven's department. I'm more concerned about whether there's a basement with decent soundproofing."
Maria had opened the folder and was moving through it as someone who had anticipated this conversation and had done preparatory work. "There are three properties in a reasonable range that meet the basic footprint," she said. "Two of them have been sitting because they need significant investment — the right buyer with patience could get a very good deal. The third one became available three weeks ago, and the asking price is three million." She looked at Ethan. "That's the serious figure in the group. The other two are lower, but the work they need would add substantially to the total."
"The three-million-dollar property. What's the land?"
"Forty-two acres. Mature forest on three sides. Private drive, approximately three hundred meters from the road. The nearest neighbor is more than half a mile away."
Raven looked at the map for another moment, then at Ethan.
He had already made a note.
"The broker."
Howard picked up the telephone.
---
The broker, a composed woman in her fifties, absorbed the group's appearance, then focused on Ethan. The potential commission was enough to keep things running smoothly.
"I understand you have a clear sense of what you're looking for."
"Very clear," Raven said dryly.
The first property was a Colonial in northern Westchester — large by most standards, well-maintained, with a small library room and a ground-floor layout that was theoretically adaptable. They walked through it with the organized attention of people who knew what they were assessing.
Rogue walked through the front door, looked at the floor plan the broker had provided, looked at the room designated as the entertainment area, and looked back at the floor plan. "The space for the gaming room is achievable if you knock through two walls. The music room doesn't work at all — the ceiling height is wrong, and the room positions it between a bedroom and the kitchen, which is an acoustics problem that isn't fixable without a full structural renovation."
The broker blinked. "Most clients focus primarily on—"
"She has opinions," Jean said, pleasantly. "We all do."
The second property had better bones — a Victorian revival with a second-floor room that had the potential Jean was looking for: large windows, proportional ceilings, and a sense of space that could hold shelving without making it feel like an afterthought. But the land was only three acres, and what existed of it was open rather than forested, and when Raven walked out through the back doors and stood on the lawn and looked at the absence of trees, she turned around after approximately thirty seconds without speaking.
Ethan read the thirty seconds correctly.
"Let's see the third one."
---
The private drive was the first indication.
The drive appeared as a break in the treeline, centuries-old trees enclosing a well-kept gravel path, dark and cool, cutting off the road behind.
The house appeared at the end of the drive.
The house was substantial: four stories, wings on each side, stone blending with the land—built for permanence, not just size.
None of them said anything for a moment.
Ilyana stood slightly apart at the edge of the group, methodically turning her head to survey the treeline on three sides, checking sight lines from the main entrance, and measuring the distances between the building's corners with practiced precision. Her focused, analytical attention showed she was assessing the defensive perimeter, a deliberate and practiced habit rather than offering any criticism, just as she usually did in new locations.
"The land," Raven said to no one in particular.
The broker was already unlocking the front door. "Forty-two acres, as mentioned. The forest begins approximately fifty meters from the main structure on the north and east sides. The south faces the private drive. The west—" she pushed the door open "—I think you should see the west side from inside."
They went in.
---
The entry hall was built to impress: high ceilings, stone floors, and natural light made even emptiness feel inhabited.
Ethan moved through it and felt something that was less analytical than the way he usually processed spaces — a recognition, uncomplicated and immediate, that this was the place.
He did not say this yet. He went through the rooms.
The room with the south-facing windows on the second floor was the first moment when someone else stopped walking.
Jean stood in the doorway of it and looked at the south wall — floor-to-ceiling, full-width, the glass catching the afternoon light and throwing it across original hardwood floors that had been maintained with sufficient care to still be worth maintaining — and then looked at the walls to either side, which were plaster and high and uninterrupted.
"That wall takes floor-to-ceiling shelving," she said. "Both side walls do as well, if the runs are handled correctly. The ceiling height is sufficient for a rolling ladder." She looked at Ethan. "The light is perfect."
He looked at her standing in the room with the south windows behind her and thought: " This is the room she has been picturing since she was twelve years old.
Rogue had discovered the basement stairs on her own and disappeared below. When she returned, her expression carried the rare satisfaction of someone who had found things right in ways she had not anticipated.
"The space is larger than the above suggests," she called up the stairs, then appeared at the landing. "There's an original stone foundation room in the far section that's structurally isolated from the rest of the basement — the walls are thick enough, and the position is right for the acoustic work. The gaming room is easier; the whole middle section is open and level." She looked at Ethan. "This works."
Raven had walked through the main floor and the east wing and had come out through the rear of the house to the west-facing terrace, where the broker had said to look.
The west side of the property was where the forty-two acres made themselves felt. The forest began at the terrace edge — not trimmed back, not managed into something decorative, but actual forest, the March trees in their bare architecture, the depth of the woodland visible as layers of trunks and branches receding into an interior that had the quality of somewhere genuinely apart from the human world.
Raven stood at the terrace edge and looked at the trees, and did not move for two full minutes.
Ethan stood beside her and watched her look at the forest and understood what she was thinking — the animals she'd mentioned, the principle of it more than the particulars, the idea of a home where living things were present not because they served a purpose but because they belonged there. The forest made that real in a way that the colonials' lawn and the Victorians' three acres had not.
"This is the one," she said, without turning.
He had already decided the same thing approximately ten minutes earlier. "I know,"
They walked back through the house and found the others reconvening in what would eventually be the main living area — a room on the ground floor large enough to hold the entire group without anyone feeling placed. Jean was already standing near the south wall of the adjacent library-to-be. Rogue was looking at the ceiling heights with the measuring eye of someone who had already mentally placed equipment. Ilyana stood in the middle of the living area and slowly turned, taking in all four walls, which was the most comprehensive approval she was likely to express.
The broker watched all of this with the practiced neutrality of someone who had seen enough purchase decisions to know when one was being made without the formal moment having arrived yet.
Raven looked at the group and then at Ethan, and then at the room — the scale of it, the walls, the way the afternoon light moved across the floors. "There's more than enough room here," she said, in the dry register she used for statements that were true and slightly something else simultaneously. "For the household as it currently stands and for however it might develop."
Jean looked at the south windows and said nothing.
Rogue looked at Raven with the expression of someone who had received an entire conversation in six words.
Ethan looked at the room and considered how unlikely this moment was: October in Boston, a backpack with nothing inside, and now this sunlit room in Westchester on a March afternoon. The distance between those two points felt impossible to measure.
"We're getting this house," he said. He said it the way he said things he had already decided, which was without inflection, which was how the people who knew him best had learned to recognize the ones that were settled.
Nobody argued.
---
Outside, walking back toward the drive, Ilyana fell into step beside him.
She did it the way she did most things — without preamble, without softening, in the direct way of someone who had been holding a question exactly as long as it took her to decide to say it.
"When you move here," she said, "can I come too?"
He looked at her.
She looked back with the expression she used when she had committed to a question and was prepared to receive whatever answer arrived without flinching.
"There's more than enough room," he said.
"I know there is," she said. "That's not what I was asking."
He turned to face her properly. "Then the answer is that, of course, you can. There was never any version of this where you weren't included if you wanted to be."
Something shifted in her expression—not her usual cataloging look, but something softer and more private. It was the look of someone who had wandered a long time without an anchor and had just discovered one was waiting.
She nodded once and looked at the trees.
From behind them, Raven's voice: "She's been asking that question in her head since the house conversation last week."
Ilyana looked over her shoulder. "How long have you known?"
"Since approximately the middle of the second property viewing," Raven said, with the composed warmth of someone who found this particular piece of information not at all unwelcome. "You walked through that Victorian library-to-be and looked at the walls and then looked at Jean and then looked at the room that would have been yours if the property had been right. I noticed."
Ilyana looked at her for a moment. "You notice everything."
"I've been noticing things for decades," Raven said. "At this point, it's automatic."
Jean, from slightly ahead: "Also, you are not as difficult to read as you believe you are. I say this with genuine warmth."
Ilyana turned forward and resumed walking, and the fact that she did not argue with either of them was, in its own way, the warmest thing she'd done all afternoon.
---
The drive back toward Xavier's mansion moved through the late March afternoon with the particular warmth of people who had spent a day doing something worth doing and were carrying the result of it into the evening. The light was at an angle that made Westchester look like a painting of itself — the low gold of late afternoon, the trees beginning to show the first edge of green that would become spring, the roads empty enough in this hour that the landscape had a quality of privacy.
Nobody needed to manufacture conversation. The afternoon had been full, and what followed it could be quiet without the quiet meaning anything other than satisfaction.
Ethan turned the numbers over as they moved.
Three million dollars. His current accessible funds — after the Boston operation, after the Detroit expansion that Dumar was running and that was not available to be touched because it was not a reserve but a functioning enterprise on which real people depended — were not immediately sufficient for that figure. This was not a problem. It was a practical question with a practical answer that did not require much moral deliberation.
There were operations running in the northeast — he knew of three stash houses connected to a South American distribution network that had been on his list for over a month, the kind of locations that contained cash that had arrived there through processes worth dismantling. Two of those locations would cover the purchase and leave enough to handle whatever renovation brought Rogue's basement rooms and Jean's library walls and the east wing into their final form.
He would handle that tomorrow.
Tonight there was dinner and the particular warmth of a group that had spent the day making a decision together, and that was more than sufficient.
Ilyana sat in the back with her arms folded and her blue eyes on the passing trees, and occasionally she looked at the others in the car with the expression she kept hidden most of the time — the one that was not cataloging and not assessing and was simply, without performance or qualification, glad to be where she was.