A quick shoutout before you dive in — this Bonus Chapter was paid for and made possible by the sponsorship of Hugh Jass. Because of their support, the whole community gets an extra chapter today. Thank you! 🙏
Morning arrived, and Raven was already deep in thought before Ethan was fully awake. He recognized it in her stillness, the sign of a mind already active.
"What's the plan?" Ethan asked.
Rogue stirred on his other side. "Why are you asking the ceiling?"
"I'm asking generally."
Raven turned her head toward him. "You could ask Jean if she's free."
He looked at her. "I already did. Last night, before I came back up." A pause. "You knew I was going to."
"I had a feeling," she said, composed as ever.
"We could join," Rogue offered, though without much conviction in her voice.
"Girls' day," Raven said to Rogue. "We had plans."
"We had the idea of plans," Rogue said. "That is different."
"Go," Raven said to Ethan. "We'll be here."
Rogue settled back into the pillow. "She means she has wanted to test something with my powers all week, and I am the only one who can help."
Raven didn't deny this.
Ethan looked between them: Rogue was already half-asleep again, and Raven was already focused on whatever the day's experiment would require. He got up.
---
Breakfast in the mansion's dining room was as noisy as a school returning from an overnight trip, filled with the energy of young people settling back into routine.
Scott Summers came in from the hallway and looked at Ethan across the room.
The look lasted three seconds. It was the look of someone who had heard something, formed an opinion, and communicated it through nothing but eye contact.
Ethan looked back with the expression of someone who had received the message and chose not to engage.
He heard about yesterday, Ethan thought. In a building full of people who talk, of course, he heard.
Scott got his coffee and sat at the far end of the table. The mutual ignoring began with the practiced efficiency of two people who had chosen to address an issue by avoiding it.
Jean entered five minutes later, found her seat, glanced at Scott and then at Ethan, and had clearly assessed the situation before she finished sitting down.
She said nothing, but the slight tightening around Jean's eyes indicated she had noted it for later.
---
He found Jean in the corridor after breakfast, the tense atmosphere of the dining room still lingering with them.
"The stink eye was significant," Jean said before Ethan could say anything.
"I noticed."
"He does not have standing to—" Jean began, then stopped herself. "That is not a conversation for right now."
"Agreed." He leaned against the wall. "You mentioned the Rocky Mountains once."
Jean blinked at the subject change. Then her expression shifted from tense to lighter. "Rogue told you."
"She did. Is it still true?"
Jean looked at him for a moment. "I've wanted to see them since I was twelve," she admitted. "Somehow never managed it."
"We could fix that today," Ethan suggested. "Twenty-five minutes at a comfortable speed. Less if we push it."
She tilted her head. "And Raven mentioned—" she paused, slightly self-conscious, "—being carried."
"No wind, no cold, no pressure change," Ethan explained. "You have flown before. This is different; you would feel the speed visually, but nothing else. Just like with the car."
Jean considered this for approximately two seconds. "When do we leave?"
---
They returned to the back grounds: the January lawn, bare trees, and the privacy of the mansion's rear approach. Jean stood as he joined her, and she looked at him with the uncertainty of someone about to try something new.
He picked her up with ease, though it always seemed to require adjustment from anyone he carried, no matter how often he explained it.
She went still for a moment. Then: "Oh."
"The aura," he said. "Everything settles."
"It is—" Jean looked at the ground receding below them. "—it is like being still while the world moves."
"Yes."
"That's completely different from flying myself."
"It is."
She looked at the horizon, and the expression on her face matched what he had seen from Rogue and Raven the first time: the response of someone experiencing a new kind of freedom.
---
They crossed Pennsylvania and Ohio quickly, the interstate below becoming a moving map, with roads forming patterns and cities appearing and receding as if viewed from the ideal vantage point.
"Raven and Rogue," Jean said, into the wind-that-wasn't-wind. "Is it actually permanent? What you have with them?"
He thought about waking up in that room over the past several weeks: Raven against his left side, Rogue's arm across him from the right. Their arrangement no longer felt like a choice, but a fact.
"I can't imagine waking up without them anymore," Ethan replied. "That's the most accurate thing I can say about it."
Jean was quiet for a moment, watching the Midwest move below them. "And — more people. Does that concern you?"
"I am not looking for more," Ethan said honestly. "But I am not afraid of what happens when something genuine arrives unexpectedly." He paused. "If nobody involved has a problem with it, neither do I."
Jean turned her head to look at him instead of the ground. With no wind, her hair remained still, and her expression was clear.
"That's a very calm way to think about it," Jean said.
"It took a while to get here," Ethan said.
She turned back to the horizon. They flew in comfortable silence through the Indiana sky, and he reflected on how silence felt different with each person. With Raven, it was dense and full, the silence of two people thinking in parallel. With Rogue, it was clean and easy, requiring no performance. With Jean, it was the silence of someone accustomed to knowing others' thoughts, now finding the uncertainty interesting rather than frustrating.
"You're the only person I can't read," Jean said, which confirmed she'd been thinking in the same direction.
"Does it bother you?" Ethan asked.
She considered it honestly. "It bothered me at first," Jean admitted. "I am used to having the full picture. With you, there is always something withheld." She paused. "Now it feels like talking to someone where you have to truly listen. No shortcuts."
"Is that good?"
"Yes, actually."
---
The Rockies paled below them with the grandeur expected of such vast geography. The plains averaged higher, and the snow-covered peaks rose from the horizon, requiring the eye to adjust upward.
He brought them down on a ridge with no trail access, a place reachable only by those who did not need a trail. The view was one the mountains had reserved for themselves.
Jean stood at the edge of the ridge, looking at it.
For a long time, she just looked.
The Rockies in January felt timeless, immense, long before anyone noticed and destined to remain so. The peaks stretched north and south as far as the eye could see, their snow a blue-white of altitude, the sky above a deep, clear blue found only above eight thousand feet.
"So was it worth it?" Ethan asked.
Jean turned to look at him, and whatever she saw on his face made her smile — the full kind, the one that had been appearing more since the Phoenix bond was complete.
"More than worth it," Jean said.
They stayed on the ridge for an hour, which felt shorter than it actually was, as time often does in the right place. In the valley below the mountains, there was a distinct character: a place that had built its identity around the landscape above it and was honest about it — the shops and restaurants oriented toward people who had come for the mountains and needed somewhere warm to go afterward.
They walked through the town with no agenda and found a lunch spot established enough to have strong opinions about its soup, which proved justified. Afterward, Jean ordered coffee, wrapped both hands around the cup, and spoke about topics unrelated to Xavier, telepathy, or recent months: books she had read, a theory from a physics journal, and the unique grief of watching a beloved film with someone who did not share her feelings.
Ethan told her about his upbringing—the real, Earth-based version of his life, his life before this one. He offered a simplified account, but one that was true without telling her it was a different life, of course.
She listened with the complete attention she gave things worth listening to.
The afternoon included a visit to a bookstore, a coffee shop, and a walk back toward open ground as daylight faded. By the end of the day, it felt effortlessly good.
"Carry me back?" Jean asked at the edge of town, with the lightness of someone who had decided to stop hiding her desires.
"Obviously," Ethan said.
Back at the mansion, in Raven's room, the two of them had been at it for most of the afternoon.
Rogue sat cross-legged on the bed, attempting for the fourth time to explain what it felt like when her power activated.
"It's not a decision," she said, pushing her hair back. "It's more like — when you touch someone, there's a pull. Like a current that wants to go somewhere. I can feel it start, and I can feel it building, and there's a point where if I don't break contact, it just — takes."
Raven sat across from her, focused as she tried to replicate the experience in her mind. "The initial pull—is it directional? Does it feel like it comes from you toward them, or from them toward you?"
Rogue thought about this carefully. "From me," she said. "Like something in me reaching for something in them."
Raven closed her eyes.
Rogue watched her. "You're not going to be able to get this one in an afternoon," she said. "It took me years just to understand what was happening, and I had no choice about it."
"I am not trying to copy the full mechanism yet," Raven said, eyes still closed. "I am trying to understand the architecture—where in the cellular structure it originates." She was quiet for a moment. "It is different from the others. Cyclops, Storm, Bobby—those are energy-based. This is something different, more biological."
Rogue looked at her hands. "It's always felt like it was always there," she said. "It is most likely something that grew from inside rather than just being there all of a sudden, thanks to a mutation starting to be active."
Raven opened her eyes and regarded her with a look of recognition. "That is exactly right," she said. "This is why it is more difficult to copy. I am not replicating an energy system; I am trying to grow something."
"Can you?"
"I think so." She paused. "Give me two more hours, please."
---
Two hours and forty minutes later, Raven reached across and touched Rogue's hand.
Nothing happened.
Rogue looked at the point of contact. "You're not—"
"No," Raven interjected. "I'm not."
Rogue instinctively reached for what her power would normally do—felt it activate, felt it reach—and found nothing. The current started, found Raven on the other end, and was sent back.
"I'm immune," Raven said.
"Because you copied it," Rogue said slowly.
"The same mechanism cannot drain itself," Raven said. "Like two magnets with the same pole: the force exists, but it repels rather than connects."
Rogue thought about what this meant. "So you can touch me."
"Now there is no risk of the power activating at all—not against me." She turned her hand over and looked at it. Then she looked at Raven with the expression of someone running a secondary implication that had just arrived.
"If I could copy your ability," she said. "The transformation. The power-copying. Would that give me the same immunity to myself?"
Raven looked at her. "That's—" she paused. "That's a much more complicated question."
"But theoretically."
"Probably, yes," Raven said. "If you copied my copying ability, you might be able to copy your own power as I did, and produce the same immunity effect." She considered this. "However, copying a copying ability is recursive in a way that may not be possible,"
"It's worth exploring," Raven said.
Rogue looked at her hand again — bare, ungloved, resting in Raven's with no consequence.
"Yeah," she said. "It is."
---
Raven watched from the window.
Rogue observed, noting Jean's posture, the way she stood near Ethan, and the ease between them. "She looks different,"