Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first thing to go was the light.

It didn’t die—it stuttered. Overhead fixtures blinked like startled eyes, the halls of the Xavier Institute pulsing between day and dusk while the wind outside howled against the stone like a living thing. Somewhere deeper in the mansion, the backup generators coughed and caught, shoving a weak, steady glow back into the corridors.

“Okay, that is officially creepy,” Jubilee announced from the foyer, clutching a stack of board games in her arms like a shield. “Is anyone else getting ‘haunted ski lodge’ vibes?”

“Given that this edifice sits at an altitude below most reputable ski resorts, I’d classify our situation as ‘unseasonal meteorological mischief,’” Beast said, already shouldering past her with an armful of cables. Frost dusted the fur along his temples where he’d been outside moments earlier, securing heat tape to the gutters. “Jubilation, if you would be so kind as to continue your vigilant stewardship of… Candy Land.”

Rogue popped a peppermint between her teeth and peered out a window. “Sugar, if this gets any thicker, Ah won’t be able to see the porch from the parlor. And that’s sayin’ somethin’.”

Cyclops checked his wrist communicator for the tenth time in as many minutes, voice clipped. “Hank, status on the generators?”

“Operational—though I would not wish to see how they fare against an extended siege. Our power consumption is… robust.”

“Which is why we’re rationing,” Scott said. “Lower the Danger Room to standby and keep only essential systems running.”

The mansion swayed with another groan of wind. A flurry shot sideways across the windows; the panes hummed. Jean turned her head slightly, as if listening to something far away, and frowned. “It’s loud,” she said softly. “Not just the sound. The air feels—crowded.”

Storm had been silent through the bustle—watching, feeling. She stood at the far end of the foyer where a draft snuck under the heavy front doors, white hair lifted by the current. Power always lived near her skin like warm static, ready to answer when she called. But this storm moved with its own mind. It pressed against the walls like a tide.

“Ororo?” Jean prompted, concern touching her voice. “What are you getting?”

Storm drew in a breath and closed her eyes.

On a good day she could taste a storm before it crossed the horizon—the salt and iron and wild sweetness of it, the promise of rain braided with pressure, the way currents curled like a prayer between her fingers. She could speak to the sky and the sky spoke back. On a good day the balance held.

This was not a good day.

She reached, delicately at first, extending her awareness above the roofline, brushing along the jagged edges where wind met stone. The blizzard reared up like a horse under a whip and slammed into her senses—icy, impersonal, furious. She tried to soften it, casting a net of calm. The net shredded. The gale shoved back, and something—something she could not name—moved inside the storm like the suggestion of a shadow behind glass.

Ororo’s eyes opened to the echo of it.

“It isn’t mine,” she said.

Cyclops’ head snapped toward her. “What do you mean?”

“The storm.” She kept her voice even though the foyer seemed suddenly too small, the ceiling too low. “I did not summon it. It does not respond to me.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Jubilee said, already edging closer to the fireplace. “It’s snowing like a holiday special on fast-forward. If it’s not you—who?”

Jean’s gaze went more distant. “Telepathically, it’s just—noise. Like a thousand radios tuned to static.”

Beast’s fingers danced over a diagnostic screen. “Barometric pressure has plummeted at a rate characteristic of a bomb cyclone. The suddenness is… dramatic, even by our standards.”

Scott set his jaw. “Who benefits from freezing the X-Men in place?”

“Take a number,” Logan’s voice rumbled from the stairwell.

He came down in a battered brown bomber jacket, hair wilder than usual, the kind of restless energy rolling off him that made people step aside without thinking. Snowflakes hissed and died on his shoulders from where he’d braved the perimeter with Hank. His eyes cut to Ororo and held there an extra heartbeat.

“You look like you smelled somethin’ dead,” he told her, softer than the words sounded.

“I smelled resistance,” she said. “In my own element.”

He grunted, glancing past her to the doors as the wind shrieked again. “Don’t like that.”

“Neither do I.” She felt the old pressure in her chest, a ghost from childhood—the close darkness of a collapsed tomb in Cairo; the way earth could become sky when both were hungry to swallow you. She stilled it with practice, turned the breath into a smooth tide.

Cyclops stepped closer. “Can you push it back?”

Ororo let a heartbeat of honesty pass between them. “I do not know.”

Scott hesitated, leadership warring with worry. He adjusted his visor minutely, as if the extra angle could cut clearer answers. “We’re going to need you to try.”

“I will.” She lifted her chin. “But not from inside.”

“Storm—” Jean began.

“This house has always felt like a sanctuary,” Ororo said gently. “Right now it feels like a box.”

Logan’s mouth did a small, unhappy corner-twitch. “I’ll go with.”

“You will not,” Scott said. “Visibility is nil. We need a tether, and we can’t afford to lose two team members to a whiteout.”

“Then tie a rope ‘round my waist,” Logan shot back. “I’m not sittin’ on my hands while she—”

“Enough,” Ororo said, and it wasn’t anger that cut through the room, but steadiness. The wind outside seemed to pause to listen. “I will go to the roof first. If I cannot reach the storm from there, I will reassess.”

“Take a comm,” Jean said. “And… Ororo? Be careful.”

Storm’s smile touched only her eyes. “I am always careful.”

Logan’s hands flexed, then stilled. “Watch your step, ‘Ro.”

She nodded once and moved.

The greenhouse smelled like chlorophyll and hope, even under winter. Ororo crossed it with the surety of habit, palms brushing the leaves of a lemon tree as if in benediction. The door to the roof stuck for a moment with ice; she murmured to it and it let go.

Cold hit her like a wall.

Snow clawed sideways, driven by a wind that bit any exposed skin and reached for the rest. The world beyond the roof edge vanished into the kind of white that made distance meaningless. If not for the muffled glow leaking from the skylights, she would have felt suspended in a blank place, untethered.

She stepped forward until the soles of her boots found the grit of the roof’s surface. She rolled her shoulders back and raised her arms, hair snapping wild around her face.

“Spirits of the air,” she called, voice pitched to thread between gusts. “Hear me.”

She didn’t always ritualize. Sometimes she simply asked. Sometimes she demanded. Today she named it because the wrongness needed naming.

There was a response—oh yes. The way the storm turned its full face toward her and pressed down felt like a hand to the chest. She tried a gentle lift in pressure, the trick of coaxing a system to move along faster, spending itself on empty fields instead of on a home. The gale bucked. She felt the structure of the blizzard like a living knot—dense, braided wrong, anchored somewhere not here. She reached for the knot.

It jerked away.

Ice needles exploded along the roof edge and skittered like shrapnel under her boots. The air around her snapped with little blue foxfire sparks, electricity sloughing off the friction of snow in wind; the phenomenon was common, but this felt sharpened, curated. She pulled lightning to her like breath, letting it pool in her bones, not to strike but to see—a flicker of white sense through white world.

The lightning showed her nothing but the shape of resistance. As if someone out there—somewhere beyond the reach of the mansion’s grounds—had wrapped the storm in their hands and dared her to pull harder.

Ororo closed her eyes, teeth bare for a heartbeat in something that wasn’t quite a smile.

She lowered her arms.

“Very well,” she whispered.

It would be easier to brute-force it, to pour power into power until one broke. She could do it. She knew she could. But brute force twists things it tries to mend, and the land here was a place she had promised to be gentle with.

A gust punched into her shoulder and shoved her half a step. She set her feet, drew in a slow breath through her nose, and sent out a pulse of warmth instead—an unseasonal softness, the memory of sun-warmed stone. The storm recoiled like a cat from a bath. It did not break. It did not yield.

“Ororo?” Jean’s voice flitted into her ear through the comm, gilded with static. “Talk to me.”

“I can not reach it,” Storm said, and hated the feeling that accompanied the admission—not shame, exactly. A more dangerous cousin.

“Not at all?”

“It is… steered,” she said, searching for the right word. “There is a hand on it. Not mine.”

“What kind of hand?” Scott asked, cutting in. “Magneto? Sinister? Weather Witch? I want options.”

“Psychic interference is possible,” Jean said. “But it’s like trying to hear a melody in a hurricane.”

Ororo opened her eyes to the white. “If there is a hand, it must have an arm. An anchor. I may find it easier to move the storm if I loosen the place it clings.”

“You’re not going farther out there alone,” Cyclops said. “Negative, Storm. That’s an order.”

Silence hissed across the comm. She could imagine Scott’s posture in the War Room—shoulders squared, jaw tight, the weight of choices braced across his spine. Good leader. Good man. Not always right.

“Scott,” she said, tension stripped from her voice until only steel was left. “Half the students in this school have never weathered a storm like this. If the generators fail, we will lose heat. If we lose heat, we will make choices no one wants to make.”

“Which is why we need you here.”

“Which is why I must go there.”

Another voice bled through the channel—rough, low. “Darlin’, you tell me where you are and I’ll walk that way.”

“Logan—” Scott started.

“I am on the roof,” Ororo said. “And I will be careful.”

She shut the comm off before anyone could stop her.

For a moment she simply stood, letting snow collect along the edges of her cloak, letting the wind tear at her with childish fingers. The world was all white and roar and sting, and in that there was a kind of clarity. She had been worshiped as a goddess once and rejected the name. She had been a thief once and rejected that, too. What she loved was not the title. It was the work. The work was listening. The work was choosing.

She stepped forward into the white.

Logan didn’t remember sitting down and he didn’t remember standing up again. He knew only that one second the War Room had four walls and the next second it had none; the edges of the maps on the table blurred; the storm pressed on the roof and his skull in equal measure and—she cut her comm, he realized, low and cold.

“She turned it off,” he said.

Scott flinched like the words were knives. “She—I ordered—”

“You ordered a storm not to blow,” Logan snapped, already moving. “How’s that goin’ for ya?”

“Logan—”

“Save it.”

“Logan,” Jean said, and her voice was a hand, even when her hand wasn’t. “If you go out there blind, you won’t make it twenty yards.”

“Won’t be blind.” He jammed his arms back into his jacket, fingers already going for the old coil of mountain rope he kept by the door like an ugly habit he never could kick. “Been tracking in worse.”

“Where, exactly?” Jubilee demanded, following him like a duckling on roller skates. “The ninth circle of—”

“Alaska,” he said, which shut her up.

Hank swung around a console, blue bulk intercepting the path to the outer doors. “As the mansion’s de facto facilities manager, I must protest this compulsion to use my heating system as a sacrificial lamb.”

Logan stared up at him. “You gonna move?”

Hank sighed, the long-suffering noise of someone who had done impossible math in his head and not liked the answer. “If you perish, it will be frightfully inconvenient.”

“Yeah. Real heartbreak.” Logan jerked his chin at the gear closet. “Gimme the good goggles.”

Rogue moved fast, plucking a pair off a hook and tossing them with a flick of her wrist. He caught them without looking, already mentally mapping the front steps, the drift lines he’d seen forming when he was out stringing heat cable with Hank, the way the wind curled around the east colonnade like a fist.

Scott blocked the main doors this time, gloved hands braced against the wood. “I can’t let you just—”

“You can,” Logan said, voice gone very, very quiet. “Or you can try and stop me.”

Jean’s fingers tightened on Scott’s forearm. He didn’t look at her, but something eased at the line of his shoulders, the tilt of his head—leadership bending before it broke.

“Fine,” Scott said. “But you’re not going without a tether and a backup. Rogue, you’re on the door. Hank, give him a steady line and set a timer—two minutes out, one minute to call it off, two minutes in. If he doesn’t answer, we reel him.”

Rogue nodded. “Ah can do that.”

“Jubilee, keep the students calm. Board games. Hot chocolate. Tell them it’s an adventure.”

“On it,” Jubilee said, already hustling toward the kitchen, muttering about marshmallows and sanctioned pyrotechnics.

Jean stepped close as Logan tightened the rope around his waist, tucking the knot low and to the side where it wouldn’t catch his ribs if he had to dig or fight. She touched his sleeve, her eyes dark with the storm reflected in them. “I can’t get a clear read on her. But—” She swallowed. “She wasn’t afraid when she cut the comm.”

He looked at her for a beat. “That’s worse.”

Jean’s mouth tilted. “I know.”

Hank pressed a coil of line into his palm. “Do be mindful of hypothermia. You will not recognize it until it is too late.”

“Buddy,” Logan said, shoving his hands into his gloves, “me and too late been dancin’ a long time.”

Scott unbarred the doors.

The storm punched the foyer like a fist.

Snow billowed in, a curtain the color of the world’s end. Wind clawed at maps and cables and coats and tried to drag them outside. Rogue leaned into the rope with a grunt; Hank braced her; Scott’s visor flared as a tight beam seared a drifting branch into pulp before it could spear through the opening. Jean’s arm was up, telekinesis pushing like another wall against the air’s wild hunger.

Logan lowered his goggles. The world narrowed to a slit of amber plastic and a path only he could smell.

He went.

The snow grabbed at his calves like small, angry hands, trying to pull him under. The front steps were already half gone, their edges blurred into new, shifting topography. He slammed a foot down where memory told him stone should be and found purchase by force and stubbornness. The rope at his waist sang with Rogue’s tug; he signaled back twice, sharp—got it. He put his head down and shouldered into the white.

He’d been cold before. He’d been buried. He’d been trapped under worse than snow. The blizzard tried to make him forget that, to turn everything into now and ache and the blank, muffled press of it. He ignored the way his breath froze against the fleecing at his collar and the way his beard went needle-stiff. He focused on scent, on the thin thread of ozone that always clung to Ororo like a signature written in sky.

It was there. Faint. Everywhere and nowhere, smeared by the storm’s fingers. He pushed toward the strongest curl of it. The east side. The greenhouse.

A shape loomed. The glass roof of the greenhouse was already wearing a heavy hat of snow; the door banged uselessly in its frame, propped open by a drift that matched him hip for hip. He shoved it wider, threw himself into the warm-lung air inside long enough to suck life back into his chest, then vaulted the potting bench and climbed the ladder to the roof hatch two at a time.

It opened to white.

He hauled himself out and crouched flat in the drift, goggles pushed up for a second, listening. The wind tried to take his head off. He grinned into it, feral, and bared his teeth.

“Ororo!” he roared.

The storm stole the name and flung it away.

He dropped back into the greenhouse, swore, and slammed the hatch. The sound rang in the humid space like a gunshot.

“Think, Logan,” he muttered, planting his palms on the workbench until the wood creaked. “Think.”

She had gone to the roof to try. If she couldn’t move it from there—and he needed to stop imagining the word couldn’t in the same sentence as her—then where? Not the woods; too many trees to tangle and trap. Not the frozen pond; it would be a grave with bad manners. The open field behind the east hedgerow, maybe. The old stone folly the kids used as a haunted house in October. The ridge beyond…

He shut his eyes, the better to see her in his head—chin up, eyes bright, the line of her shoulders when she decided a thing and there wasn’t a power on earth that could turn her. The scent of ozone tugged at him again, an echo on the back of his tongue.

He looked at the greenhouse door, at the rope tied around his waist, at the drift like a dare waiting on the other side.

“Two minutes,” he growled, and yanked the door open again.

The storm swallowed him whole.

On the roof, Ororo moved like a wraith.

Down was easy—sliding back through the greenhouse, down through warmth, out again into the courtyard where heavy, wet snow was already pulling the hedges into aching bows. Up again across the stable roof. Across again along the ridge behind the east lawn where the wind came in cleaner lines she could read for a heartbeat at a time before it broke.

She had turned her comm off and every step asked if she had been arrogant to do it. But the pressure in her chest eased with distance from the walls, and she reminded herself that fear lied in two languages: the one that warned too late, and the one that warned too soon. She would not listen to either.

The storm fought like something offended.

She tried again, not with power but with patience, seeking the seam where pressure shifted, the tiny hinge that every weather system hid if you knew where to put your fingers. There. A subtler line beneath the rest, like grain in wood. She followed it, breath fogging the scarf at her mouth, snow matting her lashes. The temperature dropped another degree; she felt the change like a click in her bones.

She reached.

It jerked away again, and this time—this time she felt it for what it was. Not just resistance. Direction. Someone had tied a thread to the storm and pulled.

Ororo straightened in the white, hair whipping her cheeks, and for a heartbeat the tired, hungry sky looked back at a woman who had been struck by lightning and learned to speak its name.

“I do not belong to you,” she told it, and if there was an answer it was only more wind.

Her boot sank to the knee in a drift she hadn’t seen. She grunted, hauled herself free, and tested the ground ahead with a toe before taking the next step. The rope she did not have tugged at her mind like a question. Logan’s voice, when she let herself imagine it, was not an order but a tether, a thing that simply existed between them, stubborn as summer.

She moved forward until the mansion vanished behind her and the storm became the whole world.

When the wind shifted, faint and quick, carrying a breath of leather and iron that no winter should, she almost convinced herself she had imagined it.

She didn’t turn.

She went on.

And somewhere, not so very far away, a man with a rope around his waist put his head down and followed the taste of lightning into the snow.

Chapter Text

The front doors tried to slam themselves shut.

Wind hit the foyer like a freight train, flinging powder through the air in glittering sheets. Maps snapped and fluttered, cables leapt off consoles, and the first three feet of the floor disappeared beneath a drift that hadn’t existed a heartbeat earlier. Rogue dug in with both boots and a low grunt, bracing the rope around her hips while Hank anchored her from behind, one massive paw on the banister.

“Timer’s goin’!” Rogue called over the howl. “Two minutes out!”

“Make it three,” Logan shot back, dropping his goggles and bowing his head into the white. The rope at his waist thrummed with Rogue’s answering tug: heard you.

Then the mansion was gone, and there was only storm.

The world had shrunk to a tunnel the width of a forearm and the length of a breath. Logan set his boots the way you did when the ground didn’t want you—heel, wedge, weight, then the next. The wind turned his scarf to wood and iced his beard into needles. Snow grabbed his calves with small, furious hands. He ignored the ache and the sting and the steady siphon of heat, focusing instead on the thin thread of scent he knew better than most people knew the names of their favorite songs: ozone and rain on warm stone, the crisp bite that lived in Storm’s wake.

He followed it east.

A step, a tug—Rogue keeping him honest—and another step. He imagined the rope back there like a stubborn thought, Rogue putting her shoulder behind it and Hank muttering equations about wind shear and tensile strength just to keep his brain busy. He pictured Jean with a hand on Scott’s arm, grounding him while she listened for the faintest flicker of Ororo behind the static.

“C’mon, darlin’,” he told the white. “Leave me somethin’.”

The greenhouse reared out of the blizzard like a ship in fog, its glass roof already hunched under a thick white cap. He slid across the drift that had swallowed the steps, ducked inside long enough to steal two lungfuls of humid green air, then climbed the ladder two rungs at a time and shouldered through the roof hatch.

Wind hit like a slap. White erased depth. Sound turned to roar.

He bared his teeth against it and cupped a hand at his mouth. “’Ro!”

The word vanished. He didn’t waste a second one.

He dropped, closed the hatch, and vaulted the potting bench instead, out the back into the courtyard where hedges had become humps and the stone path was a rumor. The rope thrummed again—Rogue’s three-tug pattern: thirty seconds before the first reel-in warning. He answered with two sharp jerks. He had her. He’d find her.

He pushed.

Ororo moved through the white with care that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with respect. The wind wanted to shove; she let it lean and then slipped by. The snow wanted to swallow; she gave it one foot and then the other, testing each step with the toe of her boot. The blizzard crowded at her ears and eyes and mouth and memory, and she kept all of it at the edge of her mind like a story told in a loud room.

She could feel where the storm ended and she began—until she reached for it.

On good days the sky met her halfway. Even on bad days the weather grudgingly allowed itself to be persuaded by someone who loved it. Today was neither. Today the system had a spine. It coiled when she touched it, not with wildness but with direction, like a leash jerked by a hand just out of sight.

She found the seam again—there was always a seam, a place where pressure softened, a hinge you could work—and sent the smallest push through it. The storm jerked like a fish. The hinge slid away.

“Who holds you?” she asked into the gale.

The answer was sleet like glass across her cheek, a clean sting that made her eyes water and her temper light.

It would be easy—dangerously easy—to answer force with force. To draw lightning into her bones, to call thunder down and shatter the pattern with power until the system unraveled from shock alone.

But storms broke people when you broke storms like that. And the land here had put its trust in her.

She swallowed the urge, let the breath go slow, and tried a different tack: a warmth-pulse under the skin of the air, the remembered caress of a July noon. The blizzard recoiled, then slammed back twice as hard, angry as a cornered thing.

“Very well,” she murmured, and the words fogged the cloth at her mouth.

Her foot went through a crust she hadn’t seen. Snow swallowed her to the knee and tried to keep her. She planted her palm in the drift, felt the cold burn like fever through her glove, and hauled herself free with a controlled fury that startled a breath of laughter out of her in the white.

She set her next heel with more caution.

Under the roar, another sound teased at the edge of hearing. Not the generators’ hum, not the creak of laden trees. A low, steady rhythm. She might have mistaken it for another trick of pressure if it hadn’t shortened and lengthened with purpose—if it hadn’t carried with it, faint and ridiculous in a blizzard, the smell of leather warmed by a body.

She did not turn. She kept moving. Pride could be a foolish god, but she wasn’t praying to it. She was buying seconds. And when the wind shifted, when it parted for a heartbeat with the grudging respect winter shows a thing that will not bow, a voice rode the gap like a thrown rope:

“’Ro!”

Ororo stopped.

She didn’t have to see him to know. “Logan?”

“Down!” he barked, and his shape was already there—a dark wedge of motion in a world that didn’t want edges. His hands hit her shoulders, hot even through gloves, and steadied her before the wind could steal the moment.

“Gotcha,” he said, voice gone rough with relief. “Not my best idea, but I came anyway.”

The laugh that scraped out of her was half shiver. “You never do like waiting.”

“Waitin’ is just a fancy word for losin’ slow.” He leaned into the wind with her, making a wall of himself on her exposed flank. “You with me?”

She nodded once. “It’s not mine, Logan. Someone is steering it.”

“Figured as much.” He dipped his head closer, so his scarf brushed her cheek. “Cabin on the north ridge. Half mile. You walk, I push. We get you hot and breathing easy. Then we make a plan.”

She should have said I do not need to be pushed. She found instead that her gloved fingers had caught his sleeve and were not letting go.

“Very well,” she said.

They moved as if the world had rules they could enforce by stubbornness alone. Logan took the upwind side, shouldering gusts head-on and cursing when the rope snagged on a buried shrub or a half-torn fence post. Ororo kept her attention on the skin of the air, stealing seconds where the pressure eased, shifting their line a yard this way, two that way, so each step hit slightly less resistance.

“Left,” she said once, and he swung without question just before a crusted cornice collapsed into a hidden hollow where winter liked to keep its bones.

“Step,” he warned another time, and she lifted as his boot punched through the mask of a drift to the old stone path beneath.

They didn’t waste breath. The storm tried to take it anyway.

Wind knifed through seams no seamstress could have predicted; snow found the inconsistent quarter inch at the edge of a glove and made of it a glacier. Twice Ororo’s knees buckled and twice Logan’s arm locked around her waist with a precision that was all training and none of the panic in his pulse.

“Eyes on me,” he said the second time, voice pitched low and even as if speaking to a spooked horse. “Count with me. In for two, out for four.”

She wanted to tell him she knew breathing. That breath was her craft and her sacrament. But the small cabin of her chest had gone tight, the walls too close, Cairo’s collapsed tomb folded up like memory behind her ribs. She counted with him anyway—two, and four—until numbers became air again and the roof of her body lifted by degrees.

“Better?”

“Yes.” She swallowed. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” He jerked his chin toward the white ahead. A darker line hulled up out of the blur—the edge of the trees that curled the north ridge. The cabin crouched somewhere behind them, a shadow with a door.

They passed the old folly, its broken arch jammed with snow and rimed with ice like teeth. The storm shook it once, hard, as if testing whether the place would add a few more stones to its diet. The arch held. So did they.

At last the cabin shouldered through the white—slope-shouldered and stubborn, black shingles now white, the door scabbed with ice. Logan hip-checked it and it gave with a crack that felt, absurdly, like victory.

Silence fell heavy as a blanket. The world shrank to wood creak and breath. Ororo stood in the quiet and felt the tremor in her thighs as if it belonged to someone else.

Logan loosened the rope with hands that didn’t fumble, shook the numb out of his fingers with a brief, violent shiver, and went immediately for the small iron stove as if the square box were a friend he’d meant to visit. Kindling, match, breath; flame licked and took. He fed it with the patience he almost never showed people.

“Sit,” he said without looking back.

She did, because the bench was there and because the authority wasn’t an order so much as muscle memory shared between soldiers. He crouched by the stove until the faint orange turned steady and then pushed up and turned to face her.

His eyes swept her like a scan—skin, lips, the places where color pooled or fled. He stripped a blanket off a peg with the economy of a man unwrapping a weapon and draped it over her shoulders. Heat was already beginning to gather in the small space. Not enough. He knelt, caught her gloved hands in his, and brought them to the hot belly of the stove without touching metal.

“Stay.” He squeezed once through the gloves, then tugged at the fingers. “Hands.”

She hesitated—pride, habit, the reflexive privacy of the body in pain. Then she flexed her fingers one at a time out of the frozen fabric, wincing as needles of returning life fired off like small, bright fireworks under her skin.

He took her bare hands between his gloved ones first, cautious—then peeled his own off, tucked them under his arms for a beat to wake them, and slid his palms to cover hers, cupping warmth around her knuckles.

“Hurts first,” he said, not quite an apology. “Means it’s workin’.”

“It is tolerable.” Her breath softened with the words. “You have done this before.”

“Too many times.” A breath of a laugh. “Alaska. Canada. Places whose idea of a joke is ten feet o’ snow in October and a bear in your sleeping bag.”

She couldn’t help it. “A bear?”

“Don’t ask.” His mouth twitched. “You warmin’?”

“I am.” She listened. Not to the wind—she could hear that in the rafters, a patient gnawing—but to her own body. “Thank you.”

He slid his hands up, careful, to cover her wrists. “Don’t go to sleep.”

“I’m aware.” She lifted her gaze, met his squarely. “I would not, regardless. The storm…”

“Yeah.” He rocked back on his heels but didn’t get up, as if moving away would loosen something vital. “Talk to me.”

“It is… wrong.” She searched for words that didn’t flatten the complexity into panic. “Not merely strong. Steered. As if someone braided a line through the system and is pulling it by that thread.”

“Telepathic?”

“Perhaps. Or some machine that speaks the sky’s language badly. Forge would have theories.” She tilted her head, thinking of Beast’s instruments, of magnetometers and barometers and the elegant physics that loved to pretend weather was not poetry first. “Jean said the air was crowded. I feel it, too. Like—” She smiled the barest inch. “Like a room full of polite people waiting for the one person making a scene to sit down.”

“Storm metaphors,” he said, mouth quirking. “Who’d have guessed.”

“If I cannot sit the person down, I must find their chair.” She wrapped the blanket tighter as another push of wind made the cabin bones pop. “There is an anchor. I felt it. East-northeast.”

“Where you were headin’.”

“Yes.” She closed her eyes for a heartbeat and let herself see it: the seam sliding away just before she could reach it, the pull against the system’s spine. “But I would prefer not to chase it through a whiteout alone.”

He didn’t say good. He didn’t say I told you so. He only grunted and got to his feet, moving to the corner where Hank, in a fit of foresight, had stashed an emergency crate: a battered metal kettle, a packet of tea that had given up most of its scent to its paper, a coil of chemical handwarmers, a flashlight, a few ration bars that had the approximate culinary thrill of cardboard.

“Tea?” he asked.

She arched a brow. “You drink tea?”

“I drink anything hot that doesn’t taste like regret.” He filled the kettle with clean snow, set it on the stove, and shook a handwarmer to life with the ferocity of a man punishing something smaller than him. He slid it between her palms and closed her fingers around it. “There. Keep rollin’ it.”

“Logan,” she said, and he looked up. “I turned off my comm.”

“Yeah,” he said after a beat. “Noticed.”

“I did not want to argue about responsibility while standing on a roof.” Her mouth softened. “But I would not have turned it off if I didn’t trust that someone would come if I left the door open.”

His shoulders unhitched a fraction. “Left it open?”

“The greenhouse door.” The corner of her mouth tugged. “You never look up first.”

He snorted. “I do when I know you’re already up there.”

She let the warmth soak into her bones and counted her breaths again: in for two, out for four. On the fourth out, a small flicker trembled across the edge of her senses, something that didn’t belong to wind or cold.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

He stilled. “Hear what?”

“Not with your ears,” she said, which earned her a look. She reached for the wrongness again and felt it tap the cabin like knuckles on wood. Once. Twice. Then it slid away, coy.

He straightened, the hair along his arms prickling like pine under frost. “Didn’t hear it. Felt somethin’.”

“It is testing us,” Ororo said quietly. “It is not content with the outside.”

“Then it can make an appointment.” His hands flexed empty and then full—snikt—as the claws slid home with a sound like ice breaking on a river. The cabin’s dim light ran along adamantium. “It comes through that door, it leaves fewer pieces than it came with.”

Her eyes went briefly bright at the sound, the old electricity in her bones answering like a friend. She damped it, unwilling to start a fight without a name. “Let us not give it more than it has taken.”

He flicked a glance to the window. Frost crawled along the glass in fern patterns, blooming in slow motion. Beyond it, the white snarled and hissed, then drew back as if pulling air into its lungs.

He moved to the door. Set his palm to it. Listened.

“Back at the mansion,” he said without turning, “they’re countin’ minutes.”

“Rogue is swearing at the rope in Cajun,” Ororo said, and when he glanced back she was smiling a little. “She thinks we cannot hear her when the wind is loud.”

He huffed. “Hank’s calculatin’ to give himself somethin’ to do besides worry. Jean’s starin’ at the middle distance. Scott’s blame’s got nowhere to go, so it’ll try to settle on himself.”

“And Jubilee?” Ororo asked.

“Tryin’ to convince a hundred kids that hot chocolate and Monopoly are the same thing as a field trip,” he said. “She’ll pull it off.”

Ororo eased her shoulders down. “When the storm passes,” she said softly, “I will open the greenhouse and set all the plants to drink.”

“When the storm passes,” he answered, “we’re followin’ that line of yours and findin’ whoever thinks they can yank your weather like a dog on a leash.”

“Together,” she said.

“Together,” he agreed.

The kettle popped, a small domestic sound that belonged to another world. He poured, hands sure even with claws sheathed, steam ribboning between them. He offered her the first tin cup and took the second. The tea tasted like the memory of tea. It was enough.

Outside, the storm hit the cabin full-bore.

The walls boomed with it, a low, bowing groan. Snow forced its way through cracks like powder through a sieve, dusting the boards. Frost jumped on the window, the fern patterns knitting into white plates.

Ororo felt the pressure change before Logan did. The hinge in the system flicked, the pull tugged east-northeast like a fisherman testing a line. She set her cup aside, every sense pulled taut.

“It’s moving,” she said. “The anchor.”

“How far?”

“I can’t say.” She closed her eyes. Behind the lids, the world was a map in pressure, and someone had run a finger along a river and expected the water to follow. “Not far. Far enough that it will try to pull us with it if we go out now.”

He nodded once. “Then we don’t.”

“We rest,” she agreed. “We wait for the minute when it thinks it has us positioned, and then we move across its current instead of with it.”

He almost smiled. “Counterpunch.”

“If you like.”

Something knocked at the door then. Not a hand. Not wood. A thump like a drift shrugging its shoulders—and then a sharper sound, as if ice had been tossed against the boards and asked to be let in.

Logan set his cup down.

“Stay warm,” he said.

“Stay inside,” she answered.

“Not an option.”

He moved to the door and laid his palm against it again. On the other side, something pressed back—pressure without shape. His claws slid with a slow, deliberate snikt. The storm hissed like a crowd drawing breath for a shout.

Ororo stood without taking the blanket off. The kettle chimed inside the stove as the last bubbles broke.

“Logan,” she said, the name steady as a stake driven into good earth.

He glanced back. “Yeah?”

“Count with me,” she said. “In for two, out for four.”

He huffed the small, feral ghost of a laugh. “Yes, ma’am.”

They breathed together while the storm threw itself against the walls, and the cabin held.

Outside, something in the blizzard listened. Then it drew back, as if it had found what it came to measure.

When it hit them again, it would not be a question.

They waited for the question to end.

Chapter Text

The storm did not retreat. It circled.

Wind clawed at the seams of the cabin, slipping cold fingers through every crack in the boards. Frost spread like ivy over the window glass, curling, branching, knitting itself into opaque white plates. The stove rattled against the force of the draft, fire flaring as if it too was startled.

Ororo stood near the wall, blanket still draped around her shoulders, listening with her whole body. Logan stayed by the door, claws out, every muscle telling the storm: Not today.

It wasn’t random anymore. Ororo could feel it in the cadence. The gusts came like testing strikes—hard, then soft, then angled, as if searching for weakness. The pressure beat against her temples in patterns, not noise. Whoever pulled the leash on this weather was close enough to tug directly, and they were learning her rhythms.

“They’re watching,” she murmured.

Logan’s head snapped toward her. “Through the storm?”

“Yes. Using it as eyes.” She raised her hand, fingers trembling with fatigue, and spread them toward the boards. “When I push here, they push back. When I pause, they prod. They want me to commit my strength.”

Logan bared his teeth. “Then don’t play their game.”

The storm slammed against the door as if in reply. Snow sifted through a crack and pattered on the floorboards like grains of sand through an hourglass. Time was running thin.

Logan crossed back to her, claws retracting with a deliberate snikt. His hand landed heavy and warm on her shoulder.

“You said it’s anchored.” His voice was quiet, rough with certainty. “Then we cut the anchor.”

Ororo nodded, eyes closing. “East-northeast. Not far.” She inhaled slowly, letting the air burn through her lungs, and exhaled longer still. “But if we follow too soon, we walk into its hands.”

“Then we wait.” He crouched by the stove, feeding another split of wood into the flame. The fire leapt, gold and defiant. “We wait till we choose the ground.”

Her smile ghosted, weary but real. “You sound like a general.”

“Been called worse.” He leaned back, watching her from the corner of his eye. “Besides, you’re the one they follow into battle. I’m just the ugly backup singer.”

“You are the anchor, Logan.” Her voice softened. “You keep us steady when the sky tilts.”

The words sat between them like an ember. He looked away first, jaw tight, but the faintest twitch at his mouth betrayed him.

The storm struck again—harder. The window groaned; a web of cracks skittered across the frosted glass. Ororo staggered, clutching at her temple as the psychic weight of it pressed like iron bands around her mind.

“They are pulling me,” she gasped. Her knees dipped.

Logan caught her before she could fall, arms braced around her waist, dragging her back from the edge.

“Easy, ‘Ro. Stay with me. Breathe.”

“I… can’t hold it—”

“Yes, you can.” His forehead pressed to hers, voice raw but steady. “You taught me the trick. Two in, four out. Right here. With me.”

She clung to his jacket, forcing her breath to match his. Slowly, the storm’s roar dulled back into static, just enough for her to straighten again.

When her eyes opened, they glowed faintly, not from summoning—but from fury. “They think to master me. They will learn otherwise.”

Logan’s lips curved into a grim smile. “That’s the Ororo I know.”

Silence stretched, broken only by the hiss of snow against the door. Ororo drew the blanket closer, steadying herself.

“When dawn comes,” she said, voice like steel, “we find the anchor. We end this.”

Logan adjusted his gloves, settling beside the door again like a sentinel. “Then we make it through the night.”

They shared the space—the firelight between them, the storm snarling without. Neither spoke the thought that hovered unsaid: if the storm could already press this hard, what would it unleash when its master showed their face?

But Logan stayed close, and Ororo’s gaze stayed fierce. Between them, the cabin held.

Chapter Text

The storm learned them.

It hit the cabin in sets, like a boxer working a pattern—two jabs on the west wall, a cross at the door, a feint that rattled the stovepipe and made sparks cough into the ash. Between flurries, the white pressed its ear to the boards and listened.

Ororo listened back.

She sat on the floor with her shoulder to the wall, blanket wrapped close, palms open to the grain. Her eyes were closed, not to shut anything out but to make more room for what wanted in: the subtle ticks of changing pressure, the way the wind braided at the eaves, the low, wrong thrum riding the blizzard’s belly like a motor idling under snow.

Opposite her, Logan held the door like a promise. He didn’t lean on it—leaning gave the storm something to take. He stood easy, weight in his hips, hands loose at his sides until the cabin shuddered; then he was steel.

“Still east-northeast?” he asked after a while, voice pitched low, as if anything louder might give the storm ideas.

“Yes.” Ororo’s breath made a small cloud that slid away. “It tugs, then slackens. As if it were…feeding line.”

“Fishing us.” He snorted, the sound soft and mean. “Let it think it’s got a bite.”

A hush moved through the wood, a false lull that would make a careless person open the door to “check.” The temperature clawed down a degree. Frost ferns chased each other across the window and merged into a white plate; a hairline crack shot through the center with a crisp tick.

Logan’s head turned toward the sound. “We’ve got a pane ready to go.”

“We have a stove and a door,” Ororo said, calmly. “We are rich in infrastructure.”

He huffed. “We’re rich in stubborn. That’ll do.”

The stove popped. Water in the kettle rolled and settled. The fire’s thin light made a halo of heat that refused to be bullied. Logan poured another finger of tea with hands that had steadied a thousand worse nights and offered the tin to Ororo without comment. She drank, swallowed warmth, and let it sit in her chest like a coal.

“Tell me something,” she said.

“Like what?” He didn’t move from the door.

“Something that takes a minute to say,” she said, and when he cut her a side look, she smiled a little. “I will keep hearing the storm. I would like to also hear you.”

He exhaled through his nose. “Once walked three days out of a whiteout in the Yukon with a busted leg and one snowshoe. Leg healed. Snowshoe didn’t. Kept the busted one to remember not to be dumb in January.”

She pictured it: the hard line of him against an endless horizon, refusing to stop because stopping was losing slow. “What did you do when it—” she flicked two fingers toward the door, indicating the press and the roar “—got inside your head?”

“Counted trees I’d chopped.” The corner of his mouth ticked. “Real practical guy.”

“That is practical,” she said, and meant it. “You catalogued the world to anchor yourself to it.”

“And you?” he asked. “When the sky fights you.”

“I make it small,” Ororo said. “Not the storm—the ask. I stop trying to calm a blizzard and I see if I can change the temperature of one breath of air. If I can, I have a place to stand.”

He nodded once, satisfied. “That’ll do too.”

The storm hit the window then with a savage shoulder. Glass spidered and went in a wheeze of crystals. Logan was already there, body between her and the break, claws out with a patient snikt in case anything decided it liked the idea of a door that wasn’t a door.

Nothing came but cold.

He put the claws away with a thought and dragged a shelving plank across the gap. Ororo rose, palms warming, and feathered a thin breath of heat against the board while he nailed it into place; the wood swelled into the seam, making it tight.

“Forge would be proud,” he said.

“Forge would insist we log the repair.” She pressed the heel of her hand to her brow for a second and let the pressure drain down her spine. “The tug just now—stronger. Closer.”

“How close?”

She opened her eyes and looked at the wall like it was a crude map she could read by feel. “Within a few miles. Less if the terrain stays open.”

Logan pulled his glove off with his teeth, turned his palm, and drew in the dust on the floor with a blunt finger: the mansion as a square, the greenhouse a small rectangle, the shrubs and folly, the ridge, the treeline. “We’re here,” he said, marking an X. “If I were a jerk tryin’ to throw weather at a school, where do I park my toy?”

“High ground,” she said. “Clean fetch from the west. Access without roads.” She tapped the floor map where the ridge curved like a shoulder. “Old radio tower?”

“Rusting to hell and half the bolts gone.” He nodded. “But the base is there.”

“Or the quarry,” she said. “Rock gives shield. Echoes would be terrible, but if you wanted to hide machinery from casual sight…”

“Quarry’s farther east.” He scratched another mark. “And the creek cut’s iced. Could drag a sled rig up it without anyone noticing.”

Ororo considered the pull in her bones. It did not care about roads. It liked lines—the straight kind humans made when they stretched wire. “There is a line beneath us and to the north,” she said slowly. “Like buried cable.” Her mouth went rueful. “Or I am imagining cable because it would make this simpler.”

“Trust your nose,” he said automatically, then shrugged. “Or your…pressure nose.”

“My pressure nose appreciates your faith.”

He went back to the door. “Sun’s two hours off. We hold. We move when the light gives us shadows to work with.”

She nodded. “We will move across the current, not with it.”

“Counterpunch,” he said again, and this time she smiled outright.

The storm circled. It tested and pressed, and when it felt them refuse to give, it changed tactics: a lull, a seduction, a soft weight that whispered open the door, this was all a misunderstanding.

Logan didn’t open the door. He closed his eyes and counted trees he’d chopped. Ororo changed the temperature of one breath of air.

They made it to dawn.

At the mansion, the storm made a cathedral out of white.

Windows became blank stained glass; the main hall turned into a nave of cold light and restless shadow. The generators whined like tired choirs. Scott ran checklists until the ink smudged. Hank performed mathematics at a sprint. Jean stood with her fingertips on the War Room table, eyes unfocused, listening to the noise for something that wasn’t.

Jubilee kept a cafeteria full of kids from panicking with an iron fist, a hot chocolate lake, and the unassailable authority of a girl who had seen a lot of weird and refused to be impressed by powdered milk. Rogue and Gambit had dueling Monopoly empires. Someone had already hung a hand-lettered sign over the Danger Room: SNOW DAY SHELTER — NO LASERS.

“Barometric pressure still free-falling,” Hank reported. “If this were a film, I would accuse the director of histrionics.”

“Direction,” Jean murmured, not quite to them. “It’s directional. It’s being moved like a… like a marionette. And Ororo—” Her eyes flickered, a pained crease jumping between them. “She’s steady. And angry.”

Scott exhaled. It shook. “Good.”

“We need telemetry,” Beast went on. “If we could instrument the roof—”

“The roof is a mile of ice,” Rogue said, rolling her shoulders. “But Ah can fly lines up under it so long as Ah’ve got a belay.”

Scott looked at the map. Looked at the white beyond the window. Looked at the empty square on the table where Logan would normally scrawl a rude note and Ororo would normally write a neat one. “Do it,” he said. “With a safety. And nobody goes more than fifty yards from a tether.”

Rogue tipped him a salute like a dare. “Yes, sir.”

Jean’s eyes unfocused again. “They’re moving at dawn,” she said softly, and didn’t seem to notice she’d spoken until Scott set a hand on hers.

“Who?”

“Ororo and Logan,” Jean said, color coming back into her face as if naming them pulled her into herself. “They’re… working together.” The corner of her mouth twitched, warm even with worry. “It’s good.”

Scott nodded, jaw tight against everything he wanted to say and couldn’t. “Then so are we.”

Dawn came stingy.

The blizzard didn’t quit—it thinned. The white turned from sheet to gauze, depth returning by inches until trees had edges again and the ridge was more than a rumor. Ororo rose, feeling life return to muscles that had spent hours pretending they didn’t care about cold. Logan rolled his shoulders; something in his back popped and he didn’t wince.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes.” She tucked the blanket onto its peg as if returning a borrowed thing. “We go cross-current.”

They wrapped scarves and pulled hoods and tightened gloves and opened the door.

Cold slapped them. Light—thin, gray—followed them out like a blessing that had to work for its keep. The cabin vanished behind them in twelve steps.

They did not walk with the tug. They walked against it.

Ororo took the lead, not by distance but by feel, adjusting their line a yard left, then three right, skirting dips the wind wanted to turn into traps. Logan held the upwind side, rope coiled over his shoulder now for them—not the mansion—his hand on the coil’s throat like a man who’d had too many bad falls to trust a knot he didn’t tie himself.

They spoke when the terrain demanded it. Mostly they didn’t. Breath was work. Forward was work. The storm’s handler tugged; Ororo ignored it and let the tug slide. When the pressure made her temples ache, Logan’s palm pressed briefly between her shoulder blades—the human version of a handwarmer—and the ache remembered it had limits.

They paralleled the ridge until the land offered a clean rise with scrub pine for cover. Logan dropped to a crouch at the top, peering into the bruise of white beyond.

“See it?” he asked.

Ororo let her eyes unfocus, seeing not snow but the way air ran around objects. Wind wanted straight lines. It hated breaking for no reason. Ahead, a place where the flow should have been smooth kinked, curled, broke.

“There,” she said. “Something tall.”

Logan’s mouth went thin. “Tower.”

They slid along the ridge’s backside, using the pines as a windbreak until the silhouette rose clean out of the white: a skeletal radio mast twice as tall as the trees, plated in rime. At its base, something hummed. The sound was wrong in the same way the storm was wrong. It wasn’t a sound so much as a pressure on tooth and bone.

“Forge didn’t build that,” Logan said. “And if he did I’m takin’ away his wrenches.”

Cables webbed the base—some old and iced, others new and neat, black snakes half-buried in drifts. The new ones ran north, vanishing under a sheet of snow toward the quarry cut.

Ororo didn’t step closer. She lifted a hand and let the smallest skein of air run over the mast’s skin. Not touch, not force—just sense.

The mast pushed back.

She bit off a hiss and kept her palm steady. “Capacitors. A field. It is shaping the storm—no, seeding it, and then pushing. If I pull head-on, I feed it.”

“So we cut the cables.”

She shook her head once. “If we trigger a failsafe, it may spike.”

“Then we don’t cut.” He squinted at the hardware. “We chew.”

He moved like shadow—down the lee side, close to the mast’s foot. He sniffed. He listened. He pressed two fingers to metal, drew them back, and frowned at the small sizzle that tried to dance across the skin.

“Smart toy,” he muttered. “Doesn’t want visitors.”

“Logan,” Ororo said. Her tone changed the air.

He froze.

“Up,” she whispered.

He didn’t look—just flowed backward into the pine shadow and followed her gaze.

Two dark shapes slid through the thinning white, low and careful, where the new cables disappeared into snow. Not people. Not animals. Machines with narrow sled-bodies and insect heads—drones built to skim, not fly, armored against ice, each carrying a cargo pod tucked close beneath. They paused as if scenting the air.

They turned, in unison, toward the mast. Toward them.

Logan’s claws slid free with a sound that belonged in summer lightning. “Showtime.”

“Not yet,” Ororo said, and the hand she raised didn’t call lightning; it pinched two fingers together and made the faintest shift in pressure between the drones’ sensor grills, just enough to tell them a lie: your target is five yards left.

The drones adjusted. Logan grinned without humor. “Now?”

“Now,” she said, and let fly the tiniest, meanest downdraft she’d ever crafted, a slap of heavy air at ankle height that flipped the first drone on its back like a beetle. Logan was already moving. One claw punched a sensor; his boot pinned a thrashing track. The second drone spun, corrected, and spat a steel dart that buried itself in a pine trunk with a thunk. He rolled, took its leg, and jammed its own dart-gun into its intake.

Silence jumped, brittle and waiting.

The mast hummed higher. The storm gathered like muscle.

“Back,” Ororo said, breath even. “It will answer.”

It did.

The sky dropped a white curtain on them so hard the world went from dawn to blind. Wind pressed them into the ridge like a hand. The mast’s hum turned into a pulse that rode the wind like a command.

Ororo reached for small.

She changed the temperature of one breath of air—in Logan’s scarf, where it would steal less of him. She used that as a place to stand, shifted the pressure three inches above the snow to give their boots more honesty, made the air around their eyes a little less raw so blinking cost less time.

“Go,” she said, and he didn’t argue.

They slid back along the ridge into the pines, the mast disappearing between one heartbeat and the next. The pulse chased them, searching, confused that the quarry of a second ago had become a pair of shapes that bled less heat and made smaller eddies.

They stopped only when the ridge curled them into a pocket of relative calm. The white settled from sheet to veil.

Logan leaned his shoulder into a trunk. “They’ll send more.”

“They will,” Ororo agreed. “And they will move the anchor.”

He spat a flake of ice and wiped his mouth with the back of his glove. “So we move faster.”

She drew a breath, felt the pull slide, felt the anchor line jerk north like a leash on a bad dog. “They are heading for the quarry.”

“Then we’re right.” He flashed her a brief, toothy grin that didn’t reach his eyes. “Hate bein’ right in a snowstorm.”

“Let us be right somewhere with cover,” she said, and when he tilted his head, she added, “Together.”

“Together,” he echoed.

They started along the ridge again, cross-current, shadows to their left and the wrong hum in their bones. Behind them, under a crusted coil of cable, one of the drones’ cargo pods blinked to life and began to count down in a silent, pretty sequence of green lights.

It would be a beautiful surprise for anyone who came back to check.

Neither of them did.

They slipped into the trees while the storm reset its stance, and the mast’s pulse followed, patient as a hunter.

Chapter Text

Dawn gave them edges—barely.
The storm thinned to gauze, and that was enough to make trees into trees again and the ridge into a real ridge instead of a rumor. Ororo and Logan kept to the leeward side, moving cross-current, letting the storm tug and sliding past it instead of answering.

Behind them, under the mast, a green light finished its pretty count.

The blast hit like a hand.

Snow leapt. Wind slammed forward, then snapped back, a false tide. The boom rolled low through the pines and tried to knock their feet together.

“Down,” Logan barked.

Ororo dropped to a knee, one palm pressed to the snow. She sent a small counterpressure beneath them—just enough. The shockwave shouldered over and lost interest.

“Someone doesn’t want visitors doubling back,” Logan said, eyes sweeping the white.

“They are cutting their footprints,” Ororo answered. “And making new ones for us.”

“Yeah? Let’s make our own.”

They angled north, the pull in Ororo’s temples sliding with them; the anchor line jerked again—impatient, then taut. A sting of wrongness rode the air like a low sound.

The trees thinned. The ridge ended in a bulwarked lip. Below: the quarry. Winter had made a bowl of rock and ice, its floor drifted smooth. On the far side of the basin, metal stood where rock should—an ungainly scaffold half-buried in whiteness, cables running out from it in neat black veins. The mast’s new twins: squat emitters on tripods, each wrapped in a fitted shroud.

Logan crouched behind a scrub pine and pulled his goggles up to scan. “Not ours.”

“No.” Ororo kept her breath slow; small changes, small asks. “Seeding cannisters, perhaps. Capacitors. A field projector.”

“Fancy weather wand.” He sniffed, nose wrinkling. “Somebody stocked it yesterday. Diesel. Hot wiring. Plastic explosives.”

Her eyes slid to the fresh scrape in the rock at the rim—sled marks. “They were here long enough to be confident.”

“And dumb enough to still be close.” He tipped his head. “Hear that?”

Ororo half-smiled without humor. “You mean the storm hissing at us? Yes.”

He huffed. “Other that. Listen.”

A different hum bled into the storm’s belly—regular, pulsed, not wind. A generator cough under blankets. She followed it with her attention and felt the pressure around the basin twist on its axis. The field was shaping the air, not roaring it down; it made a lip to catch snow and an arm to steer it into the mansion’s lungs.

“If I pull head-on,” she said, “I add energy. I don’t want to feed the machine.”

“So we don’t pull.” Logan’s claws slid out with the slow, quiet snikt of a decision. “We pry.”

“Careful,” she warned. “If they built a spike into the failsafe—”

“I don’t touch the heart first.” He pointed: buried cable, half a hand deep under powder, running from the tripod cluster into a drift that looked a little too neat. “We start with the veins.”

They moved like shadow: along the lip, using scrub and drift as cover. Twice a gust tried to flatten them; twice Ororo slipped a hand into the weather and made it forget them. At the nearest tripod, Logan dropped to a knee. Up close, the shroud was a smart fabric—shedding ice, hugging seams. He tapped the frame with a claw and listened like a mechanic to an old truck.

“Load balancer,” he murmured. “Capacitor bank. Antenna head. This one shapes, that one shoves.”

“Then that one is the anchor,” Ororo said, fingertips hovering over the second tripod across the bowl.

“Or the head fake so you smash it first.”

“Paranoid.”

“Experienced.”

He eased the shroud edge aside. A low sizzle danced across the metal to taste his skin. He pulled back and glared at it like it had insulted him. “Nasty. They wired it hot.”

“May I?” Ororo asked.

“After you.”

She didn’t grab. She breathed. She softened the air right above the panel to steal some charge away, made a tiny riverbed for electrons to prefer, and exhaled a whisper of dry warmth at the gasket so it relaxed. When she tipped the flap again, it lifted without the bite.

Inside: neat rows of capacitors, a bus bar, a glove-boxed control board with sealed status lights, and at the bottom a bulky tank stamped with hazard diamonds and a string of letters that made her shoulders tense: AgI—silver iodide. Cloud seeding.

“They cheat the sky into wanting snow,” she said. “And then they give it the push.”

“Fine. We make it stop wanting.” Logan’s eyes cut to the bus bar. “Gonna pull the battery from the back end, not slice the main. You keep the load from spiking.”

“Little asks,” she said.

“Little asks,” he echoed.

He set his claws under the terminal screws, metal ringing softly. Ororo felt for the pressure seam, for the hinge in the air, for the small lever that would let the load settle instead of buck. When he turned, she pressed—not hard. Like a finger on a throat to calm a swallow.

“Screw, screw, pull,” Logan murmured. “Easy… good… now.”

The last connector eased. The status lights dimmed to an offended red. The hum dropped a pitch. The wind that had been trying to curl into a fist uncurled a finger.

Ororo felt the pressure knock ease off her skull half a pound. She exhaled.

“Round one,” Logan said.

“Round one,” she agreed.

The storm didn’t like that.

White fell like a curtain again. The far end of the basin blurred. The second tripod’s shroud snapped like a flag.

And the snow moved.

Not drift, not wind—masses, low and fast and wrong, skimming over the bowl toward them: three more sled drones, bigger than the two at the mast, heads bristling with angled grills, cargo pods slung underneath like ticks. They fanned, trying to flank.

“Back,” Ororo said.

Logan didn’t argue. They fell away from the dismantled unit and slid into the shallow groove of an old haul road, drift-filled enough to hide a man. The lead drone reached the first tripod, paused, and scanned. Its head swung toward them like a dog who’d caught a bad habit.

Logan’s claws slid free again. He stayed low. “Plan?”

“We separate their faces from their eyes.” Ororo’s gloves flexed. “Sensors read gradients. Give them bad gradients.”

She pinched two fingers and moved them a quarter inch. The air five feet left of the drones warmed by three degrees and stuttered once. The lead unit tilted, correcting to aim at the wrong heat. Logan was already moving. He popped up, slammed one claw through the first drone’s sensor bank, booted it over, and let it thrash while he took the second’s front leg clean off at the joint.

The third spat a steel dart. He rolled; it nicked his shoulder and sparked on rock.

“Cute,” he grunted.

“Logan.” Ororo’s voice flicked like a switch.

He ducked. Her microburst hit the third sled low, a hard slap of weight that didn’t add wind, didn’t call lightning, didn’t feed anything—it just refused. The drone’s belly scraped rock; its intake gulped powder and choked.

Something else moved then—above, at the scrub line: a human shape in white, there and gone.

Logan’s head snapped up. “We’re made.”

“I suspected,” Ororo said. Her eyes glowed faintly from inside her hood. “They watched all night.”

“Then we move before they send teeth with names.” He jerked his chin toward the far side. “Anchor two.”

“Across the bowl?”

“Cross-current.” He grinned, feral. “Your line, my legs.”

They slid along the groove until it offered a lip, then dropped to the basin floor and sprinted low, using dunes and old rock piles as breaks. Twice Ororo ducked them under a seam where the air pressed wrong; twice Logan didn’t ask, just followed the certainty in her shoulders.

At the second tripod, the hum throbbed clearer. Up close, this unit wasn’t a twin. It was the heart. Bigger capacitor bank, second battery, and behind the shroud a steel case with a lock that had ideas about fingerprints.

“Not today,” Logan told it, and drove a claw into the hinge like a locksmith who refused to wait.

The case swung. Inside: the push brain. A control loop, a radio link, a small module with a printed label that made Ororo’s pulse jump—Remote Node B / Primary Array.

“Node,” Logan said. “There’s an A.”

“And perhaps a C.” Her jaw tightened. “We finish here. We find A.”

“Same dance?” he asked.

“Yes. But gentler.” She set her palms over the casing, not touching, not yet. “It is greedy. If we pull wrong, it will take.”

“Say when.”

She inhaled. Two in. Four out. She made the air above the bus bar easier to leave than to live. “Now.”

He turned the first screw. She bled the push off in a trickle. The hum dipped, tried to surge, found no purchase. Second screw. Third. The status lights wavered, sulked, went low. The wind’s hand loosened another finger.

For a heartbeat, a small, clean quiet lived in the basin. Not silence—just air, remembering it could be air.

Then the quarry floor answered from beneath.

A bigger hum woke—deep, teeth-buzzing, not the neat neatness of a tripod but the old wrong sound she’d felt in the cabin wall. The anchor line in Ororo’s head snapped north and down.

“Primary’s below,” she said.

“Of course it is.” Logan’s mouth went thin. “Creek cut.”

He was moving before the sentence finished—back into the track of the iced-over runoff, where summer water would have gone to a spillway and winter had laid glass. The storm tried to shove them sideways; Ororo dropped the air’s weight around their ankles just enough to give traction and nothing more.

They slid under a ledge where someone had knocked ice away with a boot heel. A zipper of cable disappeared into rock. A door that used to be a service hatch hid behind a veil of icicles.

Logan set his palm to it. “Warm in there.”

“I can take the air down two degrees,” Ororo said. “We make it colder outside than in. It will pop.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Gonna blow?”

“Gonna complain.”

She pinched her fingers. The icicles sang—quiet, high. Frost crawled over the hatch seam, then cracked. The old seal surrendered with a hiss no one but them would hear over the wind.

Logan got his fingers in and hauled. The door groaned and swung inward.

Warmth, faint and wrong, breathed in their faces. A green diode winked to itself in the dim.

“After you,” he said.

“Together,” she answered.

They slipped inside.

At the mansion, the pressure on the windows eased a fraction. The hallway lights steadied. Somewhere in the cafeteria, a spoon clinked against a mug and didn’t rattle three more times from the vibration.

Jean’s head lifted. “They cut it,” she whispered.

“Part of it,” Hank said, eyes on the flickering data Rogue’s rooftop sensors were managing to upload through a storm that hated uploads. “The signature persists. Less amplitude. Different phase.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the orchestra lost a trumpet, but the percussionist is still drunk.” He adjusted his glasses with his wrist. “If they take down the conductor, the rest will follow.”

“Or the conductor will get mad,” Scott said, not looking away from the map. “Rogue, status?”

Rogue crackled over comms: “Still here, Sugars. Got three sensors singin’ and one screamin’. Ah don’t like singin’ this early, but Ah’ll take it.”

“Hold the roof and keep the kids calm,” Scott said. “When Ororo moves, we move.”

Jean’s eyes were far away again. “She’s going down.”

“Down where?”

“Under.” Jean blinked slowly. “Into the quarry.”

Scott closed his hand on the table edge. “Then so are we the second we can do it without getting killed.”

“An admirable professional preference,” Beast said.

The hatch opened into a narrow service tunnel: poured concrete sweating in the subtle heat, old conduit brackets rusted to scars, boot prints in melted snow leading in and out. The hum was louder here, a steady, low heartbeat that didn’t belong to a building. It pressed on tooth and bone.

Logan lifted his nose. “Two people came through here in the last hour. One left. One stayed.”

“Where?”

He jerked his chin down the tunnel. “Don’t love that we’re walkin’ toward the cat.”

“Then we bring a bigger dog,” Ororo said.

“Who’s that?”

“Me.”

He almost smiled. “That’s right.”

They moved, quiet. The tunnel bent left, then right, then opened into the quarry’s under-belly: a rough room carved into rock, cables webbing the ceiling, banks of equipment shoved in where slabs allowed. The centerpiece was ugly and efficient—three pallet-mounted racks bolted together, each with a slate of capacitors and a central unit wired to a field coil that vanished into the ceiling. A generator banged quietly in a corner, its exhaust venting into a pipe someone had hammered through rock in a hurry.

The hum wasn’t sound. It was pressure. The coil reached up and squeezed the weather above like a hand.

“Primary array,” Logan said grimly.

“Node A,” Ororo corrected, eyes on the labeling stamped into the steel.

“Which means there’s a C somewhere.”

“And perhaps a friend waiting to keep us from touching A.”

Something clicked on the far side of the room.

They turned together.

A man in a white parka stood half in shadow, a remote in one hand, a sidearm in the other. His face was forgettable by design—narrow, tidy, eyes that did math before empathy. He took them in without surprise; the remote in his hand blinked green, green, green.

“X-Men,” he said. Midwest vowels. No fear. “Right on schedule.”

Logan’s claws slid out, one by one. “You like other people’s schedules?”

“I like data.” The man tipped the remote toward the rack. “Phase test complete. Array efficacy exceeds ninety-four percent at this distance.”

Ororo’s gaze cut to the coil. “You are hurting children to gather numbers.”

He didn’t flinch. “We’re modeling a larger intervention. Climate correction. Proofs are messy.”

“Your proofs are over,” Logan said, voice flat.

The sidearm tilted toward him; the man didn’t take his eyes off Ororo. “Step away from the array and no one has to lose an eye.”

“You first,” Logan said.

“What’s your name?” Ororo asked, and the softness in the question made both men check themselves.

The corner of the man’s mouth lifted. “Dr. Lyle Kincaid. Contracted.”

“By whom?” she asked.

He tapped the remote with his thumb. “You’ll meet them when you break this one. They prefer to arrive for cleanup.”

“Sinister?” Logan asked.

Kincaid’s smile didn’t change. “Names are for fan clubs.”

He clicked the remote.

The hum climbed.

Above, the storm braced.

Ororo felt the coil’s grip tighten on the sky like fingers around a throat. She set her feet.

“Logan,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t let him hurt anyone.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The first dart snapped across the room, aimed at Logan’s chest. He slid sideways; it whined off rock. His claws rang once and kept moving.

Ororo lifted her hands. She didn’t call lightning. Not yet. She built a small, precise pressure sink over the array’s intake and starved it of the air it wanted to grab. The hum balked. The status lights flared and then steadied.

Kincaid swore under his breath and swung the pistol toward her.

Logan was already there.

The gun went skittering. Kincaid ducked the first claw, rolled, came up with a knife he’d hidden in the parka seam, and slashed. Logan caught his wrist, twisted, and the knife remembered gravity. Kincaid tried to stomp his arch; Logan stepped through him and introduced his face to the concrete.

“Your proofs are over,” Logan repeated, and this time it wasn’t flat.

“Logan.” Ororo’s voice threaded between them.

He looked back. The hum had risen another notch; the coil was pushing hard enough to pucker the dust around its base. Ororo’s eyes were pale, hands steady, breath measured. “I need five seconds.”

“Take ten.”

“Five will do.”

He kicked Kincaid’s remote under a rack and slammed the man’s wrist to the floor with a knee. He didn’t have to say don’t move; the weight said it.

Ororo closed her eyes.

She changed the temperature of one breath of air, and then another, and then another, tiny, precise changes that made the flow at the coil’s mouth laminar, not turbulent; she gave the machine the kind of air it didn’t know how to grasp.

“Now,” she said.

Logan popped the primary disconnect and pulled. The hum dropped like a cut line. The status lights died to red. The storm above shuddered—once—and loosened.

Silence—real, heavy—fell in the room.

Snow hit the quarry with less spite.

Kincaid breathed hard against the concrete. “They’ll just bring another,” he said, the dry satisfaction of a man who thinks he’s told a truth. “Or you’ll go after the next one. Either way, the model improves.”

“Tell me where Node C is,” Logan said.

“Ororo?” Kincaid’s eyes went to her, quick and assessing, not pleading. “You could help fix this. Your control is… elegant. Direct your gifts to the—”

“The weather is not a pet,” she said. “And people are not a price.”

She looked at Logan. “The children?”

He tilted his head like a wolf listening. Above them, the wind ran like wind, not marching; the pressure in his teeth went from wrong to normal wrong. “Breathin’ easier.”

“Good.” She stepped to the rack and laid her palm flat on the cold steel, not in affection but in witness. Then she drew her hand back.

“Pick him up,” she said.

Logan hauled Kincaid to his feet. The man held himself like a person who didn’t plan to fight unless data demanded it.

“Node C,” Logan prompted.

Kincaid smiled with half his mouth. “Follow the creek.”

“North or south?” Ororo asked.

He considered lying and decided it would ruin a dataset he cared about. “South.”

“Thank you.” Ororo’s chin lifted. “You are finished here.”

“You’ll never get out before the next front fills the bowl,” he said, not with triumph—just spreadsheets. “We planned for attrition.”

Logan’s claws whispered out again. “We planned for stubborn.”

“Walk,” Ororo said.

They walked him to the hatch and out into the mean cold. The wind hit their faces like relief.

Below, the quarry’s floor lifted snow without malice for the first time in a day. Above, the sky didn’t listen—yet—but it had stopped actively sneering.

Logan tightened his grip on Kincaid’s arm. “We hand him to Scott, then we follow the creek.”

“South,” Ororo said. The pull in her temples—fainter now—agreed.

“Together,” Logan said.

“Together,” she answered.

They started toward the ridge as the storm reset its stance for another round.