Life can Change: What a Marvel Part 4 (0–>10k) (Patreon)

"Come on," Mark said with a grin. "Hit me with everything you've got."

Ben's orange face split into something that was half grin and half warning. "If you insist, kid." 

Jessica was already moving into position on Mark's right flank. "I'm definitely gonna work out some of my frustrations on you."

They came at the same time.

Ben dropped his centre of gravity and exploded forward, three hundred and fifty pounds of living rock accelerating across the grass like a freight train, his footfalls blowing chunks of turf into the air with every stride. Jessica cut wide to the right, arms pumping, timing herself to arrive the moment just after Ben impacted.

Mark watched both of them come and didn't move until the last possible instant.

He sidestepped Ben's shoulder charge by six inches, the massive orange bulk thundering through the space where his torso had been a fraction of a second earlier, and pivoted into Jessica's opening punch. Her fist hit his cheekbone with the full weight of her enhanced strength behind it, a blow that would have caved in a steel door, yet his head didn't move. Not an inch. His expression didn't change either. He just looked at her with an annoying grin while she shook the feeling back into her hand.

With a scowl she threw a left hook, to which he drove his elbow up into her forearm to redirect it rather than take it. She sailed past him and he let her go, already spinning to face Ben who had corrected his charge and was coming back with a right hand that had enough force behind it to demolish a truck.

Mark caught it.

He closed his fingers around Ben's rocky fist and stopped it dead in the air between them, his arm barely bending at the elbow from the impact. Ben's eyes went wide as he felt his entire momentum absorbed and cancelled.

Mark looked at the fist in his hand, then up at Ben. "That all you've got?"

Ben roared and drove a left uppercut from the ground up with every ounce of strength he possessed.

Mark took it on the chin.

His feet left the grass. He rose a couple feet off the ground from the force of it, floated there for a moment, then landed back on the same spot. He rolled his jaw. "Better," he said.

Ben stared at him like he was crazy. 

Jessica didn't wait for Ben to process it. She hit Mark across the back with a running clothesline that would have decapitated a normal man. Mark lurched forward half a step from the momentum, then turned around to face her, she was already throwing a two-handed hammer punch at his chest that sent shockwaves through the ground beneath them.

He slid back across the grass.

"Okay," he said, and now he was grinning properly. 

"My turn."

He moved.

He didn't fly. Didn't need to. His legs drove him across the gap between them in a single explosive stride that tore the turf apart beneath his feet and he hit Ben with a shoulder barge that was almost gentle by his standards. Almost. The sound it made was not gentle at all. It was a deep concussive boom that rolled across the grounds and scattered birds from the treeline, and Ben left the earth entirely, his massive body tumbling end over end across the grass, skipping once, twice, a third time with each impact cratering the lawn and spraying dirt in wide arcs, until he hit the edge of the pond. 

The water exploded upward in a curtain thirty feet high as Ben's body ploughed through the bank and carved a trench into the bed, coming to rest half submerged with steam rising off the disturbed water around him.

Mark had already turned back before Ben landed.

Jessica was mid-air. She had launched herself from a standing jump, clearing ten feet of height, both fists raised above her head to drive them down onto the top of his skull with everything she had.

Mark stepped inside her arc as she came down, got one hand on her hip and one on her shoulder, and redirected her descent sideways. She hit the grass rolling and came up instantly, drove a knee into his ribs hard enough to buckle steel plating, and grabbed two fistfuls of his jacket to headbutt him across the nose.

The headbutt hurt her more than it hurt him.

"Shit... why did I do that," she cursed and pulled back, but he caught both her wrists before she could reset, turned with her and hurled her. She spun through the air, her arms and legs cycling as she tried to find something to grab onto, and found nothing but open sky until the oak at the treeline stopped her with a crack that split the trunk halfway through and shook every branch above it.

Mark was already moving before she hit.

He crossed the field in under two seconds on foot, the grass flattening in his wake from the displaced air, and got both arms around her as she peeled away from the bark, catching her before she'd dropped more than a foot. He pulled her against his chest and held her, one hand at her back and one under her knees, while the last of the leaves rained down around them.

Jessica stared up at him.

She had a scowl on her face and a streak of bark dust across her cheek. "We lost faster than last time," she said flatly.

"Debatable," Mark said.

"It is not debatable," she said. "Last time Ben at least got you a few times before you threw him."

Mark glanced toward the pond. Ben was sitting upright in the shallows with mud on his face and water cascading off his shoulders and.

"Nah he just telegraphed the uppercut," Mark said.

"Yeah... I'm sure that's the reason we lost," Jessica said. 

"I could go easier on you," Mark said with a little amusement in his voice.  

Her eyes narrowed. "Do you want me to punch you?"

He looked down at her with a grin. "I could make it up to you," he said with a little husk in his voice. He also took the opportunity to move his hand from the bottoms of her knees to the swell of her behind. 

Jessica held his gaze for a moment before she raised a brow. "That's a very broad offer."

"I have a broad skill set," he replied.

She looked away toward the pond and said nothing for a second. "Put me down," she said finally as she rolled her eyes. 

He set her on her feet and kept one hand at her elbow until the ground was solid under her. "I'm serious about making it up to you," he added.

"You better..." she said, brushing bark from her sleeve.

From the pond, Ben's voice carried across the ruined lawn. "Little help."

They both looked over. He had attempted to stand and was now listing sideways in the mud as his feet sunk and it made him fall over. 

Jessica snorted.

Mark sighed and pushed off the ground, rising smoothly into the air and crossing the distance to the pond in a few seconds before dropping down beside the bank. He reached out and got both hands under Ben's arm, and with one clean upward pull he lifted the entire mass of Ben free from the mud with a wet sucking pop, swinging him up and forward so that Ben's feet cleared the bank and found solid grass again.

Ben balanced himself, looked down at the state of his legs, then looked at the pond, then looked at Mark. "Thanks, kid," he said. He rolled one shoulder and cracked his neck and then looked back at Mark. "You wanna go again?"

Mark landed beside him and shook his head with a small laugh. "I'm good," he said. "I think you've both had enough of me for one morning."

Ben grunted but didn't argue.

Jessica had caught up to them by then, walking across the torn and cratered lawn with her hands in her jacket pockets, stepping around the gouges Ben's body had carved through the turf on its way to the pond. She looked at the state of the field for a moment, then looked at Mark as the three of them fell into step together moving back toward the centre of the grounds.

"Why did we even bother?" she said, and it was not quite a question and not quite a complaint but something that sat between the two. "I mean that genuinely. You're clearly operating in a completely different weight class to the rest of us. Ben hits hard enough to level a building and you caught his fist like it was a mild annoyance."

Mark was quiet for a moment as they walked, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes moving across the grounds ahead of them. "I wanted to test where I'm at," he said eventually. "I've been back for a month now and I've mostly been resting and recovering, which I needed, but I don't really know how much stronger I am now than I was before Limbo."

"How long were you in there exactly," he asked, though there was care underneath the question rather than simple curiosity. "You said decades before but you never really put a number on it."

Mark exhaled slowly through his nose. "Almost a hundred years," he said. "Give or take. Time moves differently in Limbo and it wasn't exactly consistent the whole time I was there, but by my reckoning it was somewhere in that range."

The three of them walked in silence for a few paces after that. "I still can't believe you'll never look older than you do now... never have to worry about wrinkles or looking older."

"Doctors hate me," Mark said with a grin. 

Jessica rolled her eyes and punched his arm for the bad joke though it just felt like hitting a steel wall. 

"From what I understand about my physiology," Mark continued, "the older we get the slower we age, and also our powers don't just stay static. They develop as we age, and they develop faster when we push them, when we take damage and recover, when we're under sustained pressure. Ninety years of fighting in Limbo is a lot of sustained pressure." He paused and looked at his own hand for a moment, turning it over before lowering it again. "I feel different than I did before. Stronger. Faster. More durable. I just didn't know by how much until I had something to compare it against."

"And now you know," Jessica said.

"And now I have a better idea, yeah," Mark said.

Ben nodded slowly. "Makes sense," he said simply.

Jessica was quiet for a moment as they walked, "I doubt there's anything on this planet that's going to give you a real match. Not at what you're describing," she said. 

Mark chuckled at that. "I doubt it too," he said, but then something shifted in his expression, a thought arriving and taking hold, he looked up at the sky. "Although," he said, drawing the word out slightly.

Jessica glanced at him sideways. "Although what."

"I should give Thor a call," Mark said.

Jessica stopped walking.

She turned to look at him fully with both eyebrows raised. "Okay, hold on," she said, putting one hand out in front of her. "Before you go shooting off into the atmosphere to arrange a playdate with a Norse god, you have a date with Sue in the lab. Today. Which you agreed to. Which I am now reminding you of because I know exactly how your brain works."

Mark opened his mouth.

"Don't," Jessica said.

"I was just going to say—"

"You were going to say you'll only be a few minutes," she said. "Which is what you always say right before you disappear for three hours."

Mark closed his mouth, held it for a moment, and then said, "I'll only be a few minutes."

Jessica stared at him.

Ben made a sound that was very close to a laugh.

"I'm serious," Mark said, already turning toward the open grass and rolling his shoulders back. "Twenty minutes. Half an hour at the most. I just want to test something quickly and then I'll come straight back."

Jessica pointed at him. "Sue is going to skin you alive if you're late."

"She won't," Mark said, and he was already grinning as he bent his knees slightly and pushed off the ground, rising fast with the air rushing beneath him and the grass flattening in a wide circle below as he went.

"Half an hour!" Jessica shouted up at him.

"Twenty minutes!" he called back, and then he was gone, punching upward through the morning cloud and leaving nothing behind but a sonic boom that rolled across the mansion grounds like a thunderclap, startling every bird in the treeline into the sky at once.

He levelled out above the cloud layer and let himself coast for a moment, feeling the cold air drag across his face and the pressure of the altitude settle against his skin, and then he tilted forward and pushed and the world blurred beneath him.

He cleared the distance from the mansion to the city's outer edge in under a thirty seconds, dropping down as the skyline appeared ahead of him and descending through the clouds until he was below the rooftops and moving between the buildings at street level, his hands loose at his sides and his body perfectly upright as the city rushed past him on both sides. 

He banked left down an avenue and pulled a roll around the corner of an office block, then climbed and spiralled upward around a crane before levelling out and dropping back down again, the wind curling off him in visible waves as he decelerated.

He was grinning before he even fully noticed it.

He swept down along a pedestrian street and a few people pointed upward, one woman grabbed her child's hand and craned her neck and a teenager raised a phone. Mark waved without stopping, climbing back up before banking over a park and cutting across the river.

It was there he spotted a thief, a man in a grey hoodie sprinting flat out with a phone in each hand and a woman's bag over one shoulder and a gap of about forty metres between him and the woman who was shouting after him. Mark saw it from above, adjusted his angle without slowing down, and dropped.

He hit the street five feet ahead of the thief at a dead run, stopping himself instantly, and the man ran directly into his chest and bounced backward off it like he had hit a lamp post. Mark caught him by the front of his waistband before he hit the pavement, carried him to the nearest lamp post, and hung him from it by his underwear, leaving him dangling with his feet a metre off the ground. 

"Ahh come on they said you weren't here anymore!" The thief said as he struggled to get loose. 

"And deprive you of this moment? I could never," Mark said with a chuckle as he set the bag and phones on the pavement, before pushing off again and climbing hard, rising above the buildings until the city spread out beneath him in its full width.

He floated there for a moment and looked down at it.

A lot of it was still scaffolding and tarpaulin and construction fencing, whole blocks still affected from the damage Magneto had brought upon it, the broken ground and the collapsed facades and the towers with their upper floors missing. But even from up here, a month on, it looked like things were starting to get better. 

Streets that had been rubble were clear. Buildings that had been shells had their windows back. The pace of it was remarkable, it made Mark smile as a lot of the city was pulling together to help, himself included when he could spare a moment.

His eyes found the centre of the skyline and the tower that stood there, newer than everything around it. 

Stark Tower.

Tony had bought the building within a week of the property values collapsing after the attack, moved faster than anyone else in the city. The construction crew he had brought in apparently worked around the clock and didn't stop for anything. 

"The prick," Mark muttered, though he was chuckling as he said it.

He stayed up there for a moment longer, turning his gaze across the rest of the skyline and finding the place where the Baxter Building had stood, and the gap further out where his own apartment building had been, both of them reduced to rubble and clearance sites now, the foundations being all that remained. 

Everyone had relocated to Xavier's mansion in the weeks since, which had the benefit of space and the drawback of never being quite quiet. Mark had not fully decided whether he liked living there as he was constantly being bombarded by the students about his life as a hero. 

He turned away from the city and pushed east, accelerating out over the water and dropping  over the surface of the ocean until he was barely twenty feet above the waves. He pushed harder and the surface of the water beneath him began to change, the air pressure of his speed compressing downward and carving a long trough in the ocean's surface that trailed behind him like a groove. 

He pushed harder still.

The trough deepened and widened, the displaced water rising in rolling walls on either side of him. He then clicked the watch on his wrist and pulled up abruptly, climbing at full power, leaving the ocean behind in an instant and rising through the atmosphere so fast that the air thinned and then vanished before the darkness of space opened around him and the stars came out all at once.

He kept going.

The moon took shape ahead of him, growing as he crossed the distance. The whole time he pushed himself faster and faster trying to reach the moon as quickly as he could. Eventually, he got close enough and landed with a big smash that kicked up lots of moon dust.

He tapped the watch again.

Once the dust cleared he read the display, it showed one hundred and fifty six seconds.

He stood there and looked at it for a moment. 

Not as fast as the loop around the world during the tsunami, but considerably faster than anything he had managed under normal conditions before Limbo. The improvement was definitely there and it was significant.

He began to walk, his boots pressing shallow prints into the dust that would remain there for millennia with nothing to disturb them, moving without any particular destination across the surface until he found the American flag planted in the grey soil, its fabric stiff and motionless in the vacuum. He looked at it for a moment, then sat down beside it and rested his arms across his knees and looked out at the Earth. 

It was peaceful up here.

Genuinely, deeply peaceful in a way that was hard to find anywhere on the surface. Up here there was only the silence, the light from sun and the slow turning of the planet beneath him. 

He closed his eyes.

He was back in Limbo immediately.

He could feel the heat of it. The smell of sulphur and scorched rock and the particular stench of blood that had been in the air for so long it had become the air itself. 

The sound of ten million things screaming and coming at him all at once at, and his own voice somewhere in the middle of it, not screaming but roaring.

Almost a hundred years.

He had killed every day of it.

He had killed so many things in so many ways that the individual moments had long since blurred into a continuous texture, a fabric woven entirely from violence that he had worn for so long he had stopped being able to feel the edge of it against his skin. 

When he had finally empowered himself with the promethium and was able to teleport out he struggled. 

He had not wanted to stop.

The killing had become the rhythm of existence and the sudden absence of it had felt wrong, every instinct he had developed over nearly a century had screamed at him to treat the people in front of him as threats until proven otherwise and he had stood there for three full seconds fighting himself before he was able to control himself. 

He had not told anyone that.

He had not told anyone that when he had come back he had almost slaughtered everyone there both friend and foe. 

He had not told anyone that during the fight with Magneto there had been a moment, he wanted to rip him apart and devour him just like he'd done millions of times before. 

He had not told anyone any of it.

He opened his eyes.

The Earth still floated in front of him. Still beautiful and calming to his mind. 

He sat with it for another moment then he unclenched his hands, which he had not noticed clenching, and pushed himself upright and stood beside the American flag.

He looked at the Earth for one more second.

Then he put on a smile, bent his knees, and launched off the surface, turning his body toward the blue ball he called home and pushing until the speed built and the distance shrank and the stars wheeled behind him, heading back to the mansion. 

...

He came down through the atmosphere and slowed himself gradually as the mansion's grounds appeared beneath him. He dropped the last hundred feet at a gentle angle and touched down on the grass near the east wing, and then walked inside through the side entrance and headed for the stairs that led down to the lower levels.

The lab occupied the subbasement beneath the mansion's east wing, a large climate-controlled space that Charles had made available to them within the first week of their arrival. It was not as large as what they had in the Baxter Building, but it was well-equipped and it was quiet, you couldn't really ask for anything more.

Mark pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The room was temperature controlled and lit in high efficiency LED lighting. The central bench covered in sample trays and sequencing equipment and several displays running parallel processes above their respective terminals. 

Hank was at the far end of the bench with his reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead and a tablet in one large blue hand, his eyes moving between the display in front of him and a printed readout he had folded in half and was holding against his knee. Sue was at the middle station with her hair pinned back and a lab coat over her clothes, leaning forward with both elbows on the bench as she studied a cellular model rotating slowly in the holographic display above her workstation.

"You're late," Sue said without looking up.

"I'm exactly on time," Mark replied, pulling a lab coat from the hook near the door and shrugging into it as he walked toward the bench.

Hank looked up over his tablet. "You are four minutes past the agreed window," he said pleasantly. "Though given the sonic boom we heard approximately eighteen minutes ago I suspect i know why."

"I was testing something," Mark said with a sheepish grin. 

"Mmmm," Hank replied, which was about as much as he'd add to this particular conversation.

Mark settled onto a stool beside Sue's station and looked around the room for a moment. "Where's Reed?" he asked, noting the absence of the man.

Sue straightened slightly and picked up a stylus, turning it over in her fingers. "He's in Washington with Dad," she said. "They went down earlier. Reed's been working on the funding applications for the Baxter Building reconstruction, trying to renew the government grants. Dad wanted to handle the congressional side personally rather than leave it to the lawyers."

Mark looked at her. "Is your dad up for that kind of trip?" he asked slightly concerned. "His headaches have been getting worse, haven't they."

Sue was quiet for a moment, and the way she set the stylus down with slightly more force than the action required told him everything before she spoke. "Yes," she said quietly. "They have." She pressed her lips together and looked at the rotating cellular model without really seeing it. "He's been having them every day now. Some mornings he can barely get out of bed before noon. I wanted him to stay and rest and so did Reed, but he wouldn't hear it." She exhaled slowly. "He said there were things only he could do in those rooms and that no headache was going to change that." Her mouth lifted at one corner in an expression that was not quite a smile. "He's incredibly stubborn."

"He's a Storm," Mark said. "It's genetic."

Sue glanced at him sideways and the not-quite-smile became a real one despite itself. "Yes well," she said, "the genetic traits in this family have been something of a theme lately."

Mark reached across and put his hand over hers briefly, she looked down at it and then back up at him and some of the tension in her face eased. "He'll be alright," Mark said. "And when he gets back we should get him properly examined, I'm sure Hank doesn't mind."

Hank, who had been absorbing his tablet this whole time, looked up at the mention of his name. "I would be glad to," he said with genuine warmth. "Franklin has been resistant to the idea but if Mark asks him he may be more receptive. People tend to find it difficult to say no to someone who just saved their life along with the city."

"I'll ask him," Mark said with a chuckle.

Sue nodded and then let out a sigh. "Thank you Mark..." she said managing a smile.

Mark pulled his stool closer to the bench and looked at the display above Sue's station, where the cellular model was still rotating. "So," he said, pulling his attention into work mode, "where are we today."

Hank set his tablet down and moved along the bench toward them, clasping his hands in front of him. "We have spent the last several weeks building an extremely detailed picture of what the cosmic radiation actually did to each of the five of you at the cellular and molecular level," he said, gesturing toward the display, "and I think we are now at a point where the picture is clear enough that we can begin asking the next question, which is whether any of those changes are reversible."

He reached past Sue and expanded one section of the model so it filled the display, showing a cluster of cells with their internal structures highlighted in different colours. "Reed first, because his is in some ways the most elegant," he said. "The radiation restructured his connective tissues, his muscles, and even his bones at the molecular level. The result is that his entire physical structure now behaves less like biological tissue and more like a high-performance polymer. His cells can redistribute mass, deform under extreme stress without fracturing, and return to their original configuration without damage. He is not simply stretchy, which is a common misconception and one that Reed finds quietly irritating." Hank allowed himself a small smile.

He cycled the display to a new model, this one annotated in blue and silver. "Sue," he continued, "is the most exotic of the four. Her cells acquired the ability to interact directly with electromagnetic radiation, particularly visible light. When she turns invisible she is not hiding herself, she is bending the path of photons around her body so that light passes around her rather than reflecting off her surface. What she perceives as force fields are electromagnetic constructs generated by her cells and shaped by her intention. The underlying mechanism is unlike anything in the evolutionary record."

Sue looked at the model of her own cells and said nothing, though she definitely looked interested in it.

Hank moved the display again. "Johnny's change is perhaps the most dramatic visually and the most straightforward mechanically," he said. "His body became a biological plasma reactor. His cells convert chemical energy, ambient thermal energy, and oxygen into extreme heat with an efficiency that should not be possible in organic tissue. When he ignites he is not catching fire in the conventional sense. He is becoming fire, or rather his body is generating and sustaining a plasma state around itself. The cells themselves do not burn because they are the source of the combustion rather than its fuel."

He paused and pulled up the final model, this one dense with overlapping annotations and structural diagrams that were considerably more complex than the others. "Ben," he said with slight sympathy, "is the most complicated of the four by a significant margin. His body did not simply change its properties. It replaced itself. His skin, his bones, his musculature, all of it was restructured into a dense biological material that resembles rock in its mechanical properties but is still fundamentally alive, still vascularised, still neurologically active."

"He feels everything. He simply also happens to be able to withstand pressures and impacts that would reduce conventional matter to powder." He tilted his head slightly. "My working theory is that his mutation represents his body interpreting the cosmic radiation as an existential threat and responding by locking itself into the most hyper-protective configuration his biology could achieve. It worked. Perhaps too well."

Mark nodded slowly, following the display. "And me?" he said.

Hank's expression shifted into something that was almost apologetic. "You present a different kind of challenge entirely, you admitted to us you were only half human," he said, "but in truth your baseline biology is so far removed from human that studying your cells in this context is rather like trying to understand a car engine by examining a horse and cart."

"The cosmic radiation did interact with your cells, that much is clear. But what it found there was already so far beyond human parameters that the interaction was less a transformation and more a..." He searched for the word. "Conversation," he said finally. "Your cells appear to have recognised the energy as information and incorporated it. What we can say with confidence is that your cells are adaptive in a way that is almost evolutionary. They responded to the new energy inputs not by resisting or being damaged but by finding a use for them. The radiation appears to have given your cellular structure a kind of blueprint for storing energy directly within the cells themselves, which explains your ability to absorb different kinds of energy."

Mark absorbed that for a moment, then looked at Sue. "So where does that leave us on the reversal question," he said.

Sue pulled the display back to a split view showing all five cellular models side by side and picked up her stylus again. "That's what we're working on today," she said. "The challenge is that the changes in each of them are not surface modifications. The radiation rewrote their fundamental architecture. You can't simply introduce a counter-agent and expect the cells to revert because there is nothing to revert to. The original cellular templates are gone."

"Which means," Hank continued, picking up the thread with the ease of two people who had been having this conversation in pieces for weeks, "that what we are actually looking for is not a reversal in the strict sense. We are looking for a way to give the cells a new instruction set. To write over what the radiation wrote, rather than erase it."

Mark leaned forward on the bench and studied the models. "A biological override," he said.

"Precisely," Hank said, and pointed at him. "And that is where your cellular architecture becomes relevant despite its alien origin, because your cells already demonstrated the ability to do something like that. 

When Natasha's reproductive system was compromised, your genetic material didn't simply give up. It identified the damage and initiated a targeted repair process. That is a form of cellular instruction delivery that is extraordinarily sophisticated and that we do not fully understand yet."

Mark looked at him. "You want to use my cells as a model for the delivery mechanism," he said. "At least I hope that's what you're saying..."

"If we can understand how your genetic material recognises and corrects damaged cellular architecture," Hank said carefully, "we may be able to construct a synthetic analogue that can carry a new instruction set into Reed's cells, into Sue's cells, into Johnny's and Ben's, and give them the option of a different configuration."

"The option," Sue said quietly, with a slight emphasis, and she and Hank shared a brief glance that told Mark this particular word had been chosen deliberately and had probably been discussed before he arrived.

"Some of them may not want to reverse it," Mark said, understanding immediately. "At least if I know Johnny he won't."

"Even if it's only Ben who wants to its worth it," Sue said simply and left it there,

"Right," Mark said, and straightened on his stool and looked at the display with fresh focus. "So. What are we doing today."

Sue pulled a sample tray closer. "We're running a comparative analysis of the energy storage mechanism in your cells against the structural changes in Reed's," she said.  "Specifically we want to see whether the adaptive response your cells show can be isolated as a process rather than a product. If we can identify the mechanism independently of your specific biology, we have a much better starting point for building the synthetic version."

Mark nodded and pulled the tray toward him and began preparing the samples beside her and just like that they worked through the morning and into the early afternoon.

The comparative analysis was painstaking in the way that good science always was, which was to say that it moved in small increments punctuated by long stretches of waiting for machines to finish doing what machines did. Mark prepared slides and ran calibrations while Sue managed the sequencing protocols and Hank moved between his own terminal and theirs, offering observations and occasionally disappearing into a tangent about molecular bonding that neither could fully follow.

Mark didn't mind. He had never been a scientist in the way that Reed or Sue or Hank were, people who could hold an entire theoretical framework in their heads and rotate it like a puzzle until the pieces clicked, he was more of an engineer, chemistry, physics type, but he understood enough of the underlying principles to be useful. More importantly, he understood that what they were trying to do mattered and that it mattered most to Ben, who would never say as much out loud but likely suffered everyday due to his condition. 

They isolated three promising sequences in Mark's cellular structure that demonstrated the adaptive behaviour Hank had described, moments where his cells appeared to receive new energy inputs and restructure their internal architecture to accommodate them without losing coherence. Sue ran each sequence against Reed's modified tissue samples and mapped the points of divergence, building a comparative model that grew more detailed with each pass.

By two o'clock they had enough data to keep Sue and Hank occupied for the rest of the week and Mark's usefulness had largely run its course. He was washing his hands at the utility sink when he glanced at the clock on the far wall and made a sound through his teeth.

"I've got to head up," he said, pulling paper towels from the dispenser and drying his hands as he turned back toward the bench. "I've got the strength management class at two thirty."

Hank nodded without looking up from his terminal. "Go," he said. "We have more than enough to work with. I suspect the next phase will be primarily computational in any case."

Sue saved her current model and leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms above her head until her shoulders popped. "How's the class going?" she asked.

"It's going well, actually," Mark said, hanging his lab coat back on the hook by the door. "Some of them are really starting to get it. There's a kid called Marcus who could barely pick up a glass of water without shattering it when we started and now he can crack an egg one-handed without breaking the yolk."

"That's a very specific metric," Sue said.

"It's a very specific problem," Mark replied with a grin. "When you're strong enough to bench press a city bus, the hard part isn't lifting things. It's not breaking them."

He paused at the door and looked back at her. "Hey, do you want to come up for dinner later? Nat's been cooking all day apparently and there's always too much food."

Sue's face softened and she smiled properly for what felt like the first time that afternoon. "I'd love that," she said. "What time?"

"Whenever you're done down here," Mark said. "No rush. Just come up when you're ready."

"I will," she said. "Tell Natasha I said thank you."

"Will do," Mark said, and raised a hand to Hank who returned the gesture without interrupting whatever equation he was currently solving in his head. Mark pushed through the door and headed for the stairs.

The idea for the class had come about naturally enough. Mark had felt guilty about the arrangement from the beginning, Charles opening his home to them when they had nowhere else to go, giving them space and resources and privacy without asking for anything in return. It didn't sit right with him. He had told Charles as much during their second week at the mansion, standing in the man's study with his hands in his pockets and an expression on his face that Charles had apparently found amusing.

"You don't owe me anything, Mark," Charles had said from behind his desk.

"I know I don't owe you anything," Mark had replied. "That's not the point. The point is that you've taken in me and my friends and you won't let me pay for any of it and it's driving me slightly insane."

Charles had considered this for a moment and then asked him a question that Mark hadn't expected. "How long did it take you to learn to control your strength?"

Mark had thought about it. "Not too long," he said. 

"There are several students here," Charles had said, "who are going through exactly that process right now, and most of them don't have the benefit of someone who understands what they're experiencing. Some of them are afraid to touch anyone as they're afraid they'll hurt them. Would you be willing to teach them?"

Mark had said yes before Charles finished the sentence.

He climbed the stairs from the subbasement and emerged into the east wing corridor, which at this time of day was busy with students moving between classes.

He made it about thirty feet down the corridor before a boy of about fifteen with bright green skin and an oversized backpack stepped directly into his path.

"Mr. Grayson," the kid said, his eyes wide. "Is it true you flew to the moon this morning?"

Mark blinked. "How do you know about that?"

"Jubilee saw the sonic boom from the window and she told Kitty and Kitty told Bobby and Bobby told basically everyone," the boy said in a single breath. "So did you?"

"I might have taken a quick trip," Mark said. "It was more of a jog."

The kid's mouth fell open. "A jog. To the moon."

"A brisk jog," Mark corrected, and kept walking.

He got another twelve feet before two girls who couldn't have been older than thirteen intercepted him from a side hallway, one of them holding a notebook and the other holding a pen, both of them looking like they had rehearsed this moment.

"Can we get your autograph?" the one with the notebook asked.

"We're doing a project on superheroes for Ms. Munroe's class," the other one added quickly. "It's educational."

Mark took the notebook and the pen and signed it and handed them back. "Tell Ms. Munroe I said hi," he said.

"She said you'd say that," the first girl said. "She also said to tell you that you still owe her."

"Tell her we can talk about it later," Mark said with a chuckle, and moved on before anyone else could corner him.

He was rounding the corner toward the main staircase when a familiar presence fell into step beside him, matching his pace with an ease that suggested she had been waiting for him to come through.

"Hey stranger," Rogue said.

She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and gloves despite the warmth of the mansion's interior, her auburn hair streaked with its distinctive white falling loose around her shoulders. She walked close to him, closer than she walked with anyone else, which was something Mark had noticed early on and wasn't too surprised.

He was the only person in the building she could touch without consequence. The only person whose skin against hers didn't trigger the pull that drained the life and memories and powers from whoever was unlucky enough to make contact.

"Hey yourself," Mark said. "How's your day been?"

"Oh you know," she said, drawing the words out in that warm Georgia drawl of hers. "Same old routine. Went to class, came back to my room, stared at my gloves for a while and contemplated the fundamental injustice of my entire existence." She glanced up at him with a crooked smile that didn't quite hide the weight underneath it. "The usual Tuesday."

"It's Monday," Mark said.

"Well that just makes it worse, doesn't it," she replied.

They walked together for a few paces and then she shifted slightly closer, her shoulder almost touching his arm. "So are we still on for Thursday?" she asked. "You said you had some ideas about control exercises and I've been thinkin' about it all week and I just... I want to make sure it's still happenin', is all. I don't want to get my hopes up if you're too busy with everything else you've got goin' on."

Mark stopped walking and turned to face her fully, and before she could say anything else he reached down and took her hand. Her bare hand. He closed his fingers around hers and held it, skin against skin, and watched the tension in her face go through a sequence that started with the reflexive flinch she couldn't help and ended with the slow exhale remembering that it was safe. 

"Of course we're still on," he said. "Thursday afternoon, same time, same place. And I promise you, Rogue, this isn't going to take forever. Your power has a mechanism and every mechanism can be understood and controlled. You're going to get your life back. All of it. Every part of it that's been taken from you."

She looked down at their joined hands and then back up at him, there was colour in her cheeks that hadn't been there a moment ago. "You really believe that?" she said quietly.

"I don't believe it," Mark said. "I know it."

She held his gaze for another moment, something in her broke a little, not in a bad way but in the way that pressure breaks when it finally manages to be realeased. She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face into his chest and held on. He put his arms around her and held her back, one hand between her shoulder blades and the other at the back of her head, he could feel the faint tremor in her breathing that told him how much this meant to her.

She stayed there for a long moment before pulling back and composing herself. "Well," she said, tucking a strand of white hair behind her ear and looking anywhere but directly at him. "I appreciate that, sugar. I really do."

"Any time," Mark said with a little smile.

"You better get to your class," she said with a grin

"Yeah... I'll catch you later Rogue," Mark said. 

"Sooner than ya think sugar," she giggled then turned and headed back the way she had come with a wave over her shoulder that he returned before continuing toward the gym.

The strength management class met in one of the reinforced training rooms on the mansion's lower level, a space that had been specifically designed to withstand the kind of forces that mutant powers could generate. The walls were lined with impact-absorbing panels and the floor was a composite material that could take a hit from a wrecking ball without cracking. 

Charles had told him the room had been rebuilt four times in the last decade alone.

Mark pushed through the double doors and found his students already there. There were seven of them today, spread around the room in different positions. Marcus Cole was the oldest at seventeen, a tall kid with broad shoulders and dark skin whose mutation had given him the strength to lift a truck over his head but had also made it nearly impossible for him to do anything delicate without months of practice. He was standing near the far wall doing the breathing exercises. 

Beside him was Elena Vasquez, fifteen, whose mutation caused her bones and muscles had restructured themselves over the course of a single week into something dense and powerful enough to punch through concrete. She was short and compact and looked like she weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds but actually tipped the scales at close to three hundred due to the density of her altered physiology. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, carefully, because the last time she had sat down too fast she had cracked the bench in the locker room clean in half.

Near the equipment rack was David Chen, sixteen, who could absorb kinetic energy through his skin and redirect it as physical force, which sounded useful until you understood that he couldn't always control the output or when it was released. He had once caught a basketball in gym class and reflexively thrown it back hard enough to embed it in the gymnasium wall.

The twins, Kai and Mira Okafor, were fourteen, and their mutation was shared. Their bodies produced a bioelectric field that amplified their physical capabilities proportionally to their emotional state, which meant that the calmer they were the more normal their strength was, and the more agitated or frightened or excited they became the stronger they got. This had made puberty an extraordinarily destructive experience for everyone around them and their parents had sent them to Xavier's after Kai accidentally ripped the front door off their house during an argument.

Leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and a scowl that could curdle milk was Sofia Ruiz, sixteen, whose skin had hardened into a chitinous shell that gave her both enhanced durability and brute strength. She didn't like being here. She didn't like her powers. She didn't like much of anything, from what Mark could tell, though he suspected that like Ben she took the physical aspects of her powers pretty hard, it must not have been easy resembling a large bug.

And finally there was Owen Park, fifteen, the newest addition to the class, a gangly kid with sandy hair and freckles whose mutation had manifested three weeks ago when he had hugged his mother goodbye on the first day of school and broken two of her ribs. He was sitting on the floor in the corner with his knees drawn up and his hands clasped together between them, staring at the far wall.

"All right," Mark said, clapping his hands together once as he stepped into the centre of the room. "Good to see everyone. Let's get started."

He began where he always began, with the fundamental principle that underpinned everything else they worked on. "Strength isn't your problem," he said, pacing slowly in front of them as they gathered into a loose semicircle. "Control is your problem. Every single one of you has more physical power than you know what to do with and the instinct when you have that kind of power is to hold back, to clamp down, to try to be as small and as careful as possible so you don't break anything or anyone." He stopped pacing and looked at them. "That instinct is natural and it's understandable and it's also completely wrong."

He picked up a tennis ball from the equipment rack and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. "When you clamp down on your strength you're treating it like a faucet that's either on or off. Full power or no power. And because you're terrified of full power, you default to no power, which means you spend all day every day suppressing what your body wants to do, which is exhausting, which makes you stressed, which makes your control worse, which makes you more afraid." He looked at Owen specifically. "Sound familiar?"

Owen nodded without lifting his head.

"The answer," Mark continued, "is not to suppress. It's to calibrate. Your strength isn't a faucet. It's a dial. And today we're going to keep working on finding the settings between zero and ten."

He set out the exercise stations he had prepared earlier. The first was a table covered in everyday objects of varying fragility: eggs, light bulbs, paper cups filled with water, a house of cards, a smartphone, and a raw piece of silk stretched across a small frame. 

The task was simple. Pick each one up, hold it for five seconds, and set it back down without damaging it.

The second station was a set of weighted handles connected to pressure sensors that displayed the exact amount of force being applied in real time, allowing them to see precisely how much strength they were using and to practice dialling it up and down with visual feedback.

The third was a pair exercise where they would face a partner and press their palms together, the goal being to match the other person's force exactly, to push and be pushed without overpowering or collapsing. It taught responsiveness, the ability to feel another person's effort and adjust in the moment.

"Pair up for station three," Mark said. "Marcus and Elena, Kai and Mira since you two are already calibrated to each other, David and Sofia. Owen, you're with me."

They spread out and got to work.

Mark stood opposite Owen at the palm-press station and held his hands up. Owen looked at them like they were made of glass.

"I'm not going to break," Mark said gently. "Trust me on that. You could hit me with everything you have and the worst thing that would happen is you'd break your hand. So put your hands up and push."

Owen raised his hands and pressed them against Mark's, barely touching. Mark could feel the tremor in them.

"Harder," Mark said. "I'm not feeling anything yet." Owen pushed a little more. Then a little more. Mark held firm, letting the kid find his footing, letting him feel what it was like to exert force properlyy.

Across the room Marcus was at the object table, his massive fingers hovering over a light bulb with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb. Elena was beside him. At the pressure sensors David was finding his rhythm, the numbers on the display climbing and falling in increasingly smooth curves as he practised modulating his output. The twins were doing well at the palm-press, their bioelectric fields syncing naturally, and Sofia was glaring at the pressure sensor like it had personally offended her but she was still doing the exercise thsnkfully.

Mark felt his phone vibrate in his pocket.

He kept one hand up against Owen's with a gentle reminder to keep pushing and pulled the phone out with the other.

Two messages from an unknown number.

Unknown: We need to talk.

Unknown: 24th and Park Avenue apartment 52

Something cold moved through his chest. His jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed for just a fraction of a second, something angry and predatory flickering across his expression before he caught it and put it away. He locked the phone and slid it back into his pocket and returned his full attention to Owen without missing a beat.

"Good," he said with a smile. "That's good. Now try backing off to about half of what you're giving me. Feel the difference in your arms when you do it."

Owen adjusted. The tremor was still there but it was less than it had been ten minutes ago.

They worked for another forty-five minutes. Mark moved between the stations, correcting form, offering encouragement, and demonstrating techniques with his own hands. When the session ended he gathered them back into the semicircle.

"Listen," he said. "I know some of you feel like you're not getting anywhere. I know some of you went home last weekend and you were still afraid to hug your parents and that feels like failure." He looked around the group slowly, meeting each of their eyes in turn. "It's not failure. You're just in the middle of a process. You're all dealing with changes that happened fast and that you didn't ask for and you're still showing up to this room and doing the work. The fact that you're here matters. And I promise you, every single one of you is making progress even when it doesn't feel like it."

"Alright now I've taken up enough of your time, so go head to your next class we'll continue same time next week," Mark said. "Get out of here." They filtered out in ones and twos, a few of them stopping to say thanks or to ask a quick question on their way through the door. Mark answered each one and then stood alone in the empty training room for a moment, his hand going to his pocket where his phone sat like a stone.

He left it there, turned off the lights, and headed upstairs.

The guest wing of the mansion occupied the far end of the second floor, a quiet corridor away from the main student dormitories that Charles had designated for the extended family or friends. Mark's space was at the end of the hall, technically classified as a guest suite but functionally a one-bedroom apartment, a living area with a small kitchen nook and a separate bedroom and bathroom. It wasn't large but it was private and it had a window that faced the grounds and the treeline beyond, which was all he really needed.

He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

Jessica was on the sofa.

Of course she was. 

She was lying full-length across it with her feet on the armrest and a glass of something amber in one hand and the television remote in the other, flipping through channels with glazed indifference. She had changed out of the clothes she'd been wearing during their sparring session that morning and was now in sweatpants and a tank top. 

"There he is," she said without looking away from the screen. "The man of the hour. The arguable saviour of New York City. Currently unemployed superhero and part-time babysitter."

"That's rich," Mark said, closing the door behind him and dropping his keys on the counter, "coming from the woman who has been lying on my sofa drinking my whisky since, what, noon?"

"Eleven thirty," Jessica corrected. "And it's not your whisky, it's the Professor's whisky. I found it in the pantry."

"So you stole it."

"I liberated it."

Mark leaned against the kitchen counter and crossed his arms and looked at her with the particular expression he reserved for Jessica. "You know," he said, "most people, when they find themselves living rent-free in a mansion, feel a certain motivation to contribute. To find a purpose. To get a job, perhaps."

Jessica took a long sip of whisky and pointed the remote at him. "Most people don't have super strength and a deeply ingrained distrust of institutional structures," she said. "Besides, I contribute plenty. I provide emotional support and a grounding presence that prevents you from floating off into the stratosphere both literally and figuratively."

"You provide a dent in the sofa cushions," Mark said.

"That dent is load-bearing," Jessica shot back. "You remove me from this sofa and the whole social ecosystem of this household collapses. I am the foundation upon which your domestic tranquillity rests."

"You're a bum."

"I'm a bum with excellent taste in stolen whisky," she said, raising her glass. 

"Still a bum," Mark said, and before she could reply he heard the bedroom door open and turned toward it.

Natasha came through the doorway and the sight of her rearranged something in his chest the way it always did. She was wearing an apron over a soft grey shirt that stretched across the curve of her stomach, her red hair pulled back in a loose ponytail and a smudge of flour on her collarbone. She was five months along now and the pregnancy had changed her in ways that were both obvious and subtle, but as ever she still looked beautiful.

Mark crossed the room to her and she looked up at him as he reached her, he put one hand on the side of her face and kissed her. She leaned into it immediately, her hand coming up to rest on his chest, and for a moment the kiss was just the two of them and the rest of the room fell away. When he pulled back she stayed close, her eyes half-closed and a small smile on her lips.

"Hi," she said softly.

"Hi," he said, and brushed the flour from her collarbone with his thumb. "How's your day been?"

Natasha exhaled in a way that was half sigh and half laugh. "It's been me and the kitchen and approximately nine failed attempts at a soufflé," she said. "I got the tenth one right, I think, but I'm not entirely confident it's going to hold. I also made a soup and something that was supposed to be focaccia but might actually just be a very thick cracker." She glanced down at herself. "Honestly, this last month has been... the further along I get the harder it is to be on my feet for long stretches. My back hurts, my ankles are swollen, and I knocked a bowl off the counter with my stomach for the third time this week, which is a spatial awareness problem I never anticipated having."

"You should rest more," Mark said gently, rubbing the back of her neck. "You don't have to cook for us every night. We can fend for themselves."

Natasha rolled her eyes. "Mark, if I rest any more than I already am I am going to lose my mind," she said. "I'm serious. I spent 10 years as one of the most active people on the planet. I have gone from daily missions and combat operations to sitting in a mansion watching my belly grow and I am slowly, quietly, going completely insane. Cooking is the only thing keeping me from trying to join another spy agency."

Mark looked at her and then looked over his shoulder at Jessica, who was still horizontal on the sofa. "Well," he said, "you do have a pet to take care of." He pointed at Jessica. "That should keep you occupied."

Jessica raised her hand from the sofa without looking away from the television and extended her middle finger in his direction.

Natasha giggled, a sound that Mark would never get tired of hearing, and she swatted his arm gently before moving past him toward the kitchen area. "Oh, that reminds me," she said, pulling a towel from the counter and wiping her hands. "Sue is coming for dinner later, yes?"

Mark nodded as he followed her with his eyes. "Yeah, she said she'd come up when she's done in the lab. Probably around six or so."

"Good," Natasha said, and there was real warmth in it. "I like when she's here. She's good company and she actually appreciates the food instead of inhaling it without comment." She shot a look at Jessica. "Also, Rogue stopped by earlier while you were downstairs. She asked if she could join us for dinner too."

From the sofa, Jessica's face split into a wide grin and she propped herself up on one elbow to look at Mark with an expression of pure delight. "Oh, that's adorable," she said. "Your little Harem keeps growing. First it was the students wanting autographs, now it's the southern belle wanting dinner invitations. Tell me, Mark, at what point did you transition from superhero to full-blown heartthrob? Because I feel like I missed the exact moment and I want to pinpoint it for mockery purposes."

"She's a friend," Mark said flatly.

"She's a friend who blushes every time you walk into a room," Jessica said, swirling her glass. "She's a friend who finds excuses to be wherever you are. She's a friend who, and I say this with love, has a crush on you the size of this entire mansion and everyone in this building knows it except apparently you."

"Jess...."

Jessica's grin widened to a truly insufferable degree. Mark Grayson, protector of the innocent, defender of the downtrodden, certified cradle robber."

Mark looked at her with a flat expression for a moment and then said, "Technically I'm a hundred and nine years old, so you're not wrong."

Jessica let out a bark of laughter so loud it startled even her. She spilled a small amount of whisky on her shirt and didn't care. "A hundred and nine," she wheezed. "Well they do say girls like older guys."

"I'm glad my existential age crisis is entertaining to you," Mark said dryly.

Natasha was smiling through the whole exchange, watching them from the kitchen with the towel draped over her shoulder and her hand resting on the top of her belly. "I told her she was welcome any time," she said simply, settling the matter. "She's sweet and she's lonely and an evening with us isn't going to hurt anyone."

"See?" Mark said, gesturing toward Natasha. "That's the correct take. Thank you."

"The correct take and the much more correct take can coexist," Jessica said, lying back down.

"Do you need help with anything?" Mark asked, turning back to Natasha.

She shook her head and waved him off with the towel. "No, go sit down, you've been running around all day. The soup is simmering and the soufflé is either going to work or it isn't and nothing either of us does at this point is going to change its mind. Go. Sit."

He went over to the sofa without anymore argument. 

Jessica was still occupying the full length of the sofa like a cat. Mark walked over, picked up her legs by the ankles, sat down in the space they had been occupying, and set them back down across his lap. She made a noise of protest that was more theatrical than sincere and adjusted her position without actually moving.

"You're a terrible roommate," she said.

"You don't pay rent," he replied, settling back into the cushions and finally letting the tension of the day start to drain out of his shoulders.

Jessica was quiet for a moment and then she poked him in the stomach with her foot. "I pay in other ways," she said, and there was a particular drawl in her voice that he had come to recognise as her version of being seductive.

"Do you now."

"I do," she said, poking him again. "I provide companionship. I provide a steady stream of insults that keep your ego in check, which is a public service considering the state of your ego. And I'm an excellent kisser."

Mark looked down at her feet across his lap and then back up at her face. Without saying anything he caught one of her ankles in his hand and pulled her foot toward him and pressed his thumbs into the arch and began to work the muscle there in slow circles.

Jessica made a sound that was almost embarrassing in how genuinely pleasured she sounded. "Oh," she said, her head dropping back against the armrest. "Oh that is... that is unfair."

"What's unfair about it," Mark said, moving his thumbs up toward the ball of her foot and pressing along the line beneath her toes.

"I was about to make a sarcastic comment and now I can't remember what it was," she said. Her eyes fluttered half closed. "I had a whole thing planned. It was very witty. You've ruined it with your stupid hands." 

He chuckled and switched to her other foot, repeating the same motion, and she made another small involuntary noise that she immediately tried to disguise as a cough.

"So is this what you meant by making it up to me?" she asked after a minute, her eyes still closed and her voice already softer than it had been a moment ago. "Because if so I have to say, your apology game is stronger than I expected."

"Nah," Mark said with a small grin. "I had something different in mind. But I suppose this'll do for now."

Jessica cracked one eye open to look at him. "I had something different in mind too," she said. "But that can wait until later. Right now you owe me, Grayson. You threw me into a tree this morning. Into. A tree. There are still bits of bark in places I am not going to describe to you. So you keep doing exactly what you're doing for as long as I tell you to and we can talk about the other thing afterwards."

"Yes ma'am," Mark said.

"That's better."

He kept working, moving from her arches to her heels and back again, and she settled deeper into the sofa cushions with contentment. The television played quietly in the background while Natasha hummed in the kitchen.

After a while Jessica spoke again. "Hey," she said. "Do you ever think this is weird?"

Mark glanced down at her. "What's weird?"

"This," she said, gesturing vaguely with one hand at the room and the apartmen. "All of this. I mean, you live with your pregnant girlfriend." she paused, "and also with me, who is your..." another pause, and now there was a slight flush rising up her neck, "...whatever I am. And then there's the whole on and off thing you've got going with Colleen and Trish that Natasha is somehow completely fine with, which I still don't understand on a fundamental level. And don't even get me started on Sue."

"I guess it's kind of weird," he replied. "When I think about it from the outside it definitely is. I felt bad about it at the time, when it all started taking shape. I kept waiting for someone to tell me to stop, or to tell me I was being selfish, or to draw a line that I'd crossed without realising it. But you all just... reassured me that you were okay. That you knew what you were getting into. That nobody was being lied to and nobody was being kept in the dark about anyone else." He looked down at her properly. "You are okay with it, right? Because if you're not, if any part of this isn't working for you, I want you to tell me. Seriously."

Jessica considered him for a long moment. "I'm okay with it," she said finally. "I think the thing is, I know you well enough by now that I know you're actually trying to do what's best for everyone. That's the difference. It's hard to think of you as a sleaze or a womaniser, way too much of a Boy Scout. You're not collecting us. You're not keeping score. You actually like all of us in your own messed up overly-generous way and that's a different thing entirely."

Mark tilted his head and gave her his best wounded expression. "Wait wait wait," he said. "I'm not a womaniser?"

"No."

"Are you sure? Because I've been working really hard on the womaniser angle. I've got the smouldering looks. I've got the lingering eye contact. I've got the bedroom voice. I have a whole bit."

"You have none of those things," Jessica said flatly.

"I have all of those things," Mark insisted. "I am extremely smooth. I am a master of seduction. Women weep at my approach."

"Women laugh at your approach," Jessica corrected. "There is a meaningful difference."

"You wound me, Jess. You wound me deeply. Here I am, baring my soul, revealing my inner Casanova, and you're ridiculing my entire identity."

"Your inner Casanova is a goofy Boy Scout with a hero complex and a bad sense of humour," she said. "I've met him. He's not too bad. He's definitely not a Casanova."

Mark grinned and leaned forward over her legs, putting on his most smouldering look, the one that he had absolutely been working on, and lowered his voice into something that was supposed to be irresistible. "Jessica," he murmured, "has anyone ever told you that your eyes are like—"

Her foot came up and planted itself directly in the middle of his face and shoved him backward against the sofa cushions.

"Nope," she said cheerfully. "Not happening. Your seductive powers are completely useless on me."

Mark laughed and pushed her foot away from his face and then caught her hand instead and held it.

"For what it's worth," he said, his thumb moving in a slow circle across the back of her hand, "even if you decided tomorrow that you just wanted us to be friends, I'd still be here. For you. And for the—"

"Don't," Jessica said quickly, and her hand tightened on his. "Don't say it. I don't... I'm not ready to talk about that yet. Okay? I know we have to eventually, I know it's coming whether I'm ready or not, but right now I just... I can't. It's still too much."

Mark closed his mouth and nodded. He didn't push. He squeezed her hand briefly, then let it go and went back to working her foot, and she let out a long slow breath and let her head fall back against the armrest and the moment passed without becoming anything heavier than it needed to be.

They settled back into silence and watched as the television played on, the channel having changed at some point to one of the major news networks. Mark wasn't really paying attention to it, his eyes resting somewhere in the middle distance while his hands worked, until a particular voice on the screen pulled his attention back like a hook.

A blonde anchorwoman in a navy blazer was speaking from behind a desk with the words THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY in bold red across the lower third of the screen.

"...continues to dominate the headlines as the Hague prepares for what legal analysts are already calling the most significant prosecution of an enhanced individual in modern history. Erik Lehnsherr, known to the world as Magneto, will face an unprecedented sixty-three counts of crimes against humanity stemming from the catastrophic attack on New York City last month, which left an estimated four thousand dead and tens of thousands more injured or displaced. Sources close to the prosecution have indicated that the case will draw on testimony from multiple enhanced individuals who participated in the defence of the city, including members of the X-Men and at least one member of the team known as the Fantastic Four. Jury selection is expected to begin..."

Mark stopped hearing her.

'Coward.'

'You should have killed him.'

'You had him on his knees and you let him live.'

'Now they're going to put him in a cage and feed him and wash him and let him die of old age in a cell with three meals a day while thousands of people are in the ground because of you.'

'Because you were weak.'

'Because you flinched.'

'You held his throat and you let him go.' 

'You let him go.'

Marks jaw tightened and his hand stopped moving on Jessica's foot.

'What happened to the Mark from Limbo.' 

'What happened to the Mark from Gotham.'

'You used to know what to do with things like him.'

'You used to know exactly what to do.' 

'You would have torn him apart with your hands and eaten the pieces and slept like a baby afterwards.'

'Now look at you. Sitting on a sofa. Rubbing a woman's feet.'

'Watching the news while they pretend a courtroom can hold what you should have ended yourself.'

'Coward.'

'Coward.'

'Coward.'

'COWARD!!!'

"Mark."

Jessica's voice dnapped him out of his thoughts. He blinked and looked down, she was sitting up now, her feet still in his lap but her body angled toward him. "Hey," she said again. "Hey are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Mark said, though he heard how wrong it sounded the moment it left his mouth. He cleared his throat and tried again. "I'm fine. Really. I just..." he glanced at the screen and then away from it. "I want to watch something else. Please."

Jessica didn't argue. She picked up the remote without breaking eye contact with him and clicked through several channels until she landed on some old sitcom rerun, then she shifted closer to him along the sofa until her hip was pressed against his and she was leaning into his shoulder.

"For what it's worth," she said quietly, "I think you did the right thing. With Magneto. I really do. You stopped him and you handed him over and now it's somebody else's job to decide what happens to him. That's what's supposed to happen. That's how it's supposed to work. You did your job, Mark. Now you let the people he hurt have their turn at him in the way they want it, in a courtroom, with the world watching. Killing him would have been easy. You did the harder thing."

Mark nodded slowly, his hand finding hers again on the cushion between them. "I know," he said. "I know you're right. I do. It just..."

He didn't finish the sentence.

Magneto had killed thousands of people that day. Thousands. After he had recovered Mark had walked through the wreckage afterwards and helped pull bodies out of the collapsed buildings and watched parents identify their children.

There were a lot of people in this country and around the world who were furious that Invincible had spared the man responsible. Mark knew that. He had read the editorials. He had seen the protests outside the federal building. He understood why people felt the way they felt and he didn't begrudge them any of it.

But in the end he had done what he thought was right. And he was going to keep doing what he thought was right, every time, even when the voice in his head told him otherwise.

'Weak.'

'Soft.' 

'You're going soft.'

'They'll all see it eventually.' 

'They'll all see what you really are. They'll see the coward sitting on the sofa playing house and they'll know.'

He ignored it.

He had been ignoring it for a month now and he was getting good at it, or at least good enough at it to keep functioning. He squeezed Jessica's hand and leaned his head against the top of hers and let the laughter from the sitcom wash over them both.

The hours past by quickly. Natasha called from the kitchen at one point to ask if anyone had seen the smaller mixing bowl and Jessica yelled back that she had no idea what a mixing bowl looked like, which earned her an unimpressed sigh from the kitchen and a snort of laughter from Mark. The smell of garlic and roasting vegetables and something with rosemary started to fill the apartment and Mark realised he was actually hungry, properly hungry, in the way he hadn't been earlier in the day.

'Anything taste better than demon flesh...'

Sue arrived first, a little after six, with her hair down and her lab coat replaced by a soft cream sweater and dark jeans. She had a bottle of wine in one hand and an apologetic smile already in place as she came through the door. "I know I'm early but I got to a stopping point sooner than I expected and I figured I'd come early and help," she said, holding up the wine. "I brought something. I don't know if it's good. Hank recommended it, which probably means it's either excellent or completely bizarre."

"Knowing Hank, both," Mark said, getting up from the sofa to greet her. He took the bottle from her and kissed her cheek, she leaned into it for just a fraction of a second longer than was strictly necessary.

Rogue knocked at the door about fifteen minutes later. She was in jeans and a long-sleeved blouse with a thin scarf at her throat, her gloves still on but her posture noticeably more relaxed than it had been in a while. Natasha greeted her with a careful hug that was more of a shoulder rub, which Rogue accepted while keeping as away as possible, and then ushered her inside and into the apartment.

Dinner was excellent.

Natasha had pulled together a roast chicken with rosemary potatoes and a salad with roasted beets and a soup that was somehow both creamy and light, and the soufflé had survived its trial by oven and emerged as something genuinely impressive that drew real surprise from everyone at the table. 

They ate around the small dining nook that was usually too compact for five people but worked well enough when everyone was willing to bump elbows. Jessica monopolised the conversation at first with an exaggerated retelling of her morning getting thrown into a tree and Ben getting thrown into a pond, and Sue laughed harder than Mark had seen her laugh in weeks. 

Rogue was quiet at first but gradually warmed up, prompted gently by Natasha asking her about her classes and her interests and the things she missed about Mississippi, and by the time the soufflé came out she was telling a story about her aunt's dog with such animation that her drawl had thickened to the point where Jessica had to ask her to repeat half of it.

After dinner Mark and Rogue slipped away to one of the smaller side rooms while the others were still at the table.

The control session was hard.

It always was. Rogue's power was different from the strength control work he did with the kids, fundamentally so, because her mutation wasn't about modulating an output. It was about preventing an absorption that happened automatically the moment her skin touched another person. The mechanism was passive and subconscious and rooted in her body's response to contact in a way that made it incredibly difficult to interrupt.

They worked through the exercises he had prepared. Breathing patterns. Visualisation. A theory he had developed about the power being tied to an instinctive defensive response that might be retrained with enough exposure to safe contact. He held her bare hand for long stretches and walked her through the process of consciously identifying the moment her body wanted to pull and consciously choosing not to act on it. 

She struggled. She got frustrated twice and had to stop and breathe and start again. Once she nearly cried, Mark pretended he hadn't noticed because he understood the frustration.

But by the end of the session she had managed something she had never managed before, a full five seconds of contact with him while consciously not using her power. It was small. It was barely anything. But it was something, and she knew it, and when she stood up to leave her eyes were bright and her smile was wider than it had ever been.

"Thank you, Mark," she said quietly at the door, and she squeezed his hand once before she let go. "I mean it. Truly."

"Thursday," he said. "Same time."

"Thursday," she agreed, and she left.

The rest of them gathered back in the living room afterwards for what was supposed to be a short bit of unwinding before everyone went their separate ways. It turned into something longer. They put on a movie nobody was really watching and Natasha curled up in the armchair with her hand on her belly, Sue sat on the sofa beside Mark while Jessica stretched back out on his other side, the four of them just existed in the same room together for a while, talking occasionally, laughing at the parts of the movie that were funny, drifting in and out of conversation.

Sue stayed long after she needed to. She was the last guest in the room and did not seem in any hurry to leave, Jessica caught Mark's eye over the rim of her glass at one point with an expression that said do you see this? you are entirely incapable of seeing this, and Mark, who was in fact entirely incapable of seeing it, smiled back at her cluelessly.

Natasha was the first to call it a night, around ten, kissing Mark on the temple and waving goodnight to the others before retreating to the bedroom. Sue stayed for another half hour after that, long enough that even she eventually had to admit she had an early start in the lab the following morning, Mark walked her to the door and she hugged him goodnight in a way that lingered just a little too long. 

He noticed this time. 

He just didn't know what to do about it.

When the door closed behind her the apartment was quiet.

Mark stood by the door for a moment, his hand still on the handle, and then he turned to Jessica who was still on the sofa and finally looking at Mark like she was about to cash in that 'Make it up to you later' right now. 

Mark very much wanted to get all up in that, but he had to go deal with that damn prick,"I'm heading out for a bit," he said regrettably. 

Jessica who was tracing the hem of her vest raised a brow at him. "Out where," she said.

"Just out. I won't be long."

"Don't be too long... I might go sleep soon," she said with a small grin. 

"I won't be long," Mark said with determination. He stepped onto the balcony off the apartment's small living room, took one last glance back at her, then pushed off the railing and into the night sky.

The flight to the city was quick as it always was. He kept high above the cloud layer for most of it, and descended only when he was over the right neighbourhood. He dropped down through the night air and slowed himself landimg silently on the rooftop of the building at the corner of 24th and Park.

He found the window and pushed it open and stepped through into a dark room.

"Took you long enough."

The voice came from a chair in the far corner, a voice that Mark recognised. A lamp clicked on a moment later and there was Nick Fury, sitting in a leather armchair with his ankles crossed and his coat draped over the back of the chair.

Mark stayed where he was by the window. He didn't move further into the room. "How did you get my number," he said flatly.

Fury looked at him with a raised brow. "I'm a spy," he said.

Mark stood very still in the centre of the room and consciously unclenched his hands at his sides, the part of him that had spent ninety years in Limbo was very much in favour of crossing the distance between them and putting Fury through the nearest wall, and the part of him that had spent the last month rebuilding himself was working very hard to keep that part in check. "What do you want, Fury," he said. "Because I don't have a lot of patience for you these days, in case you haven't picked up on that. So whatever this is, get to it."

Fury studied him for a moment and then nodded. "I managed to get Secretary Pierce to rescind the order to capture Agent Romanoff," he said. "As of three days ago. She's not on any active acquisition list, neither is the baby. As far as you're concerned, both of them are safe."

Mark almost laughed. "I appreciate the thought," he said. "But we both know better than that. You don't run an organisation like SHIELD by trusting a piece of paper that says someone changed their mind. So forgive me if I don't pop the champagne just yet."

Fury shrugged "Probably," he said. "Which is why I made sure I'd know about it. Anyone tries to reallocate SHIELD resources toward Agent Romanoff or her child without my authorisation, I'll know within the hour. And I'll punish them accordingly."

Mark held his gaze for a long moment. "I'm sure you didn't drag me here just to tell me this," he said.

"No," Fury said. "I didn't."

Fury leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his fingers laced together. "There are rumours," he said slowly. "Rumours I've been chasing for about two weeks now. A new super soldier serum. Not the old stuff, not a refinement of Erskine's formula or a variation on the Soviet program or any of the dozen other knockoffs that get cooked up in basement labs every couple of years. Something new. Something fundamentally different from anything we've seen before. The reports I'm getting suggest the source material is unlike anything currently catalogued in any database I have access to, and I have access to most of them."

Mark crossed his arms slowly. "And you think I have something to do with it."

"No," Fury said. "Not directly."

There was a small pause. Fury looked at him steadily. "Mark," he said, "how many women have you slept with."

Mark raised both eyebrows. "That's a bit of a personal question, Nick."

"Maybe," Fury said. "But it's important. I wouldn't ask you if it wasn't."

Mark stared at him. "Fine. I'm not going to give you a number, but it's not as big as you think. What's your point."

"Secretary Pierce wanted Agent Romanoff's baby because his analysts believed that with a viable sample of your offspring they might be able to reverse engineer aspects of your physiology and create something. Even an inferior version of your abilities, distributed across a soldier program, would represent a strategic asset of incalculable value. That was the entire rationale for the acquisition order. They wanted the child for what they thought it could give them, and if that failed then the child could be raised as an asset."

Fury let that hang in the air for a second.

"And I'm telling you now that the reports I'm getting about this new serum suggest that someone, somewhere, has already gotten hold of exactly the kind of source material Pierce was looking for."

Mark let out a single short laugh. It was incredulous and not at all amused. "You think there are babies of mine out there that I don't know about and that they've been collected by secret organisations and that they are using them as the basis for some kind of super soldier program."

"Yes," Fury said.

"That's insane."

"Is it?"

Mark shook his head. "Yes. It is. I'm telling you right now, Nick, with the exception of Natasha and two other women I know about, nobody is pregnant. Nobody is going to be pregnant. The women I've been with are responsible adults who took precautions. They were all on the pill. I had explicit conversations about it with all of them. I'm not careless, Fury."

Fury did not look reassured.

"Are you sure about that," he said.

"Positive."

"Mark," Fury said, and his voice was very even now, very careful, "Agent Romanoff did not have a uterus. The damage from her time in the Red Room was extensive and verified by SHIELD medical years before you ever met her. And yet not only did your biology somehow give her one, it then proceeded to fertilise it. We're talking about a level of cellular intervention that defies every model of human reproduction I've ever been briefed on. So when you tell me that the women you slept with were on the pill and that this means they couldn't be pregnant, I have to ask whether the pill is even relevant to a man whose genetic material can rebuild missing organs."

Mark didn't move. Something tight had started in his chest. "I spoke to them," he said. "All of them. They told me they weren't pregnant. They told me they were sure."

Fury watched him. "And would they tell you if they were?" he said. "Think about it. Honestly think about it. Some women have reasons of their own to keep something like that quiet. Some of them might not even know yet. Was there ever a period of time when you didn't see one or both of them, when months went by without contact, when there was a window long enough for a pregnancy to be carried and concealed and—"

Mark moved.

He crossed the room in a flash, his hand closed around the front of Fury's throat and he lifted the older man clean out of the chair and slammed him backward against the wall hard enough to shake the framed photographs from their hooks. Fury's feet were dangling six inches off the floor. Mark's face was an inch from his "Enough," Mark said. His voice was low and deadly quiet. "I don't want to hear any more of this. I'm done. Are we clear."

Fury did not struggle. He breathed carefully against the pressure of Mark's grip on his throat and looked at him with the same gaze as he always did. "Why," he said. "Because I'm making sense?"

"Because it's not my problem," Mark said. "If you're scared that SHIELD's enemies are getting their hands on whatever super soldier shit you're worried about, then do something about it. That's what you're for. That's what your entire organisation exists to do. You go and you find them and you stop them. I don't care. It's not my problem. I'm not part of SHIELD. I never was. I never will be. Whatever's happening out there in your world of spy games and secret labs and strategic assets, it is not on me to fix and I am not going to let you make it on me."

Fury did not flinch. He breathed and said nothing for a moment and then nodded, so Mark let him go. Fury slid down the wall and caught his footing and adjusted his coat. "Fine," he said, his voice slightly rough but otherwise unbothered. "Fine. You've made your position clear. I won't bring it up again."

Fury straightened his coat and walked back to his chair

"There is one more thing," he said.

Mark gave him a flat look. "Of course there is."

"I have a request," Fury said. "Just a request. You can say no."

"I can always say no, Fury. That's not a privilege you're granting me."

"Fair enough." Fury reached into the inside pocket of his coat and produced a small folded piece of paper which he set on the side table next to the chair. He did not push it toward Mark. He just left it there. "Recently, one of my agents went rogue. Walked off the job, took resources with him, has been off the grid for several weeks now. He's not alone. He's travelling with a scientist. A man you happen to know personally. Doctor Erik Selvig."

Mark raised an eyebrow at the name.

"Selvig," he said. "The same one working with Jane Foster?"

"That's the one."

"What's an astrophysicist doing running off with a SHIELD agent?"

"That is one of several questions I would very much like an answer to," Fury said.

"What did they take."

"A weapon. A particularly dangerous one."

"What weapon?"

"I can't tell you that."

Mark stared at him. "You want my help finding two missing men who have stolen a weapon you won't describe, for reasons you won't explain, in a situation you won't give me any context for. Is that the size of it?"

"That's the size of it. I know what I'm asking. I'm asking anyway." Fury met his eyes. "I'm not asking you to bring them in by force. I'm not asking you to hunt them. I'm asking that if either of them tries to contact you, or if you happen to come across either of them in the course of whatever else you're doing, you secure them long enough to let me know. That's all. One phone call. After that it's mine."

Mark didn't reply.

He looked at Fury and at the folded paper on the side table and thought about all of it for a long moment. Then he turned and walked to the window and pushed it open and stepped out onto the fire escape.

He didn't say goodbye.

He pushed off into the night sky shot upwards into the clouds. While he as a little worried about his friend he didn't want to get involved in whatever bullshit SHIELD was up to.