DISCLAIMER: All characters belong to Marvel Comics Group and are used without permission. No profit is being made.
NOTES: This story was written for anniesj's Day After Tomorrow crossover fic challenge.
ARCHIVING: If anyone wants it, go ahead; I do request to be notified (infinitepryde@lycos.com).

The Mansion had always managed to seem cramped, even at the best of times. With thirty-five people crammed into the sub-basement, and power reserves running low no matter how many ingenious ways of recharging them Paige came up with, it was darned near enough to inspire claustrophobia. Not to mention homicidal urges - and those had long ago started to infect the less temperamental residents.

Sam was one of the lucky ones. With his blastfield to keep him warm, he could leave - regularly - and scout for signs of life. Sometimes he even found them. Fires were the giveaway: little Dark Age beacons at night. Survivalists, hunters, farmers, raiders, the lucky. They gathered in camps of ten or twenty, or sometimes more. Late in the fall he'd found a full hundred holed up in a town near Ithaca, occupying what had used to be a local jail. The theory was, it was defensible. They went out in groups of a couple dozen, scrounging food and supplies, taking down trees for firewood. Sam came back by there every couple of weeks now, lending a hand and sharing news. They'd had kids born there. Partly thanks to Sam, all of them had survived the winter. Nobody much cared anymore that one of them had an easier time of it because she had a thick coat of grey fur.

Nobody much thought about next winter, either. Living through the rest of the spring, and wondering what the crazy climate was going to do to the summer thunderstorms - that was as far ahead as any of the camps could think, and most of them didn't try for that much.

They needed somebody with answers, with a plan - a whole different kind of hero than Sam was used to being. His plans all involved taking out terrorists or criminals or megalomaniacs or insane mutant-hunting robots. He didn't have the faintest idea where to start fixing an entire planet...

Huh. Maybe he did.

He veered south, his blastfield leaving an arc of fading light behind him. The mountains weren't too hard to follow, not for him. On their slopes, he found what he was looking for. Windmills turning, battered and patched-together. The patches meant they were already looked-after. That was just fine by Sam; the more people doing something useful instead of beating other people up for their food, the better.

It was only when he went down to introduce himself, and one of the reception party lunged not to attack him but to hug him, that he got the real surprise.

"I knew you'd find us sooner or later." Kitty Pryde glanced up at Sam as she let go of his shoulders, and for a moment the weariness of her features melted into something brilliant and warm. "I remember fighting with you over which of us that copy of _Lucifer's Hammer_ belonged to."

Sam's mouth twitched at one corner, the closest he'd come in a long time to a smile. "It was mine."

"Yup. 'Yana found mine kicked under my desk. 'We used to control the lightning...'" Kitty half-turned and gestured up at the windmills with a gloved hand. "And we still do. The storms wrecked a lot of 'em. But we've got about a quarter back in operation, and that's more than enough to supply us for right now. And we think we might be able to double that, if we can bootstrap ourselves into making the right tooling. Twenty-five megawatts of power. You can run a small town off that."

"Thought this wasn't a small town." Sam glanced off westward, almost frowning as he squinted into the darkness toward Scranton.

The enthusiasm in the young woman's voice was abruptly gone. "It didn't used to be. Upwards of half a million in the area. The first couple weeks kicked that down to a tenth of that, as far as we can guess. Then the winter ... Scranton's got maybe three thousand local population now, Hazelton another one - they kept the wind farm there going, too - and another couple thou scattered around. We're doing pretty well. Wilkes-Barre is a ghost town. We took in everybody we could risk. But a lot of people got stupid, figured we'd want to hang on to what we had, tried to take it instead of asking. We had to fight people we had plenty of room for. Stupid as hell. You have to go down to Allentown before you start finding much in the way of survivors, and those are mostly thanks to the Amish. That's all hearsay, though, nobody's actually been able to make the trip."

"The Amish," Sam repeated. People who were already cut off from much of society, as much as the Mansion was, and who were accustomed to doing for themselves. They wouldn't be doing too well, either, not with what the last year would've done to the harvest, but... For the first time, it occurred to him that his mother and the rest of his family, isolated on their own farm, might just possibly have lived through the storms. He marvelled at the weight that lifted off his shoulders, that he hadn't let himself notice was there. "Huh. You said you took in as many people as you could?"

"Yeah." Kitty pushed her curls out of her face with a gloved hand, then pulled her scarf back up where the hug had tugged it away from her skin. It muffled her voice, but she was still understandable. "There's a lot more food out there than you'd think - it takes a lot of people to find it, but we average in the black. We've only got one doctor, but we've managed to rig an infirmary, and there's two kids who used to work in a pharmacy, they help her scavenge medicines and figure out what's worth keeping and what's pretty much trashed. And we're working on greenhouses, figuring out how to protect them from the worst of the weather, getting 'em heated right, getting water to 'em ... That's the limiting factor on population. We've got power to support ten or fifteen thousand people, easy, more if you count in Hazelton. And the Susquehanna hasn't frozen solid, we've got water. The trick is putting together a sustainable food source for when the stuff that survived being frozen runs out. Or for if and when it finally thaws.

"Our big problem is, farming around here's been going downhill for eighty years. And in the years before the big storm, the weather was already getting bad. Lots of people gave up on it. Lots more went bankrupt thanks to the way federal subsidies were slanted. Or got eaten by bigger farms - who were more dependent on technology. Not too many survivors from there. And the dairy farmers ... well, we're not going to see a cow around here for a long time. So we're pretty short on people who know what they're doing. Maybe four or five actual farmers, and some people who used to have gardens, and there's one guy who worked on hydroponic lettuce, if you can believe it..."

Sam listened to Kitty talk about growing food and fighting to preserve the little windmill community with the focus and drive she'd never put into anything but computers before. She was falling back into the old habits so easily, presenting the whole thing as just another problem to solve between them. Not fixing the whole planet, no, but fixing a corner of it? That he could handle. Especially when her answers were staring him in the face. For the first time in more weeks than he could count, he began to smile. "So you need more people. 'N' techies, 'n' spare parts. 'N' farmers 'n' seed, 'n' people who can get around in the cold. That all?"

"All?" Kitty shot him an incredulous look over her scarf. "You could throw in a couple of Shi'ar cruisers while you're at it, I bet I could rig the clothes-making machines to put food together instead -"

Sam's grin got wider. And Kitty cut herself off, and whispered, almost inaudibly, "- oh. Oh, God, I'm an idiot. You can fly."

A hundred people living in a dead jail had survived the winter by themselves; the trek down would be hard on them, but they'd make it, especially with a chance to prepare. Little camps of hunters and farmers and survivalists, cut off by distance from the rest of society. Unless there was someone to show them the way, to help them over the hard parts, to bring them to a place that needed farmers - yes, and hunters too. Thirty-five mutants crammed into the Mansion basement with more high-tech gadgets than Sam could count, with Paige who could probably take the whole place apart and put it back together. All they needed was power to run the gadgets, and that was here.

Maybe he could even fly himself home. If anyone was there - they'd want to see Paige again. And if there was nobody there... Once it would've destroyed him. Now there were other kids that depended on him. Little babies, with and without grey fur.

Hundreds of people. Thousands, maybe, if Kitty meant it about them needing farmers that bad. What was a hero supposed to be, anyway, except somebody who helped make other people's lives better?

"Better make a list of what you need." Sam reached forward and wrapped his hand around Kitty's. Her gloves were bulkier than his. He'd bet his were warmer. "Nice long one. But no Shi'ar on it, okay?"

"Okay." Kitty glanced up at the towering windmills, then out over the slopes, toward where the city had been now. Then up at him, just for an instant, before she turned and buried her face in his shoulder.

He told himself it was just because crying in the cold was a bad idea. And he told himself he was only holding her that tightly because it was good to find another friend still alive.

That evening, he stood outside a warm house hand in hand with her and watched lamps wink on. Patches of yellow and white glowing in the blackness. Lightning still tamed. Light that wasn't fire. He laughed, once, and said, "Not living in a Dark Age after all."

"Yeah, we are. We've lost so much - we've got enough techies we can rig a lot, and we've got books, we can teach our kids, but medicine alone..." Kitty shook her head once, and when she spoke again, she didn't sound quite so depressed. "Dark Ages are inevitable. Just about the only thing that's certain in life is that you slip sometimes and have to pick yourself back up. Civilizations do it same as individuals. That doesn't mean you have to just lie down and and die."

"Nope." And Sam fell quiet, watching the manmade stars. Something he'd taken for granted, even complained about. Light pollution. But when this might be the only electric light left in the world, he couldn't find it anything but beautiful.

After a few minutes, Kitty leaned her head on his shoulder again. She wasn't crying this time.

He put his arm around her without saying anything. In a little while, they went back inside.