Twilight Yet to Come

"I'll only be teaching on Wednesdays," she explains, "so this is handy for staying one or two nights a week. That way Logan and Mary can stay at home in Salem and I can be with them the rest of the time."

It comes as a pleasant surprise to me how comfortable I feel talking with her, much more than with the people I met in the morning. Maybe our temperaments are more compatible. Of course she is what some people call easy on the eye. She is in her early forties now, but one still has no problems seeing why all her male classmates went gaga over her when she joined Xavier's school. I bet she'll set quite a few of her students' hearts aflutter this term.

"I see you're impressed by my youthful good looks," she says with an impish grin. "You have to remember they are in part due to spending three years in suspended animation at the bottom of Jamaica Bay."

I reply in the same tone: "While I was lucky enough that my X-factor gave me the choice to look as good as I want to."

"And most of the time you choose to look like an overgrown Smurfette?"

It has been a while since I laughed out this loud in the company of someone who is not family or a close friend like Pyro. "Some find that look attractive."

"I know, Logan for one." But I swear, if I didn't already know about Jean Grey's wild streak, I would have deduced it by now from the dreamy way she looked at me during this exchange.

Is this why she invited me? Does she want to scope out one of her husband's former sex-partners? (I wouldn't call it lovers. With so many of them, myself included, it was a primarily sexual affair.) "Before your time," I remind her. It was sixteen years ago, not long after her wedding to Angel. At the time I was at loose ends following Irene Adler's death. "We both needed companionship", I add.

Jean just smiles and moves on to another subject. As time wears on, our conversation touches all manner of things, and as the ice is broken, we go beyond the usual small talk of our previous meetings (mostly at official functions like NATO metapowers conferences or during the brief breaks between the end of a successful mission and the departure of our respective teams in different directions). I tell something of my life with Irene Adler and Val Cooper (or at least give some hints, for my caution may be diminished, but it has not gone entirely), and she proves a good listener. For once the fact that she is a relative stranger makes me feel more at ease, and I tell her more than I expected when I accepted her invitation. I'm even fairly at ease about her being a telepath. When I mention that, Jean sighs. "You get a lot of this, don't you," I apologize.

"Me and every other known telepath. And of course our nearest and dearest, if they're known." Her voice momentarily switches to a passable parody of a vapid daytime talk show host. "'How do you live with your wife being able to read your every thought, Mr. Worthington?' Over and over again!"

"I suppose you telepaths have a more difficult time than most once you're out of the closet."

"Yes, TP can complicate your life a lot. You need to learn when not to use it, which means exerting a lot of self-control, and getting into that habit can play havoc with your love-life. Love begins as an impulse, so what are you going to do if you had to condition yourself to resist acting impulsively, to think before you act instead of going with your feelings?"

"I guess this is why someone like Moondragon took so long to 'thaw'."

"Well, her case is very extreme. On Titan she went through a rigorous training that made her one of the most cerebral ever and suppressed most of her emotions. Except perhaps her feelings of superiority..."

I grin at that little dig at the occasional Avenger.

"... but eventually even she found her soulmate and learned how to reshape herself and her life to accommodate for love."

"From what I heard about it, her telepathy was an advantage then, though, helping her and Marlo Jones, as she then was, to get into the clear about their feelings in a much shorter space of time."

"Oh, it's not that telepathy can't be an advantage for love. There are some dimensions to being to read your lover's thoughts and also to show him or her what goes on in your mind that outsiders just can't comprehend. I wouldn't miss it in the world. But sometimes you can learn a bit too much about someone in too short a time. And it isn't always easy to learn that not every unreflected stray thought may mean what you think it does, or for both partners to be patient with each other and to respect each other's privacy."

"I think I know what you mean. Emma Frost and Robert Drake took a very long time to move together."

"Yes, Emma hadn't had anyone to help her to teach herself about being a telepath. But it's something for which there is no single solution. It was different for Warren and me than it is for Logan and me, and it must be different again for Warren and Betsy. All the same, it probably helped that I had my first relationship before I became a full-blown telepath. I did not have to learn all about love in one fell swoop."

And Jean begins to speak to me of her romantic life. She still often thinks about what might have been between her and Cyclops.

"Scott was my first and I was his first," she says, "so he'll always be special to me."

I tell her that I had already lost count of my sexual partners by the time I met Irene and realized how little they had meant to me.

"I'd say that in the real sense Irene Adler was your first," she insisted. "I think I felt about Scott the way you felt about her."

"Maybe not quite. You did not get around to moving together. Did you shy from a commitment?"

"Believe me, I'd have shacked up with him at the drop of a hat," she says with a disarming smile. "But it takes two people to move together, and Scott wouldn't do it. He was raised in an orphanage, pretty inhibited back then, and he also had that thing about the burden of command and all that. But if it hadn't been for the Phoenix, I'm convinced I'd be living happily ever after as Scott's wife. Instead, when I returned, I found he had found someone else. And at first I didn't know what irked me more about Maddy – that she was so much like me, or that Scott had come to love some parts of her where she is different."

I start to say something, but she will not be pitied. I like that.

"Well, Scott wasn't to blame, and neither was Madelyne. Once they had worked out their difficulties, I could only stand aside. When they then found out that she is my clone-sister and she had to learn from scratch how to love him, I was of a little help. And I'm glad they have a good and happy life together. But still my husbands had to live with my memories of Scott."

Jean is perhaps overly modest about her part in the Pryor-Summers reconciliation, if Kurt and Rogue's accounts are anything to go by, but I let that pass. Instead I ask an obvious question: "Was that the reason you and Warren Worthington...?"

"No. That marriage was simply a mistake. On both parts." She leans back to reflect, then continues. "Well, not a total mistake. We're still parents of our son and we're still good friends. Better friends than we were before, actually. We care for each other and we talk about everything when we get together. And of course the sex was great, better than my first attempts with Scott all those years ago..."

That must be a diversion to avoid giving detailed reasons why she considers her first marriage a mistake. Not that I'm complaining – what could be more enjoyable to contemplate than Jean Grey having sex...!

Our conversation goes on for a bit, then Jean realizes what time it is. She declares it is too late for me to start my journey south and offers to put me up for the night in her apartment. I tell her there is no need. I have already reserved a room at a motel, because I want to surprise Irene after school tomorrow. We continue to talk in her Saab (dark green, to go with her hair) as she drives me there. Jean Grey, more demonstrative in her displays of affection, gets out of the car to give me a hug after we arrive. Not to be outdone, I return the compliment with a kiss. On the mouth.

It becomes a bit more passionate than I envisaged, for a few seconds I feel as if I've returned to the old days, when I lived on the edge and would flaunt the rules of polite society at the drop of a hat. Besides, Jean Grey is a very sexy woman, and I haven't kissed a girl as if I meant it for nine long years.

Jean is surprised, but does not resist. Maybe my impulsive action amuses her. How different from the way Storm reacted to me flirting with her once in the days of the Brotherhood (anger raging under an icy surface).

My body rejoices in the charge it gets from the intimate contact, the long-missed touch of lips upon lips, the soft resilience of her breasts against mine. And part of my mind feels pleasure at the thought of the discomfort Jean will possibly feel later when she remembers she is married (but now the pressure of her embrace grows stronger). And another part of me feels ashamed because of this. All in all it is a mercy (and not at all surprising) that we then part without further ado and with as few words as possible. I think I probably should not have done this, but then I catch her winking at me.

After I've taken my shower, I feel more alive than I have in a long time. It takes hours until I fall asleep.

***

She said she was sorry Irene Adler had been killed. Was there anything she could do for me? Did I want her to accompany me to the cremation?

I snapped at her: The last thing I need is your pitiful sympathy, Dr. Cooper. Irene died on a mission ordered by your bureaucracy, you've done enough.

Valerie said a little more in the caring vein – something about understanding what Irene had meant to me and giving me enough leave to grieve for her and bring our affairs in order. But I wasn't in a mood to listen and stomped out of the room. Then, after Val had slunk out of the house, I threw myself on Irene's bed feeling more miserable and more lonely than ever before in my life.

"That must have been the first time she genuinely reached out to you."

I turn around, and there stands the first great love of my life as I will always remember her from our first meeting – the almost fragile figure, the dark hair, the elegant black costume with the bolero jacket, the overcoat, the pillbox hat. Hello Irene, I say, but a part of me wants me to look away. She's nothing but a wishful fantasy, it insists, don't waste your time on her!

For a moment I consider telling Destiny to bugger off, but instead I say: Yes, it may well have been. It was the first time that she did and that I'd notice, even if it took me a while to register. But so shortly after your death (and that came before I had a chance to get over Rogue's apparent death in Dallas), all I desired to do was to curl up and die, or failing that, cry for the ones I had lost and generally feel sorry for myself. I was not too far gone to notice the changes Val had gone through by that point. Compared to the mutiphobia she had spouted off when I first met her and her healthy distrust of me during the time when we first set up Freedom Force, she seemed to be quite concerned about me emotionally as a person. Wonder what would have happened if you had foreseen that I would end up with her and not with Forge...

"We've been through this when I was alive, Raven," Irene Adler says with her characteristic and well-remembered patience. "Some prophecies foretell what will happen in any case, others are told to shape the future. The ancient Greeks preferred the kind that came to pass because people tried to forestall their fulfillment, but one should not discount the possibility that someone foretells one thing precisely because he or she wants another thing to happen..."

Yes, yes, yes, that would explain why you got it wrong about me and Forge (thankfully!), but you still won't tell me if you foresaw what would happen between me and Valerie, right?

Through the mists of my dream it seems that a brief smile appears on her silent lips. My mind races back to the first time I felt something like a tender emotion for Valerie. It was not long after your death, Irene, when Valerie became a thrall of the Shadow King, who sent her out to kill me. As you foretold in one of your letters to me, that order went so much against her grain that she managed to throw off his control long enough to turn the gun against herself. Because of your letter that came as no surprise, but it impressed me.

"You were angry at me when I gave my life for you, yet when she tried to do the same..."

That kind of cattiness does not suit you, try to act more like yourself. Or more in accordance with how people are supposed to behave in the hereafter. Besides, the situation was different, Valerie did what she did not out of affection for me. She would have done the same if she had been told to kill a complete stranger. She just could not kill someone she did not consider deserving of death, and it also was the only way she could think of of permanently ridding herself of Farouk's hold on her. That she saved my life was almost just a side-effect. But it wasn't just her actions that day that left such an impression on me, although I would in later years always be reminded of it when my hands ran over Valerie's scalp. There was also the immediate aftermath.

The bullet had only grazed Val's skull and left her unconscious. While she lay in an artificially sustained coma, Nick Fury and I decided that we would pretend that the assassination attempt had succeeded and I would infiltrate the Shadow King's operation in Val's shape. To feed the media statements to the desired effect was easy enough. To fool a super-telepath like Amahl Farouk up close was a different prosition requiring special efforts. In the short time we had, SHIELD's experts pumped me full of all the information on Valerie that they could lay their fingers on.

"Lucky for you that you already knew so much from rifling through her personal files whenever you had the chance before."

Yes, it paid off that I always try to be prepared. They also implanted a post-hypnotic conditioning that made me believe I actually was Valerie Cooper so that my thoughts would not betray me. And, since we knew a bit about Farouk's MO and his delight in having others suffer while he gorged his fleshly appetites until his host body was worn out, we could not exclude the possibility that he had already violated Valerie in the flesh when he forced her under his will. We therefore had to make sure that I got her body right down to the smallest detail. So they left me alone with her to look her over for distinctive moles and scars, to prod about her usually inaccessible parts so I could properly remodel mine accordingly. I was really relieved that I could not find any major recent scars on her (apart from the self-inflicted one underneath the bandages wrapping her head). There was a fairly big cut on her left calf, but that had healed so well that most people would only notice it at second glance, a childhood scar in fact. But it was a surprisingly unpleasant experience – I've never been the most respectful person about other people's privacy, but right then I felt a little queasy. At the same time I could not help being startled at her expression. She looked almost satisfied with her personal little victory over the Shadow King, as if she knew that she had punched a chink in his armor that I now could exploit to help bring him down.

Irene has listened attentively all the time, now she smiles again, a wistful little smile at yet another temporary victory over the living ghost responsible for her own death. I continue.

But perhaps the thing I remembered most, because it came out so strong even under those queasy circumstances and clinical surroundings, was the constant thought: How pretty she looks. Valerie did not possess the statuesque grace of someone like Emma Frost, the natural perfection of a Jean Grey or the overblown voluptuousness of an Elizabeth Braddock. When I first saw you at Old Trafford station I was immediately struck by your looks, but with Val it took me all these years until I was with her in that dreadful silent intensive care unit before I began to notice her more subtle beauty. Maybe it was her defenselessness, not so much that I saw her naked than that for the first time I looked at her properly without the sharp dress and hard-nosed attitude. And without looking for confirmation for my preconceived notions about her.

***

The evening's good feelings carry over to the next day, I notice how heartily I dig into the nondescript breakfast. (By the look of things the landlady thinks that her guests come for the ambiance of a genuine Continental style house, not for fancy cookery).

At the school, Irene does not give any indication that she is surprised to see me when I show up unannounced during recess. She is however glad to see me and introduces me to some of her classmates, in particular to her roommate, Candida Mayhew.

A few years ago the mutant students of the School for Gifted Youngsters generally stuck to themselves, but that has changed as the superpowered became more accepted in some parts of the world and after Charles Xavier rethought the best ways of achieving his 'dream'. Candida does not have any powers, she is what certain mutant supremacists would call a Homo inferior or a flatscan (not in Val's hearing of course, when she still was alive). She is however 'gifted' in other ways, a straight-A student who won a Eudora Frost scholarship (instituted by a bequest of Emma's great-grandfather). So academically she and Irene should fit together well. They also appear to get on well enough on a personal level, at least as far as I can judge at this early stage.

Candida does not like being called 'Candy', she prefers 'Canny' or 'Cands'. She looks the English Rose type, and it turns out that her father was born in England. At her age, she is still a bit gangly, not unlike Irene herself. At first there are some bad vibrations on my part, until I realize that it's an irrational reaction to her voice – its pitch and the Boston accent remind me of my former enemy Carol Danvers – and after overcoming that I find her quite likeable, as far as one can tell from first impressions.

Later, when we spend a little time together alone, I mention in passing to Irene that her mother probably would have approved of Candida as her roommate. Irene nods with a sad smile – even though she and Hope sometimes think I obsess about Val they miss her too.

All in all Irene appears to be content with her new school, despite the separation from her family and old schoolmates. So far, although her looks have caused a lot of people to stare at her, there have been no real problems. She thinks she is making friends both among the 'normos' and the powered students, but she is also bubbling over with how well she acquitted herself in the first morning training session today. I feel compelled to warn her not to become cocky, especially when they start having sessions with the older students in a few weeks. When we finally part, Irene winks and asks me if I'll really be going back to Washington this time.

Don't fret, you'll be rid of your old Mama soon enough, I say somewhat ungraciously and immediately regret it. Luckily Irene takes it in good humor. Still, I feel compelled to ask: "Do you think I fuss too much over you and Hope ever since Mommy is gone?" Sometimes I worry if I am trying too hard.

"You're doing fine, Mama," she replies loyally, and her hug makes me feel a little better.

"Next time I visit I'll try to let you know beforehand," I promise.

"Please do. Hope you'll have as much fun then as you did this time. Uncle Sinjin should be glad." Well, Pyro does keep telling me I should go out more...

I sigh ironically but don't comment, just kiss Irene and say good-bye, and then she quickly rejoins her fellow students. Still, I sigh a little when she is out of sight and hearing.

As I start to leave the building, whom do I see but Jean Grey. She motions me into an empty class-room. Finally decided to tell me off for my freshness yesterday, I think. But instead she gives me a coquettish look and asks: "Don't I get another kiss today?"

Well, you asked for this, Jean. I put my lips to hers, but to my surprise she takes the initiative away from me, encircles me in her arms, bends me backwards. When she breaks the kiss, she titters at the way she turned the tables on me. The look in her eyes says it all: You thought it was fun to play with fire, but what are you going to do when I call your bluff?

***

When we arrived at Jean's apartment, we did not make it into the bedroom, we stripped down immediately and did it among the scattered clothes on the carpet. I only inisted on one rule, that she did not use her telepathy, and for that she got to call the shots. After she had given lesbian sex a thorough try, she had me shift into male mode for the rest of the session, for which we finally adjourned to her bed.

It is one of the advantages and drawbacks of my power that I can be all things to my sexual partners. It can be gratifying in the short run, but often made me wonder whether they liked me or the fantasies that I could make real for them. I remember that I even was a little insecure about shifting into my real body (or, if that word should not be used, my default body) when Valerie and I first really made love.

In a way I was glad to assume different shapes that afternoon, it helped me to put a little distance between my inner self and the woman who rolled on the floor with Jean Grey, to convince me that what we both wanted was just sex and not a sticky emotional attachment. The act itself was like an explosion. Pent-up urges at last found their release with such force that my knees buckled and there were times when my entire body shook. Jean could not help remarking: "Wow, I thought you really needed a good lay, but this is ridiculous."

Part of me had at first resisted against jumping into bed with Jean, but after we had done the deed the question most on my mind was how on Earth I had managed to stay celibate all those years. Was it because I had wanted to show Val I could do without sexual partners? After all, when she still was in Rogue's body, she kept hinting not so subtly that I should go out and look for a new bedmate. In the weeks that followed, I could not help thinking that she was finally getting what she had said she wanted.

But what was Jean's reason to have that one-afternoon stand with me? I know Logan, I've experienced first hand the effect of his self-healing factor on his endurance and recuperative powers. It is hard to imagine that Jean would seek me out because she felt unsatisfied, even if there are things I can do for her that Logan cannot. I was a bit taller than him when I slept with Jean as a male, but so are about nine men out of ten (and almost four women out of five). Was the thrill of the illicit the kick craved? Did she need a change? Did the stress of life as a costumed heroine become too much (just now a young teammate of hers, Synch, is close to finalizing his divorce)? Or is she going through her mid-life crisis and needed to show to herself that she still had what it took to seduce a stranger?

Whatever her reasons were, I didn't complain. I expected Wolverine would find out about his wife's infidelity soon enough, his enhanced senses would probably ensure that even if she succeeded in concealing it whenever she went into a mind-link with him. I tried to sound her out on the subject afterwards, but she told me not to concern myself about it. Well, Jean is a grown woman, she should know what she is doing. In one way we had done it under his eyes, for unlike the typical movie adulterer she had not bothered to turn around her spouse's framed photograph or hide it in a drawer. On my flight home that struck me as oddly reassuring.

I expected the affair to end there and then, with no emotional residue. On the flight back to Washington I even hummed to myself and when Pyro picked me up, he immediately noticed the change. "You had a bit of rough," he blurted out as I walked up to him.

"Your insight serves you well, young Allerdyce," I said, and asked him not to gossip to the others.

There was no need, St. John is the soul of discretion. (Funny how I fell into using a Star Wars quote at that moment, that was Val's obsession, not mine.) I did not tell him who had been my partner, and he did not pry, even though he said he was glad that I was behaving more 'normal' again and made a few jokes about it as he drove us back into town.

I slept wonderfully that night.

***

"Ta-dah!" Valerie sings out unlocking the door to her room. "Impressed, Harry?"

I grin in mock admiration. Actually it is not really different from the other single rooms in the hotel. Wooden walls made of outsized Lincoln Logs to evoke the 'frontier charm' that Benjamin Horne (the owner) found appropriate to this Nothing Gulch in the northeast corner of Washington State. But like the man himself, they appear too smooth to ring true, sanded down and varnished so that no visiting conventioneer or affluent city-dweller has to worry about ending up with a splinter in his finger or risk being offended by the smells you normally get in real log-cabins. Above the queen-size bed is a framed picture of an owl in flight (could it be a Spotted one?).

"Can I use the bathroom?" I ask.

She nods and points to the door. "Should have gone when we still were in the restaurant."

I chuckle and leave. Ah, the unsung joys of using a male body! Afterwards I take care to leave the seat up so as not to disappoint expectations. I take advantage of the occasion to freshen up at the hand-basin, looking myself over in the mirror. Sheriff Truman, whose shape I have borrowed, does possess a charm that many would describe as 'rugged'. I can understand why Valerie felt drawn to his athletic body, tanned skin and curly dark hair. I noticed how she made eyes at him whenever there was a quiet moment during this extended emergency, even if he apparently did not. But tonight an opportunity presented itself (he left for the hospital without taking his leave) and I seized it with both hands, asking Val out to dinner as Harry. And succeeded almost beyond expectation. Maybe my behavior is crazy, but frankly I don't give a damn. I deserve some fun too.

When I return to the bedroom, Valerie walks up to meet me and kisses me on the mouth. My, you're not one to waste time or words, I say as we break apart.

"Why, do you want me to?" she replies with a sweet giggle. "I thought you were the strong, tall and silent, not the good listener type."

I smile and take her in my arms. The preliminaries of this encounter have been dealt with before we came to this room. We kiss again, longer and more intensely this time. Feeling the softness of her lips against mine and the that of her breasts against 'my' manly chest causes a momentary pang of regret that I chose to seduce her in the shape of a man. Seduce her? Well, to some extent she has seduced me. Not just because I walked into her charm offensive intended for Sheriff Harry, but because her whole personality is engaging today. I don't think we've ever been so relaxed with each other before, the big battle is over and we both are lonely people in search of release.

Even while we are kissing, Valerie unbuttons the checked lumberjack shirt I'm wearing and helps me get out of it. It is soon joined on the floor at the foot of her bed by her yellow turtle-necked dress. Her underwear is pink. She leaves me the pleasure of opening her satiny bra and taking it off, while slipping off her panty herself (are we a wee bit impatient?).

It is good we both opted for the silent approach, I could not give voice to the thoughts that rush in on me after I've bared her body without giving away the game. It can hardly say: I love your breasts, they look so much better than I remember them! (And indeed, their skin is in the pink of health and maybe the flush of expectation, while back then its unhealthy pallor was underscored by the bright artificial lighting of the ICU). Or even: How I would like to squash my breasts against yours, if only I could return to a female body!

But instead I bow forward towards her bosom so that my breath blows over the powder-pink tips, causing her nipples to rise almost imperceptively from the crinkling rings around them. Val's growing excitation is evident from her body's state of perpetual motion, which helps to exorcise the memory of her corpse-like stillness in the hospital. Don't know when it was the last time you had sex, but by that evidence it seems to have been quite a while. Well, I'll gladly help you catch up, your pleasure shall be my pleasure. (Did I say that back then or did I merely think that?)

I have no idea what Truman is like in bed and I don't care a fig. I sink down between her thighs. My mood is tender tonight and so I make love to Val gently. Is she surprised that I appear unmindful of my own immediate gratification? She appreciates it at any rate, stroking my locks – a little clumsily – with her left hand while hyperactively squeezing her breasts and twiddling her nipples with the right. (Oh, you could have much longer hair to play with!) With my head in its current location I can't see much, but I hear her breathing getting heavier and more ragged as time passes in slow motion. She mumbles encouragements as my uncomfortably big hands almost furtively rove up her body. The strong muscles of her stomach rhythmically grow hard and relax as her inexorable orgasm builds, then I'm past the lower ribs and arrive at her breasts. My fingers dig into the soft, resilient flesh and for a couple of moments Val's hands settle on mine to push them harder against herself. Then they are gone, to reappear on the back of my head when she approaches her first climax.

"Wow," she says when this stage is finally over after what seems like hours, "you are good at this. And not many men would have the patience..."

"Maybe I'm a man like no other."

"Let's not indulge in delusions of grandeur." She playfully slaps my cheek. "But it's high time for Little Harry to get his reward. Just lay back and relax..."

With that she turns her attentions to 'my' semi-flaccid member. Oh, the wet heat of her mouth, the squishy depths of her cleavage, the incessant activity of her slender fingers and agile tongue, the gentle hardness of her teeth! When she senses that I have trouble holding back she stops and reaches for the packet of condoms she providentially put on the bedside table. She unwraps one and efficiently slips it on 'Little Harry'. And then, at last, she climbs on top of me.

We are both strangely at ease in the moment of union. "You like being on top, Valerie?"

"It's an image thing." She grins playfully. "Everyone likes to call me bossy. But look at the up side – you don't have to work so hard."

Gradually, gently, and once again silently she settles down. I slide deeper and deeper into her hot and moist interior. Slowly she begins to move, taking great care not to rush me. I don't remain passive for long, though. Soon our hips move against each other in a common rhythm. My arms go up to grip and hold her, and she takes advantage of the lift to reach down and pinch my nipples into hard erection. I grit my teeth as I struggle to hold back, and together we manage to delay our orgasm for a surprisingly long time, but finally we come loudly in a sweaty climax.

And it does not end there...

Afterwards Valerie is in a talkative mood. We lie together under the blanket, spent, her head resting on my shoulder, and take stock on the events of the past few days. To my surprise, she eventually starts to talk about me.

"God, I wish I could have had a word with Mystique earlier today, too bad she disappeared so early. I suppose she wanted to be alone." She sighed. "It must be hard for her, coming up against the Shadow King again so soon. He probably was responsible for her life-partner's death, you know."

"But you defeated him," I perform my part as the sheriff, "he's gone now."

"So it would seem. The 'fireworks' certainly were impressive enough. But I bet Raven Darkh"lme is convinced he'll be back sooner or later." There you guess correctly, I'm afraid.

And what do you think?

"I fear she may be right. I've been up against him before, for a time he turned me into his slave... I have some idea of what he can do. How do you kill an astral entity anyway? We succeeded in weakening and expelling him from my brother, but I'm not too optimistic we've seen the last of him... A pity Raven sticks to herself off-duty. I understand her grief and her anger, but she shouldn't shut herself off and let them eat into her like that. It's not good for her. If she doesn't want to let me or anyone from the team help her, maybe she should at least talk to her daughter more often. She hasn't seen her once except in the course of missions since we press-ganged her into X-Factor..."

Here she inadvertently puts her finger on a sore point. Why do I not get together with Rogue? Am I still angry at her for leaving me to join the X-Men, for going to her death with them? I could do something about it, and I really should. After all, she is the most important living person in my world now. (Along with Kurt, but he still hasn't sussed out he's my son).

"Did you tell her that?" I venture.

"Ha!" Val snorts, "I needn't bother. She'd hurl that kind of advice right back in my face."

"Who knows, maybe she'd surprise you. You can't always predict what people..."

"I suppose trying can't make her hate me more than she already does." But her derision does not completely drown out the undertone of regret.

"But you no longer hated her, did you? You were already beginning to fall in love with her that night..."

You again, Irene. Can't a woman dream in peace?

"Be grateful I waited until after you had your fun with Valerie." The room, Val, my male shape all dissolve and in the end only Irene and Mystique are left, hovering in a milky white fog.

Now that you mention it, Irene, your timing is impeccable. What followed wasn't all light and sunshine. Seeing that in her way she cared for me made me feel uncomfortable. Though we had our fun that night, and I think the sex did a world of good and helped us both to get over the uneasy forebodings about the Shadow King, I realized I was no longer unconcerned about being found out. That put a damper on things and I left rather hurriedly early the next morning.

"But it all worked out for the best..."

After she did find out, it took a bit of time and groveling until she forgave me the hurt she felt because of the way I had sneaked into her pants. We did not speak of that night all that often later. For us our real first time was during the night six weeks later, when we laid to rest our misunderstandings, when she told me she had come to love me and made me see that I had fallen in love with her.

"However I can tell that you still have quite fond memories of that hotel."

Yes, that was a guilty little pleasure. As time wore on even Valerie felt safe enough to make jokes about it occasionally. She accepted I meant no harm. Well, as you said, it worked out for the best. If you were real, I suppose you'd be content. You said you wanted me to be happy with someone else after you died.

Irene just smiles indulgently, but then her expression changes.

Is there something the matter?

"Well, if you must know... Raven, I have been seeing quite a bit of you since I died, and sometimes I wonder... you dream about Valerie a lot, but..."

I'm dreaming of you now.

"That's different."

Irene, surely you're not jealous of Valerie at this time of life, I mean: death? You know I'll love you until I die!

"In a depressingly Platonic way most of the time," she says dejectedly. She may be right. I tend to think of her as she was in the final years of her life, slender, graceful, but not as young as she used to be (aged perhaps more by what she had experienced than mere years) and a little too frail to be the focus of wild sexual fantasies. On the other hand, here in this dream she is young again, I just was too preoccupied...

"Maybe, my dear, it is not too late to remedy things," I say and move in. It becomes a good kiss, and as I hold her tighter against me I feel her joyful excitement. And, fresh as it once was, my own growing arousal. It is incredible, my libido has returned with a vengeance, could it be because of that afternoon with Jean? But for now my first love and I let our imagined bodies do most of the talking, although Irene has another thought for me:

"Things should really get interesting if you should ever make it to heaven and eventually be reunited with Valerie and me..."

***

The weeks that followed were fairly normal. Pulling myself together, I appeared as accustomed to the other X-Factorites. The usual regime of training sessions, alarm drills, shifts on monitor duty interrupted by the occasional real emergency and subsequent debriefings. Off duty there was time to look through Hope's homework and generally annoy my youngest daughter. My undivided attention became a reason for her to regret her sister Irene's departure for Massachusetts, although that also had a welcome side-effect for her: Hope is now the oldest of the four X-Factor children in Georgetown. Mike Madrox is about a year younger than she, then comes Guido Carosella's daughter Pru Cheney, and finally Chris Summers, Jr. Of course in Hope's own estimation the age difference becomes even greater, she sees herself as almost a grownup and her school and play-mates as young boys and girls. (As her parent I may be prejudiced, but I do think she is actually quite mature for her age, in part due to what she has gone through.) But in spite of this she gets on well enough with her fellow X-Factor babies. But her closest friends are two of her classmates, Greer Wilson (whose parents are both doctors) and Ramon Alvarez, the son of a correspondent from a Filipino TV channel. As I could tell when I took the three plus Pru and Mike to a cinema around that time.

Hope noticed that I was cheerier after my return from the Bay State, but she and Pyro were the only ones. Of course it helped that X-Factor does not have a telepath on its roster.

I thought the affair was over, but then last Tuesday there came a phone call from Jean Grey. I had not expected her to call, and certainly not this soon, and if she called, I expected her to tell me that we should not ever see each other again. Instead, after a slightly awkward exchange of initial pleasantries, she abruptly asked me: "How would you like to come on a dirty weekend with me come Friday?"

I was so amazed that after a little while Jean asked: "Helloooo? You still there?"

Now the sex with Jean had been highly enjoyable and I also felt good about our long conversation the day before, but a reunion after such a short interval was not what I had envisaged.

In the end, I accepted the invitation despite my misgivings about reviving what I had wanted to write off as a once-off affair. I wasn't scared of being with Jean again, right? So we both came to this little New Hampshire town yesterday evening. It was so late that we didn't even have dinner together, we just went to our hotel room and immediately to bed.

Whilst it was not as exciting as the first time – what chance was there to revive the spontaneity of that afternoon and the dizzy anticipation raised by years of sexual self-denial? – it was very satisfying as a purely physical experience. Telepathy was still a no-go area, but Jean did make greater use of her telekinetic abilities and we went through a lot of variations until we fell asleep exhausted.

In spite of those exertions, I wake up early this morning. I rise and go to the bathroom for my ablutions. At my return she is still lying in bed, but I can tell she is awake, so I say: Rise and shine, my dear.

She slowly opens her eyes and the way her bright green irises emerge between her lids puts me in mind of a sunrise.

"Morning Raven," she says dreamily. She takes in my naked body as I begin to dress for breakfast and the corners of her eyes crinkle prettily as she smiles. "Did you sleep all right?"

"Oh yes, fell asleep as soon as my head hit my pillow. Good thing we only used the blanket before that," I add, distracted by what I see.

Jean turns from the side to her back and throws back the blanket. Her massive breasts lazily wobble into a different shape according to their new position. The pale white skin gleams in the morning sun as she stretches and yawns. She sinks back into her pillow and, noticing that my eyes are fixed to her bosom, gives me another puckish smile. I keep on staring.

"Glad you came here, are you?" she says. I feel my own smile broadening foolishly. Then I'm finished dressing and I sit down to watch her as she prepares for the day. Then we go outside.

The town center is a New England cliché – neat little streets, a plaque commemorating a local hero of '76 on the house next door, a memorial to the fallen of 'the War of the Rebellion' (Rogue would love this) before the white-steepled church, and brightly-colored leaves on the trees in and around the town. When I recall my younger days back in Europe I cannot seem to recall half the variety of shades of red and orange.

Over breakfast (we take it in a side-street delicatessen) I finally begin to ask her the questions that have been on my mind for weeks: "Why are you doing this? And why with me?"

"Oh dear, it's not like me at all, is it?" Jean frowns and rests her chin in her right hand, but her inflection is ironic. She looks me in the eye.

"It's not what I expected from you," I admit after a pause, but I only knew you from a distance. All this surprised me, and when I consider how you talk about Logan, I'm even more unsure why you cheat on him.

"I'm faithful to Logan in my fashion." It makes me a little uncomfortable that she answers telepathically, but I understand that she does not want anyone else in the deli to overhear what she now divulges. "Or perhaps it would be more precise to say: in his fashion."

The coin drops. "So you lead..."

"...an open kind of marriage," she completes my spoken sentence. "You can 'talk' to me in your mind without me prying in your inner thoughts, by the way. Telepathic communication at the surface level can even work if it is impossible to read a person's mind. That's what happened with Rogue when even the Professor couldn't breach the interference from the two personalities she had absorbed from Ms. Marvel."

I relax a little and sip on my second cup of coffee.

Jean leans back on her bench scratching her chin. "It's not what I expected to happen, but Logan can't help being who he is. Maybe things would have turned out differently with someone else. Sometimes I dreamed that if the Phoenix hadn't taken my place, Scott and I would have married and stuck it out without looking at other women and men until the end of our days. But Logan is not Scott. His urges are more powerful, he can't help reacting to a pretty face, and for a telepath that can become pretty hard. Mind you, I'm glad we have the link, it lets me know how truly he loves me, that his lust for a sexy woman or lingering affection for an old girlfriend simply can't compare. But that doesn't alter the fact that he has feelings that are not what I was taught to see as proper in a good husband."

"And Logan has had plenty of girlfriends," I think in Jean's direction.

"You don't know half of it," comes her reply.

Deep down in my inner self I think: I know more than you think. There is no visible reaction, so I'll assume my psychic shields are functioning and strong enough not to let out clues for Jean's telepathy to catch.

"The problem is not that Logan has such a colorful past, but that you never can predict when it will come next to haunt him and us. They did such a hatchet job on his memories before he was picked up by Department H that even he can be surprised when a former lover shows up with a kid in tow."

I could tell you stories, Jean, but it is probably kinder that I shut up.

"I sometimes have nightmares about a woman appearing at our doorstep to take him away from me because he was still her husband. And there's no way I or Logan can be sure that there isn't a wife somewhere in the world still waiting for him."

"Well, one can assume that after something like three decades she'll have given up," I 'say' encouragingly, which makes her laugh out softly.

"In any case, there were problems both because of the old girlfriends and the young women after whom he lusted. Logan sensed how I felt and tried to change, but that just led to more frictions because his... body resisted and without realizing it he began to resent me. His strong will, his willfulness, if you like, is part of what makes him who he is, it's also what helps him to overcome enemies who at first glance outmatch him. The situation improved when I became pregnant and had Mary, but then it became worse again and we had to face up to the problem. It became too much of a strain for him, he was getting desperate (if not for his healing factor, our sex life would have become very boring indeed). In the end I said I'd just have to learn to accept that I might not be able to fulfill all his sexual cravings and that he occasionally sought relief with other partners. So far it worked out well. It's not an ideal situation, but preferable to the alternative."

"I see, my friend, but now you're seeking relief from him. So you decided that what's sauce for the gander should also be sauce for the goose? In your generation it is no longer expected that a wife should overlook her husband's indiscretions..."

"No, definitely not. That would have been unbearable. We made it clear from the start that if he was free to have other partners so was I. It was only fair... Actually, at first was confident that it would be a bit one-sided and I looked forward to being rather smug around Logan. But then in the space of a few years my age began to tell. I passed my 40th birthday, a few hairs began to emulate my family name, and, well, suddenly I found the next generation was taking over the X-Men. My big sister's children are now my teammates, and my little sister's eldest is thinking of joining your team."

I nod, Nathan Summers, code-named Myrmidon, already visited our HQ to discuss the details. "Havok is looking forward to having his nephew with us."

"So I began to feel old, especially because Logan's healing factor keeps him from aging. Then there came a time when he had to go to Madripoor to sort out something with his pal Tyger Tiger which made me feel lonely as well, and so I went out and seduced me a sexy young man to prove to myself I still had what it takes."

I'd love to know details, but Jean laughs off my Mrs. Robinson jokes and says a lady does not kiss and tell, even if the affair was primarily sexual. All she will say is that she does not think that she was the first woman he had sex with, that she enjoyed their one-nighter but has no intention of another encounter with him.

"But you felt like a repeat performance with me," I reply, "I'm flattered."

She giggles daintily.

"I once was in a similar situation to yours, but from the other side," I continue on a different tack. "My metamorphic 'talent' keeps me young even though I am old enough to be your grandmother. When I lived with Irene Adler she grew old beside me, and there finally came a time when the physical aspects of our love fulfilled my appetites to a lesser extent than they had before – mostly because Irene felt less need for sex and there was less of it. She told me she did not mind if I looked for sexual gratification elsewhere – women of her generation were still expected to suffer patiently like Katherine Hepburn's mother in The Philadelphia Story. But it didn't work for me, after a brief fling or two I simply had to stop. I would flirt around a bit after that, but no more. I didn't play the field for real again until after she was killed. Maybe it would have been different if she and I had been able to link minds, I don't know."

"Thanks for reminding me that it's going to become worse."

"I'm sure you'll manage. If worst comes to worst, you can always telepathically make him believe you look as you did twenty years ago." Jean chuckles at this attempt at levity and the awkward moment passes. I'm not sure it was a good idea to drop all this onto her, but I am glad she will listen. "Valerie did not grow old enough for it to become a problem. She ... was more passionate than Irene anyway, I think her libido would have held out a lot longer. It might have become a lot more difficult with her. She'd have wanted to have my guts for garters if I had looked at other people... When she was in Rogue's body and there was no question of us making love, then she talked bravely about me having to look for someone new, but even then she sometimes could not hide that this thought did not come easy to her at all."

"Proud of that, aren't you?" her psychic voice whispers. "Methinks I'm beginning to understand you a little better. Beneath that cynical exterior you're a bit of a romantic."

"Nonsense," I snort, "I'm nothing if not a realist."

"So you say, but when I listen to you I think you deeply believe that love is for keeps and a commitment should last until death. Maybe even beyond the grave, I mean, when we have a little conversation you'll bring Irene Adler or Valerie Cooper into it before five minutes are out..."

"You could say that I definitely loved Valerie after she died," I grudgingly admit, "but love beyond the grave has an over-inflated reputation." What I keep to myself is the disappointment that haunts me on some sleepless nights that in the end Valerie sacrificed herself for Heloise without... what? What did I expect her to do? Maybe to take longer to decide to do what she did, to write me a more tearful farewell note? I know Val, I knew Val and her sense of what is right and what is wrong (so much stricter than my own, more pragmatic ethics). I can't even say she could have come to a different course of action without becoming untrue to the woman she was. More's the pity. All that I hide in the nooks and crannies of my mind and instead ask Jean again: Why did you choose me to have an affair with, and why do you want to continue it? When we first went to bed together I thought it had something to do with me and Logan having slept with each other before he married you, but now I'm not so sure.

"It is something I can't help remembering when we meet," Jean admitted. "But I never felt the irrepressible urge to knock boots with every girlfriend Logan ever had, if that's what you're driving at." She cheekily sticks out her tongue at me.

"Ah, so it's just me who's irresistible."

"In your dreams, my dear. No, I don't think it was just because I know about your past with Logan, although that was one of the things that first got me interested in you. And it wasn't about having sex with a woman either. I knew all about that... well enough at any rate... I'm afraid I was a bit naughty when I rediscovered my telepathy." Saints above, she's blushing!

"Using your powers for selfish ends," I think out 'loudly', "what would Professor Xavier say?"

"Well, I just 'listened' in on a few couples in the vicinity, I didn't make anyone do anything. I'm pretty sure." And Jean gives me a brief flash of some of her fears, of what she might do subconsciously, of what might happen if the terrors that lurk in the depths of her mind should rise to the surface, how she wonders how much of herself was in the original Phoenix when that nearly omnipotent being was corrupted. Maybe that is one of the factors that drew Jean and Logan together – they both have reasons to fear what they can become. But she returns to lighter matters: "Not that having sex with you didn't turn out to be a revelation..."

Nice of you to say so, I smirk. In our two get-togethers so far, Jean seemed intent on trying out everything in as short a time as possible, she had me as a man, a woman, and, to cap it off last night, 'half-and-half', as she so quaintly put it, when 'upstairs' our boobs were mashed together while 'downstairs' my temporary masculinity was buried deep inside her with a little telekinetic push to my backside. But I prefer it this way, primarily sexual.

"...but what also helped was that you and I don't really have a common history before this happened," she explains. "I was fascinated by you, and there was neither an old enmity between us that could get in the way, nor an old friendship to put at risk. So I felt a lot more comfortable about giving in to your advances."

For the rest of our stay together, we do not trouble ourselves with this serious kind of talk. We spend a leisurely weekend, then comes Sunday evening and the time to part. And without warning there is Wolverine standing on the other side of the street before our hotel, leaning on his motorcycle and lighting one of his cheap cigars in the characteristic fashion.

Jean is unperturbed: "Ah, there's my ride."

Well, she did not exaggerate about them leading an open marriage, even though we must reek of sex he is quite nonchalant when Jean 'introduces' us with a saucy "You two know each other, at least in the biblical sense."

That's not a pang of jealousy I feel when the two embrace in a long kiss? Surely not. I'm not in love with her, Jean and I came here to satisfy a more primitive need. She said this is what she wants, and it seems to work for her. I see again what a sexy beast he is. There certainly is something both erotic and feral about the way he inhales his mate's scent. Are you putting on a show for me?

As they break apart, back goes the burning cigar to his mouth. He notices my gaze and looks at me with a big grin, almost as if he is applauding his wife's choice of extracurricular bedmate. But there is something else about his expression that puts me in mind of our wild night together all those years ago.

The emotions that causes in me leave me off-balance to some extent, so Jean's ensuing question catches me flat-footed: "Would you mind terribly if I show Logan my memories of what we did in bed?"

I have to take a big gulp of air before I croak: "If you think it's a good idea." But in my mind I almost scream out: Don't you dare tell him of our breakfast conversation yesterday! She understands.

What is Jean's game? Why didn't she tell me that he would come here? But I regain my composure quickly enough. After all, it only comes down to facing up in person to a reality that I already knew is accepted by the three persons concerned. Did Jean intend this as a kind of gambit, an indication of things to come? Now that I come to think of it, that would open the door to all kinds of interesting developments.

Back home in Georgetown I have a little time to clear the decks before Rogue brings Hope back from Snug Valley in the Alleghenies (or Alligator Mountains, as Hope used to pronounce them when she was little). What would Rogue think if she knew the real reason why I had her take in her youngest sister over the weekend? I have some suspicions, so I hope she won't find out, but will I manage to keep this affair a secret if I continue it?

When the two arrive a few hours later, Hope is in very cheerful spirits. She always enjoys flying with Rogue and she looks as if she also had quite an active time in West Virginia. As soon as she touches the ground and before she has finished taking off the harness that links her to Rogue on long-distance flights, she begins to chatter about the bicycle excursions she did with Harriet and Heloise and J.B. LeBeau, Rajinder Shaara and Pia DaCosta in the lower slopes of the Alleghenies. Heloise, she tells me, is very sporty and competitive, always determined to stay ahead of her playmates even if they are older than she. In that she is very much like her sister Valerie, I have to think by myself. These days she lives with the Shaaras a lot – Rogue may talk about Valerie significantly less than I do, but even that can be often enough to get on her nerves.

As we unpack Hope's travel-bag I suddenly hold Hope's school exercise book in my hands. Not something I would expect on such a short visit. From Irene maybe, but not from Hope. "Hello, homework on your free weekend. Isn't that overdoing things a bit?"

"No, I just took 'em 'cause mommy wanted to see..." If looks could kill, Hope would survived, but the one Rogue just gave her would have her limping for a week. Hope rushes to correct herself: "...er, Rogue wanted to see them."

"You could have done that here," I tell Rogue as if there had been no slip, "just because you can lift a truck doesn't oblige you carry a truckload of stuff everywhere."

***

I'm not proud of what I did after Rogue left, but neither am I ashamed. As I am an experienced parent and with my knowledge of espionage and interrogation techniques the difficulties of wangling the information from my youngest daughter were quite surmountable. Hope now feels bad about giving away what she promised not to tell, but she'll bounce back soon. It was a difficult situation for her to begin with – she had not exactly relished withholding something this important from me. And she is very much like her mother in one respect: She does not like to lie. However, she is not yet old and experienced enough to be anyway near as good as Val at dissimulating without telling outright untruths.

So. Mommy Val has returned. This is what Hope eventually said she learned: Earlier this year Heloise would wake up and find her toys, clothes and everything in subtly different places from where she remembered leaving them before she fell asleep. One time the entire room had apparently been cleaned up overnight (there are times when tidiness can be a drawback). Slowly, she began to suspect (or hope, at least that is what Hope says she said) that she was not alone in her head, that Val now lived in her subconscious and would emerge from it at nights to borrow her body. Heloise could remember what it was like from 'the other side', having existed 'subconsciously' herself when Val's transplanted psyche had been in control of her body. And so it was.

At first there was no direct way for Heloise to communicate with Val in her mind. I'm not even sure if Val wanted her to become aware of her so soon. Anyway, Heloise, proving quite resourceful for her age, started leaving notes for Val, which apparently was the real reason why her teacher and everyone else was so delighted by her studious efforts in learning to read and write at the time.

"Heloise thinks she saved Mommy when the Professor tried to wipe her from her mind," Hope told me. "She kicked and screamed at him and at Mommy to get her to stay. Back then she thought it had all been for nothing, but somehow she seems to have pulled he into some corner safe from mind-probes. Leastways that's what the Professor says."

Rogue took him into their confidence eventually, but not me. Maybe it was to be expected, Charles Xavier is that most excellent life-form, an 'expert', and I am merely the woman who centered her life on Valerie.

Well, maybe not the woman, it appears that in her way Heloise is currently making Val the most important factor in her life as well. If Hope remembers correctly what Heloise, Val and Rogue told her, Heloise stalwartly refused any suggestion of another attempt to mind-wipe her 'sister's' persona. Hope thinks that it would not be possible without risking severe damage to Heloise's brain. If she understood Rogue (who had inquired about the possibility of transferring Val back to her mind) correctly, the first attempt resulted in Valerie's persona being pushed much deeper inside Heloise's inner mind, so some fragments have become entangled so much that it is pretty much impossible even for an expert telepath to sort out which elements belong to which persona (because they belong to clone-sisters they are very similar) and to remove only Valerie's.

This could cause serious problems if the peaceful coexistence of Val and Heloise inside Heloise's head should come to an end, but at present that possibility thankfully is not imminent. Heloise is in control of her body, her relationship with Val is, in Hope's opinion, "just like it was when mommy was in Rogue". I would surmise that the incomplete erasure enabled Heloise's own personality to 'find her feet', so that by the time of Val's reappearance it had matured and grown strong enough to assert herself, at least when she is awake.

Hope claims that Heloise and Val get along well now and that they have gained a large measure of control about who is in charge of the body (Heloise could 'hand over' control to Val when they wanted to during Irene and Hope's visits).

As I said, I'm not proud of what I did and maybe I'll have to work on soothing Hope's bruised feelings for a while. I asked her what she would like do with me, and she said she wanted me to take her to a fashion show. Now that is something I did not see coming.

***

The light is so bright its impact hurts the back of my eyes. Adjusting to it I discover I'm not in my own bed, but in the sick bay of X-Factor HQ. And I'm heavily bandaged. What happened ... ah yes, fight, Sabretooth broke loose, tried to kill me, passing out as I was carried here, blood running down my right leg ... Oh god, Valerie was in the room with us, did he...?

No, there she is, wrapped in even more bandages than me, her left arm in a plaster cast. But alive. Breathing regularly in her sleep. So we both survived his attack. Thank heavens. (There's a crucifix on the wall above us, a donation from my son Kurt. Not all that appropriate to Val's Lutheran sensibilities..)

For all her bruises and the paleness of her face she looks lovely and serene. How close I just came to losing her! Or possibly how close she came to losing me (he could have killed me if not for her). So soon after we faced up to how we felt for each other. We were both incredibly lucky, and we still have a chance for something more than our furtive little meetings...

It was largely my fault that we didn't spend more time together, that we kept our (tentative?) relationship a secret from most people we know. I was a little scared that it wouldn't work out. But what put us into sickbeds puts everything into perspective... What is more important, the fears of what could go wrong between us or the way we feel when we're together?

But it was kind of funny at times. Two months ago, the day after our first time, when she had me sent to her office and everybody thought she was giving me another dressing-down. When she just didn't have the patience to wait until the evening... At times we behaved like a couple of schoolgirls sneaking off to the bathroom for a slap-and-tickle.

Maybe we should act more like adults. It is not as if I'm ashamed of being in love with Val, is it?

The door opens and in walks Forge, electronically alerted to my waking up. "Good morning Raven," he says. "Feeling better?"

Forge is the only one on the team to whom Valerie has hinted about her feelings, but that was ages ago. Maybe he guesses – he mentions that he saw to it that we weren't put into separate rooms. "I thought it'd help you to see immediately how you're doing."

"What about Sabretooth," I ask, "did he escape?"

"No."

So he's sitting and waiting in a holding cell. "I hope what happened will at least bury the prospects of him being forced on us after some half-witted brain treatment."

"Hardly. He's dead."

"What?? How...?"

"Valerie got in at least two good shots, one in the spine and one in the skull. The bullet was so small that it was thrown back when it hit bone again after going through his brain. Made a big mess of his brain and cerebellum."

"But surely his healing factor...?"

"Too chaotic. From the autopsy it appears that the relatively undamaged parts of his brain tried to regenerate while another part of his body tried to build a new brain from scratch and the bone fragments that had been propelled inside tried to grow into a new skull inside the original one. The competing centers drew blood and oxygen away from each other and from the other parts of the body. The coordination of metabolic processes deteriorated rapidly, and finally his respiration and heart gave out."

And I have a hunch it was too late for you to do anything about it.

"We were too busy saving your and Valerie's lives. Well, what's done is done. Soooo, you're the widow, any thoughts about the funeral arrangements? What would you say about a cremation?"

With a poker-face as impassive as Forge's I reply: I am sure that is what Victor would have wanted.

"Good, so I guessed correctly. I've already made the necessary arrangements."

Of course that includes all parts removed during the autopsy, right?

"If you insist." Forge hardly winks at me at all and leaves the room.

It is better to be safe than sorry. Whoever had Sabretooth assigned to X-Factor would probably leap at the opportunity to make use of his remains, perhaps try to create a more docile Sabre-clone. Forge also senses that, and though he continues to work for Uncle Sam, he knows that some things (such as his Neutralizer) are so dangerous that you have to destroy them even if there is only a small chance of them falling into the wrong hands.

A while later Valerie finally awakes. Hello there, how do you feel, my love?

Val blinks and grimaces. "Badly beaten about. Hurting, but alive. And you?"

As well as can be expected under the circumstances. Glad to see you've come through in one piece. Sad to see you injured. And so badly.

She blows me a little kiss and smiles when I return the gesture. But we don't remain alone for long. Forge returns quickly, this time accompanied by Havok. At least I don't have to try to explain myself what happened in the fight with Sabretooth. Valerie listens attentively, but she is still worn out and relieved when the informal debriefing is over and the two leave.

Not that this relief lasts, for now Dr. Fitzpatrick and Nurse McQueen arrive to inspect their two patients. While Anita chattily takes my pulse and blood-pressure, the good doctor speaks to Val in hushed tones, practically whispering. I can't make out what he is saying above the cheerful banter of the nurse. But it seems to be important. I see Valerie's eyes widen in surprise. For a while she just stares into space. Finally her expression softens and she smiles. And whatever the news is, it made her drowsiness utterly disappear.

After our two visitors are finished and my bed has been rolled closer to hers, Valerie shoos them away.

She looks at me.

I look back at her.

She smiles at me with an expression I cannot read.

At last she breaks the silence.

"Um, Raven... I hope you're lying down..." She giggles nervously. "Uhmm... how to begin...? Now this came as a surprise to me, I wonder if it does to you..."

What is she talking about? I can't see my own expression, but it must look funny to her. Her smile widens to become a smirky grin.

"I had no idea just how anatomically correct you become when you take on a male shape."

You mean...

"I do indeed. You see, when Dr. Gunther told me that I'm pregnant I thought 'that's impossible, the only person I had sex with these past months is Raven, and she's a woman, right?'"

I gape like a shell-shocked Harrison Ford. My mind races back. We always made love as woman and woman, except... "It must have been when we... the first time... at your place..."

Valerie nods, but I don't pick up the thread. "Don't you want to know how the baby is?"

I don't have to. I know it is fine just by looking at her beaming face. Then her expression changes once more. She looks me in the eyes affectionately. Tenderly. With no trace of any reproach. My loving Val.

With some difficulty I rise and lean over to her. It becomes a good kiss. But then I have to sink back into my pillows. A little dizzy still, I explain, maybe from the loss of blood.

Val puts her right index and middle fingers to her lips, then to mine. She winces, her bandaged arm hurts with the effort. I hold on to her slackening hand and kiss the palm. It is a magic moment. I sense perhaps for the first time we know each other's thoughts and feelings without having to put them into words. Valerie can sense my love for her, that our trial period is over before it really began and she won't have to wait the full six months, that she and I and the unborn child will begin a new life together as a family.

"Till death us do part," she whispers and I have to struggle to keep my eyes from welling up as I nod and smile a crooked smile at her. I think of paging the nurse to ask her to bring us a bottle of champagne and all at once I notice a sparrow chirruping outside the window over the noise of the noontime traffic.

***

Irene Adler did not appear in that dream. Odd. I couldn't stop dreaming of her ever since Valerie's 'suicide'. But I probably did not want to think of her in that context. In the weeks that followed, Destiny would occasionally come to 'haunt' me again. But more of my dreams began to revolve around the present than the past (at least that is true for the dreams that I could remember the following morning), I even had a few erotic fantasies about Jean Grey and Logan.

The year wore on. Nathan Summers arrived at X-Factor HQ, and I was assigned to instruct him in hand-to-hand combat to help him refine what he had learned from Wolverine and others while in school. The addition of Myrmidon to the team forced me to guard my thoughts better, but after a few weeks I got used to this (minor) annoyance.

At home, Hope overcame her temporary estrangement and accepted that I would not mess up Heloise's life in order to get back together with Valerie. We did things together in her free time more often, when my 'job' permitted. Once we went to Williamsburg, where she spent hours exploring the intricacies of old Colonial law and administration as well as the details and parts that made up 18th century costume.

I also traveled north on a few occasions, mostly to see Irene and what progress she was making at school. No cause to worry there, she got good grades and appeared to be popular enough with her classmates (both mutant and non-mutant). Unlike myself, and to a much greater degree than Valerie, she has a knack for getting along with people and making friends. Also, after a period of frictions in October, she and her roommate Candida (or Kansas, as Irene as taken to calling her) now get along famously with each other.

Candida currently is sweet on their schoolmate Cyrano Blaire (who evidently inherited his father Longshot's attractiveness), while Irene is in no hurry to get into a crush on someone. She is very serious about her studies and has some very definite ideas as to what she wants to make of herself when she graduates, but thankfully she also can relax and have fun in her free time. That ability to let her hair down helped her to take some of the pressure out of her rivalry (in the academic field as well as when they are training as a metapowered team) with some of her equally ambitious classmates. During one of my visits Emma Frost joked to me that it had been bad enough when she taught Husk, now she had a fresher class with two swots like her, Irene and Valeria Richards! Mr. Fantastic's daughter apparently is hard to beat in raw intelligence, but being a very versatile near-genius, she tends to get easily distracted from her tasks when something more interesting crops up, while Irene has the advantage in concentration and perseverance.

If an opportunity arose, I took advantage of these trips to see Jean. Once Logan joined in for an afternoon and a night, inadvertently making one of my recent dreams a reality, but more importantly fulfilling one of Jean's fantasies. She was like a child in a candy store, having at her disposal a mouth for each of her breasts plus four hands, two breasts, and penises enough to be applied everywhere she wanted them at the same time. While Jean was the unchallenged focus of our activities, Logan also did not do too badly; the attention of his wife and her bedmate rose to the challenge of his X-factor-supported stamina. Together Logan and I pleasured Jean until she cried enough!, then we went at each other under her eyes, playing out another fantasy scenario of hers with the aid of my metamorphic powers. Finally all three of us fell asleep in a sweaty heap.

It was something new to me. Not the first time I had sex with two partners (though the last such experience lay back a long, long time), but it was much longer and much more intense thanks to Logan's recuperative powers and to Jean's telepathy. Not that I dared to link minds with her myself, but she and Logan did, and it was a sight to behold and hear how their voices and love-making reflected the feedback from what the other was just experiencing. To top it all off, Logan and Jean switched their minds between bodies for a while so that she could have sex with me as a man. I can't decide what was eerier – the way he looked at us with undisguised lust from her naked body, or the way his mouth voiced her unmistakable speech-patterns in a strange falsetto as she drove his member deeper and deeper into me. But while it was incredibly sensual, that entire session also made me face up to the fact that I am the optional extra. In a way, I was relieved, it showed that my affair with Jean will not progress beyond the point I aimed for when it began. I am still no more able to open up my mind to her now than I was then. It made me wonder if I had consented to do that if Irene Adler or Valerie Cooper had been a mind-reader. Possibly, but then they were two remarkable women. Would I ever find a third who would become as special to me as they had been? I felt a little wistful when I flew home from the get-together, reflecting that Valerie would not be returning to me – or rather, what hurt more, that she had come back, but not for me.

Christmas 2010 we celebrate at the family home on 30th Street. Irene invited Kansas for the holidays, and Rogue brought along Magnus and Harriet, so there is quite a crowd, especially during the days, when Hope's friends and some X-Factor people visit. Today Irene and two of her friends from elementary school, Jody and Darlene Whittier, are showing Candida the sights of the city with Hope tagging along. Magneto, still not exactly a natural in his parental role, is sitting upstairs reading and keeping an eye on Harriet, Pru Cheney and Chris Summers, who are watching A Charlie Brown Christmas. And Rogue and I are in the kitchen, preparing the Christmas dinner for the family and Rogue's old teammate Pyro.

She has been rather tense ever since her arrival, but that unfortunately has been the case for quite a while now. It started when Hope slipped up and gave away that Valerie is back. She suspects I got that information from Hope and she does not like it. Will she finally talk about it today? Yuletide is notorious as the season of family quarrels. But she would have to admit that Val has returned, and she probably had to promise her that she would not do that...

But after I slide the goose into the oven I see there is a different matter at the top of her mind.

"Momma, what the hell are you playin' at with Jean Grey?" Her voice is sharp.

I don't say anything.

"Are you tryin' to break her up with Logan? That's low, lower'n a snake's belly in a wheel-rut."

I look at her quizzically, racking my brains how she could have found out about our affair. But Rogue has her own interpretation of my expression:

"Dontcha dare deny it! Ah got it from Angel, and he got it from Jean herself."

"Angel told you??"

"No, when we fought against the Mandarin last month he had to fill me in quick and let me absorb his memories."

"That's Worthington for you. Living with telepathic wives made him neglect his verbal skills." Confound it, Jean said she still talked about everything with her ex, but I didn't expect that to include me.

"Stick to the point, momma!"

I take a deep breath. "Not that it's any of your business, but yes, I'm seeing Jean from time to time. We ... fulfill certain needs together. But it's not a big deal. Logan knows and doesn't complain."

"That's 'cause Jean can do no wrong in his book," she says with blazing eyes. "But Warren told her she's riskin' her marriage."

"He may have been Jean's husband, but he never came close enough to begin to understand Logan. And in what ways a relationship with him is going to differ from one with a 'normal' person like Warren. She is just adjusting to his ways and urges, that's why Logan condones it. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time..."

Rogue just snorts.

"...if not me, she would have found someone else. They're grown-ups and should know what they are doing. They say it helps relieve the pressures of their marriage, and as far as I can tell..."

I try to explain the situation to her, but do not make any headway. In the end, Rogue storms out of the kitchen. By the time I catch up with her, she is just out of the front door. A few passers-by hurry past us.

"Listen to me," I plead.

She turns around angrily. "Well??"

"Rogue, you are entitled to think what goes on between Jean, Logan and me is wrong. Maybe you're right, at least in theory. But don't blame me just because you're Logan's ... teammate." I could have used another word. "Look, it was not a very clever idea to fall in lust with Jean Grey, but I'm not sorry it happened. It's just something that helps me feel less lonely when I'm in bed at night. Jean and I have a friendship, but we wouldn't dream of it becoming anything more serious."

She allows me to tow her back into the house, but does not raise her eyes as we return to the kitchen.

"It wouldn't have happened if Val was still alive, and if I met someone who meant as much to me as she and Irene did, I'd be content again. But Jean is not that someone." I look over the pots and pans to see if any crisis developed while we ran out, but everything is in order. "I'm sorry this upsets you, child. It would have been easier if you hadn't found out. We like to think that keeping secrets can make life easier, but sometimes we realize that that is actually not the case, that the real reason we keep something a secret is fear of embarrassment, force of habit, what have you. I'm not happy you found out about me and Jean, but on the other hand we can openly talk about that part of my life now. And of late there were many things we do not talk about."

Behind me I hear Rogue's sudden intake of breath. She knows what she has been trying to keep secret from me. Her silence allows me to continue as if I had alluded to something else.

"You know what you told me never to tell to Logan, and I won't. But suppose you had mentioned it to someone else, Harriet or Hope, for instance, and she had happened to talk about it in his earshot. How would you react?"

"Ah... don't rightly know," she says after a pause.

"I hope you wouldn't be too angry at Harriet. But maybe it would not even come to a confrontation. Maybe he would respect your wish that you would not want to acknowledge it openly, that you would not want to talk about this subject."

She catches my drift at once. "You mean he'd continue his life as if nothing had happened and would not try to put... me in a position where ah would tell him everything myself?"

I nod. "I think he'd even be able to force himself not to visit you more often than before."

"Ah guess that would be one way of muddlin' through." She sighs and looks straight at me. "But it would tear him up inside some days, wouldn't it?"

"He'd ... manage. Knowing that you'd have reasons to want what you want. Wishing you and your loved ones to be happy. Leaving it up to you if and when you want to redefine your relationship, but too savvy and pragmatic to drive himself mad waiting for that to happen."

"Ah understand," she says quietly and puts her hand on my shoulder, wordlessly expressing what we cannot directly address. Maybe she feels that she has to cut me slack now. "Seriously, though, you reckon ah should talk to Logan?"

I had not given that much thought to this actual matter, but the analogy works both ways. "Child, some things have changed since your original decision. You've been leading your own team for years, you have your own family, maybe it won't change things if you tell him what we found out..."

"Ah'll have to think a little more about it, but what you said about the force of habit may be right, momma." She paused again. "Reckon a lot is gonna depend on Harriet. You know, when she was just a baby and he held her for the first time, ah felt an urge..."

Now it is my turn to comfort her. "Just take your time, Rogue," I say putting a hand on her shoulder.

"Yeah, right," she replies with a grin, "he can wait another year or two for me to make up my mind."

And shortly after we return to preparing the meal, Irene, Hope and Candida arrive. They're more than punctual, but the weather outside is miserable and they want to relax, talk and warm before the fireplace before setting the table. Rogue and I smile when an occasional giggle drifts into the kitchen.

Half an hour later Pyro walks in and we assemble in the dining room. Magneto sits at the opposite and of the table, in Valerie's old place. Since he is surrounded by familiar faces – I seated Irene and Harriet next to him – he is at ease and even feels comfortable enough to chat charmingly with Candida. While the other five are happily chatting away at their end, Rogue, St. John and I have our own conversation on mine. We no longer fall into the habit of reminiscing about 'the good old days' of the Second Brotherhood whenever we are together. Pyro is one of Rogue's oldest friends, but they do not meet as often as they would like. She rapidly brings him up to date on the latest goings-on in Snug Valley. Afterwards, when I accompany him back to the front door, he observes how much less tension he had sensed between her and me than at the beginning of this visit, and I grin like a Cheshire cat.

The rest of the evening passes pleasantly but uneventfully. The girls spend some more time showing each other their presents and Rogue settles down in Magnus' lap to cuddle. I go to Harriet's room to tuck her in. She likes her old grandmother to read her a bedtime story, but she is beginning to think the is getting a bit old for that, so we play our little charade once again, where I ask her if I can read another chapter from The Jungle Book for her and she 'grudgingly' says yes.

***

I switched off the lamps, but there is still the light of the street lantern before our house coming in through the bedroom window. And there she stands at the far end, walks towards me and sits down on the bed beside me. What is the matter with me? It seems Irene Adler shows up in my dreams every time I lie down. Back when Valerie was alive months could go by without me dreaming of her. Not that I'm not glad to see you.

"Grüß dich, Raven, fr"hliche Weihnacht!" she says smiling kindly. "Back then you were happy and did not need me."

Oh. Because I had Val to talk to about everything? Well, Christmas always was your favorite holiday, Irene, it is only fitting you should be here tonight.

"Did you have a nice party?"

Yes, after Rogue and I had our exchange of views, everything went smoothly. Irene's classmate got to see us at our best behavior and Pyro enjoyed celebrating the holidays with Rogue and me, almost as in the old days. Of course we still don't manage to do the goose exactly as you used to, but no one complained.

Destiny smiles. She had inherited the recipe from her mother, but she also improvised some alterations to it which she took to her grave. "And the children liked their presents?"

Hope certainly was very content that I bought her fancy football shoes. I have a nasty suspicion I'll have to become a regular soccer mom next year. And Harriet loves tinkering with the car kit, she must get that from her mother.

"I'm glad you and Rogue are on better terms again..."

Yes, that turned out better than I feared. We've been keeping too many secrets from each other this year, but now we're talking again. Although she still won't talk about...

"...the return of your great love." She places her right hand on my shoulder.

Irene, I don't know what to think. I thought Valerie and I were in love with each other as you and I had been, and now she won't even talk to me. After I found out she is back in her clone-sister's mind without telling me I couldn't sleep some nights wondering how she really feels for me. Why won't she trust me? You know, there are nights when I wonder whether our relationship would have lasted had she lived...

"Maybe Valerie just does not trust herself. It could well be that she is forcing herself to stay away from you because she is afraid of what she might do to Heloise if her feelings for you overwhelm her if she sees you face to face."

That sounds almost too good to be true. But 'could be'? I really must be dreaming you. The real Destiny would have been more definite, she would have seen what will happen when Val and I will finally speak to each other again...

"No, the real Destiny didn't see it. The future is clouded, beyond a certain point the images become jumbled. There is an anomaly in the time stream that makes it impossible to foretell anything for certain..."That sounds familiar, when had Irene said something like it before? "I sense a crisis ahead, but the danger does not concern Valerie and Heloise. All I can say, Raven, is: be on your guard."

Aren't I always?

Irene Adler smiles quietly.

***

Another day, another emergency. Here I am again in the X-Factor plane en route to Savannah, Georgia. As during the two missions that came before I wonder if this is the situation of which Destiny warned me in my dream. On the other hand, maybe I already avoided that danger by being extra cautious when we ran up against the Neo or when Kansas City was threatened by Diablo and his cohorts. Or maybe old explanations are best and that Irene Adler was nothing more than a badly digested slice of cheese.

We scrambled quickly, and now Havok is briefing the task force as his wife pilots our aircraft southwards. Firestar, Pyro, Strong Guy, Myrmidon and I gather around, as he fills us in on the situation.

"Folks, the Coast Guard called us in because one of their vessels, the Sandpiper, disappeared last night under circumstances that lead them to the suspicion that metapowered foul play might be involved. She suddenly disappeared off their radar screen around 3:15 a.m. What set off alarm bells of our friends at the USCG was that the Sandpiper had just completed a routine check on a Genoshan freighter leaving port, the MV Albatross from Hammer Bay."

So of course some bright mind suspected that some big bad mutant sank their ship. But Genosha has been at peace with the rest of the world since their last revolution.

"And there's no possibility of an accident?" asks Firestar much more reasonably.

"Highly unlikely, apparently," Alex Summers replies. "They say the night was clear on the approaches to Savannah last night and there was no wind to speak of. What is a bit worrying is that at the time of the last radar contact there were three more vessels close enough to the Sandpiper that they must have seen or even heard any explosion, should one have occurred. Yet they noticed nothing out of the ordinary."

"Do you think that whatever happened could have been concealed somehow?" Pyro asks. "A powerful telepath maybe, or someone creating a fog?"

"Hopefully it will be easy to find that out when we arrive at Savannah harbor. The three ships are all there. If a mind-wipe is involved, Nathan should recognize the signs easily." I suspect Alex feels it necessary to express confidence in our newest member.

"Thre is always the possibility that the culprit or culprits actually were on one of the other ships," I remind the others. "What do we know about them?"

Alex checks his printouts. "One ship is called the Cargofeeder Condor from Galveston, the freight appears to be, you're not going to believe this, chicken feed. Well, grain to be processed as that. The others came in together, the tug Agile towing in the Citrus Trader III, which had an engine failure on her way transporting grapefruits from Pensacola to Boston."

"Savannah's coming up!" Polaris announces from the cockpit.

Havok walks forward to join her: "Could you take us on a swing across the river so we can take a look at the ships?"

As the harbor comes into sight, Pyro sits down in his position at the recce console. "What the hell? I thought you said the Citrus Trader was carrying grapefruit, Alex, look at these radioactive emissions...!"

"Hmm, if that's what the cargo really is, they'd have to put health warnings on them."

Then everything seems to happen all at once.

Firestar, who is opening the hatch in the back to fly out, shouts: "Two bogeys closing in from six o'clock!"

That's from the sea. Probably equipped with stealth technology if our radar did not detect them. But even so, shouldn't Myrmidon's telepathy...?

As Polaris quickly goes into evasive action, Havok angrily snaps: "Nate, why didn't you...?"

"I couldn't, their minds are shielded, can't get a fix on them, not even now!"

"Hang on, that's the X-Men's planes!" Pyro shouts out. And through my small window I catch a sight of one of them, recognize the familiar lines of their Blackbird.

"Cripes, the Professor is with them." Myrmidon gasps, hearing something we cannot. "Havok, they know who's behind this, it's the Shadow King!"

Not Amahl Farouk again. Will that bodiless super-psi never stop haunting my life? At least the instructions our telepath relays in rapid staccato seemingly indicate that Xavier and his merry mutants know what is going on. The X-Men task force has more telepathic 'muscle', they will take on Farouk while we deal with his agents on the Citrus Trader III. And then, as the other two planes shoot off towards the city center, our plane does a smart turn and quick descent towards the freighter, Firestar flying ahead under her own power while Myrmidon does his best to telepathically mask our presence from his seat until the opposition on the freighter sees us and warns Farouk. All in the cabin are tossed about by the rapid maneuvers.

As we come to a halt a couple of yards above the upper deck we all scramble out. Polaris blasts open the cockpit canopy and takes to the air under her own magnetic powers, after the last one of us has leapt out of the rear hatch the aircraft takes off under auto-control and goes into hover mode above the river at a distance.

Firestar is shot out of the sky by a bright purple ray, but Polaris catches her just as she is about to plunge into the Savannah River. The assailant, a big bruiser with the height of a basketball player, the width of a sumo wrestler and a bare torso covered in tattoos, is immediately caught by Havok's energy blast and hurled against an iron wall. His clean-shaven head sinks down to his chest.

But then Alex is in trouble, a woman in an orange jumpsuit gestures, and immobilizes him by solidifying the air around. Guido reacts in an instant, works up speed with a running start and runs into the crystalline glob. The collision propels Havok into his assailant, smashing her against the bulkhead behind her. With a loud groan the air is blown from her lungs. While I make sure that she's out cold, Guido and Pyro desperately join their powers to crack open the cocoon before our leader suffocates.

Pyro shouts a warning. Turning around I see a man with spidery hands ending in shiny blue-black claws that must be half a meter long leaping over the prone body of Myrmidon and rushing toward me. Luckily I already have my stun gun out to use on Miss orange pants, aiming at him and firing is the work of an instant. The first dart hits him in the chest before I am in his reach, but he is tough, I have to pump two more into him before he finally collapses. Only then do I realize I'm cut in the left forearm.

Luckily it is nothing serious. St. John quickly slaps a bandage around it, and we rush to rejoin the fight. Or the mopping-up, as it turns out. Our prisoners, metapowered and non-powered, are speedily rounded up on the quarter-deck. Lorna calls back the plane and Guido jumps inside to bring a selection of Forge's special shackles that will hopefully restrain the stronger metas, while Firestar and I watch over those who used distance powers in the fight and are still conscious with dart-guns ready.

Seeing we have everything under control, Alex walks over to Myrmidon, who had collapsed on deck soon after he touched it. "Nathan! Are you hurt?"

The young psi rises slowly, his hands pressed against his temples. "Farouk blasted me from downtown," he groans, "but now the X-Men have got to him, he's occupied..."

Nathan Summers casts a cursory glance at the captured and handcuffed crewmen of the Citrus Trader III. With barely a change of expression, he sends us a telepathic warning: "Watch out for the shifty-eyed guy near the life raft. He's a meta!"

Unfortunately the man somehow sensed that Nate had detected his secret and runs for it, the handcuffs exploding into thousands of fragments. Nate quickly erects a TK shield to protect us and the other prisoners from the hail of shrapnel. Firestar fires almost simultaneously, but her darts bounce off his skin without effect. (What did she expect? The explosion around his wrists didn't hurt him!) Polaris picks up a wrench from the deck with her magnetic powers, but then stops. It may not be such a good idea to hurl that at him. But luckily I manage to trip him up. Guido knocks him out cold with a brutal blow to his temple, and after that it proves possible to inject a sedative.

Then quiet. The men and women of X-Factor assemble, curious if we will be needed in the fight downtown as well. Our 18-year-old psi (old enough to save the world, not old enough to buy a drink) is the first to allay our worries. "It's over."

And immediately afterwards the loudspeaker in the cockpit crackles and we hear the jubilant voice of Iceman shout out: "We nailed the fucker good!"

"I can no longer sense the Shadow King's presence," Nathan adds.

I look at Polaris. "Could you take me there?" I want to make sure myself.

She agrees, after a quick exchange of glances with Alex. Given my history with the Shadow King they understand. While the others stay behind to watch the prisoners and secure the Citrus Trader's cargo until the authorities arrive to take over, Lorna picks me up and flies me across town.

"Do you think they got him this time?" she asks me. She too has suffered at Amahl Farouk's hands.

"It would be what I've wanted ever since he slipped away after we fought him on Muir Island, maybe we shouldn't be too confident." I tell that to myself as well, but my heart beats higher. Surely the combined might of the X-Men's telepathic crew would be up to defeating him and not be deceived by him into believing he didn't escape? Somehow the sun shines brighter, and the tree-lined streets and squares of old Savannah look more beautiful.

We finally arrive at Farouk's hideout in a three-storied white wooden house on Whitaker Street. I rush up the long, curving stair up to the arched front door...

There they all are. Xavier in his Shi'ar hover chair, his face gray after the fight, but smiling. I acknowledge his greeting. Psylocke talking with Husk and Muskrat, that is Paige Guthrie (or does she call herself Wilder these days?) and her brother Jed. Wolverine, Cyclops and the younger Coys guarding the captured muscle-men in the adjoining corridor. Storm and Synch looking after a confused overweight Chinaman in his early forties sitting in a green-leather upholstered chair (the former host of the Shadow King's essence). Emma Frost and ... two Icemen??

Jean Grey walks up to me.

"This time we got him properly." She shows me a telepathic image of what happened. I see how Farouk's astral form is torn from its host body and riddled from all directions by the psychic blasts and bolts of the four telepaths and the other psis, then it begins to glow and abruptly implodes and explodes, at the same time contracting into nothing and exploding in a billion fragments that rapidly scatter in all directions until they can no longer be seen. Is this really the end of him? Is there no chance that he will somehow reassemble himself or return from whatever dimension he was sent to?

"There's no such thing as 100 per cent certainty with a being like the Shadow King," she says. "But I don't see him returning anytime soon."

"He was no longer in a state to hide his presence, and we wiped out every fragment we could get a hold of," Professor Xavier elaborates. "Some tiny fragments may have been too weak too escape detection. But then they should also be too weak to survive long enough. If there was a soul in that astral body, it was ejected into the void."

"A consummation devoutly to be wished," says the White Queen with a grim smile, but Xavier is not so elated. Even if Farouk is gone for good, that won't bring back his son. Seeing Lorna's and my puzzlement over the two Bobby Drakes, Emma points first to the one on her left and then to the one on her right.

"This young man you already know, this slightly older one is, well, also my husband after returning from a future that hopefully will no longer happen now." She began the introduction with her accustomed superior smile, but now she becomes more sober with every word she utters. "In his world, something terrible happens in two years' time. Because the Shadow King escaped from a battle against X-Factor in Savannah today, he would later have fused with Apocalypse and there would have been a terrible battle in 2013, in which most of the X-Men, myself included, ... died. Bobby... traveled back in time to warn us."

Lorna Dane has quite a few questions, and while she continues the conversation with the others, the Iceman from the future takes me aside.

"This must be great for you, after what the Farouk did to you guys," he says with a jubilant smile.

"Well, I'm tempted to begin to believe what you all just told me," I say cautiously.

"And now Rogue and Maggie and Kurt won't die. Will Val be coming with the others soon? When I think of how she must feel after being his thrall and used to try to kill you."

His prattling buys me time to think of a reply. "No, unfortunately she couldn't leave her bed. She caught a bug on that mission in Benin..."

"Give her my best wishes for a speedy recovery."

"So, what are Valerie and I like in your world, Robert Drake?" I ask nonchalantly.

"Should I tell you? Well, I already interfered in the course of history, it would be silly if I suddenly became coy now..."

"Hey, what have the laws of causality ever done for us?" I reply with a wink.

"Anyway, can't really see how it could hurt to tell you. Pretty much unchanging over the years, the two of you happily married in your house in Georgetown, Irene top of her class at Xavier's..."

"Did you say married?"

"Well, yeah, still shacking together, technically. Valerie won't talk you into formally tying the knot, if that's what you're driving at. But it's more stable than a lot of marriages with elaborate ceremonies and detailed pre-nuptial agreements that I've seen."

For a moment I feel envy for my counterpart in his world. But then I catch the import of something he said earlier. "Poor Val. It must have been hell for her after Kurt and Rogue died..."

"I missed it. I was time-traveling with the Avengers and only arrived a year after the others had..." The Robert of the future clears his throat. "Anyway, they told you had just come out of your depression. I guess it must have been hard for Valerie, but you know how much she loves you. I saw you two together before I came here, your love hasn't diminished. But now that's not gonna hap- who is THAT?!"

I turn around, following his gaze, but all I see is the rest of the team coming in through the front door. "Who is who?"

His face rapidly drains of blood. "The young guy with the white streak in his hair... the one with Scott."

"Nathan, his eldest son."

"Ohmygod."

Emma Frost turns towards us. "Bobby? Is something the matter?"

His shoulders slumped dejectedly, he says: "This is not my world. It's another frigging reality..."

Emma tries to console him, takes him in her arms. The other Bobby Drake does his best to help: "Don't let it get you down, Bobster, you did good here, you'll just try again. I'm sure you'll get to the proper past with your next try."

"Or then on after that..." Our visitor from an alternate future smiles a brave, resigned smile. "But before I leave you'll have to tell me the deal with Nathan. You see, where I come from, he had to be sent into the far future when he was still a baby because we couldn't heal him after he was infected with a techno-organic virus..."

While most of the people in the room converge to gather around the two Bobbies to compare notes on the differences between our two timelines, I discreetly edge away and towards the door. I know enough about the ... other Raven and Valerie. Indeed, I walk in a daze over it. On my way out I pass Pyro, one of the few who did not join the huddle in the center. He sees my how my eyes are turning misty.

"Raven...?"

I don't have time for this. "Please, St. John, don't. Right now I. Have. To be. Alone."

He throws up his hands in mock surrender. Thank you, old friend. Maybe I'll tell you later. I walk out and sink down on the stair, hiding my face in my arms. Good thing the others are busy inside and don't see what state I'm in.

***

"Say hello to your new baby sister, Irene."

"S'all red, mommy" our two-and-three-quarter-year-old daughter observes.

"That's because I've just given birth to her," Valerie explains, "that shortly after your birth you were all purple, Reney."

Little Irene continues her scrutiny of the baby in her mother's arms. "She's only got three fingers on each hand."

"One more than Kurt," I say. "And her hair is blue, like his." Only it does not cover her entire body as it did his when Irene Adler bore him. There is just a sparse little fuzz at the top of her head.

"She got a tail?"

"No." Valerie smiles.

"Oh." Reney looks a little disappointed. "Whatcher gonna call her?"

"Well, Mama Ray and I talked about it, and we think Hope would be a nice name."

Irene gravely nods her permission and cautiously begins to stroke her baby sister's little head.

The door opens and Rogue enters our bedroom. Having heard the news of Hope's birth she just had to fly over to help welcome her to the family.

Irene is happy to see her for Rogue has not forgotten her. She pulls a little present from her pocket. Val has to tell Reney only once to say 'thank you'. She unwraps the box to find a tin boat, the kind that is propelled by water from a tube system heated by a candle. Reney wants to try it out immediately of course, and so I accompany her to the bathroom while Valerie hands over Hope to Rogue. We fill a plastic tub inside the bathtub, while the water runs in I have to read the instructions out aloud to Irene. Getting the water inside the metal tubes is a little tricky, but then after she puts the boat on the water and I light the wick, the contraption actually works. There is a soft, stuttering noise, the tin boat gathers speed, and it winds up drive counter-clockwise along the oval wall of the plastic tub to Irene's squeals of delight.

"My best friend's brother had a boat like that when I was little." Oh no, not you again. "He never let us play with it because we were girls. Luckily I got enough pocket money to buy one, eventually. But we left it behind when we left Austria. Good to see that my namesake likes it as much as I did. I wonder where Rogue found it."

She later told me she bought it during her last visit to Europe to see Kurt and his family. At the same street fair where she also bought the duck that she had brought for Hope.

"Yes, a child can never have enough furry toys."

Later that day Magnus also arrived to join us, and in the evening, when Hopey was asleep in her cot and Reney in her bed, we sat together, the four of us and just talked away. They had also brought us a presents, a pair of fancy Han Solo and Princess Leia action dolls, which Irene and Hope eventually got their hands on years later and finally broke. You know what a Star Wars fan Valerie is. Was. Maybe still is, I don't know. So, what do you want now?

"I just wanted to see how you feel after today's happenings in Savannah," she says with a note of sympathy in her voice.

I was very depressed, if you must know. Poor St. John must have got to hear more than he wanted to know about my feelings for Valerie after what that other Iceman had told me.

"What was the problem?"

Well, there were times when I tried to console myself over losing her by telling myself that things would not have worked out between Val and me if she had lived. After all, she was killed just six years after we started living together, that was not even enough for the Seven-Year Itch to kick in. And things weren't always as idyllic between us as they are today. Back then. On April 18, 1999. We had our disagreements, and she was a lot less patient than you. So I said to myself she might have left me. But now this Robert Drake appears and tells me that Val and I lived 'happily ever after' at least until the year 2014. That's nearly twenty years!

"And now your loss hurts as intensely as it did when she died in body."

And the other time, when she tried to have Xavier erase her from Heloise's mind. I hear what Mr. Drake told me of my counterpart in his world and I think: I could have had something like that.

"At least you helped save Kurt and Rogue's life."

Maybe. I'll believe it when I see it. Well, Xavier and Co. gave the Shadow King a good tanning. Would be nice if they finished him off for good, but who can tell?

"Well, since you bring it up..."

You, Irene? If I believed in ghosts, you would be the first I asked about his fate in the afterlife...

"Oh ye of little faith." She smiles mischievously. "Let me just say, Amahl Farouk made many enemies in the world of the living, and enough of them preceded him to the other side and waited for him there to make his present existence extremely ... interesting."

***

In the weeks and months that followed, I often pondered about the possible fate of the Shadow King, but my thoughts would also stray to the world of the other Iceman. Did he eventually succeed in his quest to save his wife and his friends? What little I know about time-travel does not bode well, Reed Richards postulated that time-travelers will always end up in a different time-line from the one where they started, so it should have been impossible. Still, it would be good if he succeeded, for his own sake and for that of our counterparts in his world, who would not have to deal with losing Rogue and Kurt in one day.

Richards and the other eggheads also claimed that this Iceman's visit had briefly disrupted the fabric of time and space, and as if to prove them right, we received the news a few days later that Illyana Rasputina, the young sister of Kurt and Rogue's former teammate Colossus, had popped into our world from her otherworldly Limbo that day. She had an apparent age of fifteen years, and so eventually became Irene's classmate at the school in Snow Valley in late November.

After the excitement of July 9th, the rest of the year seemed uneventful. At X-Factor HQ love was once again in the air, between our youngest member and the daughter of our government liaison. And they – that is Guido, St. John and Random – called it puppy love. Perhaps with some justification, after all Nathan Summers had graduated from Xavier's School only last year, and Maxine Pym was still preparing for her final exams when she first came to our base, tagging along with her mother, the Wasp.

Meanwhile, back at the school Irene now had become good enough friends with Valeria Richards that she and her roommate Candida were invited to her brother's wedding on Labor Day weekend. I did not go there myself, but I heard quite a bit about it from Reney and also from Kurt and Rachel Chapman, who visited our home shortly after with their families.

Like the Iceman I had met in Savannah, Rachel (or Phoenix) is a visitor from an alternative future, only unlike him she stayed in our time. Back in her future (technically it has become an alternate past by now) she had been Franklin Richards' lover, but then, after seeing him die, she went back to 1992 to join the X-Men and later Excalibur.

Originally Rachel did not like me at all, because she claimed all the badness of her world had started with the anti-mutant backlash after my attempt to assassinate Senator Robert Kelly in 1991 had succeeded in her reality. At first as a favor to Kurt and Rogue she became civil and later a little friendlier, but this was the first time she visited me at my home without there being some official reason for her to visit Washington.

On the second day of the visit, she, Mandy and I went out together to a coffee-shop while Kurt and Joe took out Errol and Kenny to the Smithsonian. Kurt joked that Joe probably would make a side-trip to the White House and take his Union Jack identity to heart by showing his son the building that "our lot" had set on fire during the War of 1812 (even though Joey really does not go in for that much flag-waving, except when England play football against Germany).

It could be said this was the first time Rachel and I bonded. With her husband away explaining old aircraft and space capsules, I felt I could ask her what it had felt like attending the wedding of her late lover and see him (or his incarnation in this world) marry someone else. Luckily she did not take offense at my indiscreet question.

"It wasn't as troubling as I feared. The first and second time I saw Franklin after I traveled back in time it was as if a knife was twisted in my heart, seeing that little boy reminded me of the moment I saw my Franklin being killed by that Sentinel." For a second her expressive face betrays how much of the pain is still there. "But I didn't get to see this Franklin all that often, even when I lived practically next door to him. And after I settled in England, it became clear he would remain a stranger to me. Besides, it would have been impossible to wait for him to grow up. For me, and a lot more for him. I couldn't tell him: It is your destiny to marry me, a woman fourteen years older than you, so you must ignore every other girl you meet before you reach the age of consent."

"Not to mention that you've become one with a very scary primal cosmic force," Amanda interjects, "which is something even the Franklin of your world did not have to deal with."

"True, I don't know how he would have reacted to me becoming the Phoenix, but I think he would not have felt challenged to show he was more powerful." Rachel giggles, "Thankfully Joey's male ego is not bruised easily."

"You've become friends with 'our' Franklin, though, haven't you? I mean, you wouldn't have been invited to the wedding otherwise?"

"Oh yes, we're friends. I didn't mean to say we're literally strangers. He just did not feel obliged to fall in love with me just because he knows my story."

"Also, Rachel is now safe," my daughter-in-law quipped. "after marrying herself. Katie did not have to worry about her pulling a Graduate at the ceremony!"

Rachel grins at Amanda's crack. "No, Katie is cool. She's known me for years, back when she still was with Power Pack. My past with Franklin was just something she never emotionally connected with the Frank she knows. They've been around each other since she went to kindergarten, and she had a crush on him since she was a teenager, but as far as I could tell, she never felt threatened by me. A little sorry, yes, before I had boyfriends, but not threatened."

"But you were prepared to wait for Valerie to grow up, when you had her body cloned, weren't you?" Amanda would have had to ask that.

"I like to think I would have, and I think in our case it would not have been too much to ask of her to wait for me, but it's a moot point now that Val is gone and Heloise leads her own life."

"How is Heloise these days?" Rachel wants to know. "Who is looking after her?"

"Well, now that Monica Rambeau and Neal Shaara got divorced, Rogue and Magnus have to take a bigger share again. She's basically moved back into Harriet's room. The two have always been very close friends, so they both are quite happy with the new arrangement. Heloise is in second grade now, in the same class as Rajinder. Doing very well, from what I hear." I wonder if Valerie is helping her with her homework. Probably more by working on her motivation than by helping her out if she can't think of an answer. "But she and I still have a tendency to stay out of each other's way."

The following year, 2012, stuck in our memories mainly for one event, the death of Charles Xavier from accelerated aging on October 17th. He was 79 years old. When he had to leave his old body because it had been infected by a Brood Queen's egg, his mind was transferred to a new, younger one cloned for him using Shi'ar medical technology. After the clone was force-aged to adulthood the aging process was slowed down, but Charles Xavier's second body still aged faster than normal, although most people did not notice that – he had always looked a little older than he was. Even I had put down the way he looked the last time I saw him to the exertions of the fight against the Shadow King.

As Professor X had been teacher and father figure to all the major mutant 'superhero' teams and the most well-known spokesman on mutant affairs, it was no surprise that a huge throng of mourners gathered for the funeral service in St. Servatius' Catholic Church in Salem Center. They all were there – X-Men, X-Factor, Meddlers, Excalibur, delegations from the Avengers, Fantastic Four, Alpha Flight and other foreign teams, as well as friends from politics, science, and the media. And myself.

Why did I come? To make my peace with Charles? Possibly, but after I had found out that Valerie still exists in Heloise's mind I no longer was that angry at him anyway. Maybe to atone for my sins by sitting through a succession of speeches and musical tributes. Well, Xavier had many close friends who wanted or were expected to talk, beginning with the silver-haired oldest surviving ones, Magneto and Moira MacTaggert, and ending with younger students like Paige Guthrie and Nathan Summers.

Magneto really was the only one who managed to hold my interest, he told some things about the beginnings of his friendship with Charles Xavier in Israel in the 1960s that I hadn't known before and he was the only one who managed to say something that was mildly critical of the deceased in his oration. As for the others... well, they gave me time to look at the church more closely.

The building is a fairly ordinary 19th-century Gothic Revival, but some of the features had obviously been carried over from previous churches on the same site. Possibly the oldest was a big painting of the patron saint in full episcopal regalia, with one Cornelis Adriaansz. Xhonneux kneeling at prayer with his wife Helene and their four daughters. To the right of it was a marble epitaph erected in the 18th century by Charles's ancestor (or was he just some great-great uncle?) Joseph Xavier to the memory of his grandfather Michiel Karelszoon Xavier, born in Roermond in 1619, died here in 1684. His first wife, Saskia Cornelia, had also been born in the old country, in Maastricht; she had died in childbed in 1663 aged 32, and was buried along with her stillborn youngest child. Michiel Xavier's second wife, Isabella, had already been born in America. To the left side of the painting a plaque commemorated the members of the parish who had died during the American Civil War serving in the 17th New York Volunteers (Westchester Chasseurs). Two Xaviers were listed here, both died in 1862, Simon Bolivar Xavier in action at White Oak Swamp and Henry Xavier in a military hospital near Washington.

Storm gives the final speech, since Charles Xavier's widow, Lilandra Neramani, was prevented from being there due to a crisis on the outer rims of her Shi'ar Empire. Ororo Munroe and Scott Summers will shoulder the task of continuing the Professor's work from the helm of the school and the new Charles Francis Xavier Foundation. Then the mourners went out into the churchyard for the final ceremony. Charles Xavier's coffin was lowered into a new grave beside that of his father, Brian. In his opening words to the rites the priest saw fit to remind those attending that the tradition of Charles's family in this parish went back all the way to its founding. Then it was 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust', and we all filed past to pay our last respects.

Standing before his grave I had to wonder how we would come to look on him in the future. Considering some of the eulogies I have just let wash over me, it is almost surprising that it had not been announced that hencforth the school would be known as Saint Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. True, it seems that life for mutants is safer these days than it was ten or fifteen years ago, but how much closer has the world come to the fulfillment of his dream due to his actions and how much in spite of his secretive ways?

I met Rogue on the way out – she was quite overcome by the occasion, but then Charles Xavier had been such an important influence on her life, and for a short time even a kind of father figure who had eased her way into the at first hostile environment in her new team. Charles had disappointed her in some respects, especially when it came to helping her deal with her powers (she eventually attained that goal with the help of Magneto and Emma Frost), and she had had her disagreements with him as to the best way of making his dream a reality, but there is no denying of how she took his principles of peaceful coexistence and giving people another chance to heart in the way she runs her life and leads her team, the Meddlers.

"He refused to have his body cloned again," she told me as we reached the churchyard gate, where Everett Thomas and Cordelia Frost were getting into her mother's Rolls Royce. "Do ya reckon it was because of Heloise?"

"I don't know. On the other hand, he could easily have thought of Madelyne Pryor. He must have thought a bit about her after he learned that she was a clone. Scott was like a son to him, so he saw her often enough and could judge the differences between her personality and Jean's."

The mention of Jean provided Rogue with a welcome opening for a question, but I could set her mind at rest on that account. "We decided to end it. She and Logan got what troubled them out of their system and are now giving marital fidelity another shot. And I'm actually not sad that we're now just friends. Maybe it was something that simply could not have continued that way in any case." What I didn't mention was that after speaking to 'the other Robert Drake' I no longer felt satisfied with it. Surely life would have more to offer me than such an affair? Maybe I should start putting more effort into looking for someone else?

But then Magneto joined us, having had a word or two with Cyclops and Storm, and we decided to walk to the Mansion. Since Rogue had already mentioned Heloise, they told me a little about how she and Harriet were doing in West Virginia, and about their family outing to the Blue Area of the Moon a month earlier to attend the wedding of Magnus's granddaughter Luna. Which despite the efforts of Maximus to the contrary went off without a hitch.

"The most excitin' part for the girls was bein' teleported there and back by Lockjaw. They think he's just the cutest li'l dog, so watchin' an Inhuman royal weddin' was almost anti-climactic to Harriet and Heloise. They had more fun tryin' out their skateboards in Lunar gravity. But it was fun, Erbyk seems a nice kinda grandson-in-law for Magnus, and Pietro even managed to get along with his daddy for our entire stay."

Magneto did not add much to Rogue's account of the festivities in Attilan or elaborate on his still at times strained relationship to his two older children and their families. But then, that is not something about which he has to explain to me. Compared to my problems with Graydon, he has it easy with Wanda and Pietro! Besides, as long as I have known him, Magnus never volunteered much information about his inner feelings to me, which was why so many of his reminiscences of his friendship with Charles Xavier in the church had been news to me. I complimented him on his speech, but he soon changed the subject, and I did not try to return him to it.

The reception at the Mansion was a fairly informal affair, there were so many people there that it had been decided to have a standing buffet instead of a full dinner. Xi'an Coy Manh, one of the new members of the staff of the Xavier Institute opened the door for us. Magnus and Rogue remembered her well from her time in Charles Xavier's third class of students, the so-called New Mutants, and I had of course kept my files on her. Now in her late thirties the former Karma has almost entirely lost the angularity that typified her body and movements back in those days. Also there to welcome the guests was Sean Cassidy, the senior headmaster.

At the buffet we met Wolfsbane, and, as often happens when friends meet after a longer time apart, she and Magneto came to talk about the family matters of their respective teams, Rahne Guthrie bringing us up to date on the doings of her daughter Moira and son Jesse as well as the rest of the Excalibur brood, while Magnus told her about the underage contingent of the Meddlers' base in Snug Valley. At one point he talked about Heloise, and there my ears pricked up.

"It really is astonishing how much like Valerie she can be at times – unfortunately some of us grown-ups remark on it a little too often, so that she's really becoming tired of hearing it – while at others she's just Heloise." I was looking in another direction at that moment, but I did not have to turn her way to sense how Rogue tensed. It was quite obvious from Magneto's reaction. Don't mention Valerie and Heloise in one sentence when Raven is around. It can be as bad as the Fawlty Towers episode with the Germans.

But I guessed then that life probably was not that easy for Heloise. Not only is she Valerie's genetical twin, she also constantly lives with her inside her head (and Val never was one for keeping silent when she thought you were wrong). It would only be natural that even without meaning to Val exerted an almost imperceptible influence on her behavior, and that would lead to people discovering even more similarities between the two. If they had asked me, I would have tried to help, but as things were, I was the last person they would have asked. But maybe Heloise and Val got along as well with each other as Hope claimed, and help simply wasn't needed?

The following February, we all were involved in a big battle against Apocalypse. The Iceman from the future had told us that Amahl Farouk had merged with him in his reality, so there was a high probability that he was still around in ours and up to something. So the X-groups intensified our search for signs of his activities, and in the end succeeded in detecting his latest lair in the Mato Grosso and paying him a surprise call before he could set in motion his first strike. Quite a clean little operation, even if I say so myself.

After that we all breathed a lot easier, still in the run-up to September 2nd I think a lot of us still wrestled with irrational forebodings and were secretly relieved when that day passed without incident. I spent much of it sitting by myself, listening to Valerie's favorite Pet Sounds and looking at photographs and family videos. I like to think I'm a cool customer, but my hands trembled a little when I opened the first photo album with the pictures from when Irene Adler and I lived in Missisippi and began to raise a young girl who liked to be called Rogue.

2013 was also the year when Hope transferred to Xavier's School, so I flew to Massachusetts with her and Irene for the ceremony at the beginning of the new term. Irene was welcomed enthusiastically by her classmates, with hugs from Candida and Ruth Summers. Hope, being a fresher, was a little insecure at first, but that soon passed. It helped that one of the first people we met in Snow Valley was Errol Wagner, who surprised his fellow sophomore Lynn Judd (an Alpha Flight brat, as she called herself) by jocularly greeting Hope as 'Aunt Hopey'. My youngest daughter was not exactly happy that Errol teased her about their curious familial relationship on her first day in the unfamiliar new school, and soon they were in a little scuffle, in which she acquitted herself quite well, even though she is a year younger than my grandson. And somehow that 'mad' helped her confidence no end that day.

The keynote speech was held by Sean Cassidy that year (somewhere behind me I heard a parent whisper disappointedly: "That's not James Bond at all!"), then Emma Frost took charge of the business part once again. And – doesn't time fly? – she had become a grandmother as well, Cordelia giving birth to a son, Oliver, and marrying the father, Everett Thomas, earlier that year. With Cordelia still on maternity leave, Ms. Tamzarian was put in charge of Hope's class, which also has George Braddock, among its number. I got to speak a little to his parents, Captain Britain and Meggan, who had come along with Amanda while Kurt minded the Excalibur 'store' in Britain.

All in all we felt pretty good about ourselves in 2013, but when the new year began we were harshly reminded that even though we had managed to take the Shadow King and Apocalypse off the board it was still a deadly game out there. On January 29 Angel was killed in a fight between the X-Men and the Upstarts, a group of super-powered and super-wealthy layabouts who really had never been more than an assortment of second-stringers. Had some of us become over-confident? The death in action of one of the original five came as a great shock to a lot of people in the X-teams, even Alex and Lorna, who had not actually worked that much with him back in their X-Men days, were very downcast and hardly spoke for weeks. That Warren Worthington's killer, Trevor Fitzroy, only survived him by a matter of seconds was cold comfort. Indeed it only made Bishop more angry at himself for not being quick enough.

So not much more than a year had passed since the death of their mentor, and the X-Men had to bury another one of their own. I did not go to the funeral as I hadn't known Warren Worthington III all that well (he had been one of those on the team who kept their distance even after I joined X-Factor and became a good little superheroine), and besides someone had to be on stand-by in case of an emergency. So I watched it on television. Saw Warren's ex-wife Jean Grey doing her best to comfort his widow as they walked out of Centerport's Episcopal Church with their children. I had half-expected Trish Tilby to do the commentary, but of course she was to close to the deceased and the bereaved for that (her second daughter Debbie McCoy is after all one of Warren's and Elizabeth's goddaughters). However, she read out the X-Men's media statement and fielded the questions put to her by Channel 9's Shanna Cho.

All the X-teams and the students at Xavier's School and at the Xavier Institute lived in the shadow of the Angel's death in the months that followed, but life had to go on. And so here I am again in the Academy compound in Snow Valley to see Irene graduate with honors. Xi'an came up from Westchester to meet me. These past few months we have seen a lot of each other and I am beginning to wonder if this is evolving into something serious. At least it is a relationship that does not arouse misgivings among members of my family or that has to be kept secret from the world for appearance's sake. Rogue is of course all for it. Xi'an Coy Manh, the former New Mutant code-named Karma and elder sister to Chakra and Dakini of the X-Men, entered my life around the end of last year. Having broken up with her former life-partner Chance in 2012, she was amenable to my first approach. But so far we take things slowly, one date or tryst at a time.

Xavier's School combines the graduation ceremony with that for the opening of the term, so Hope is here, now a lot more confident than she was a year ago. Of course it helps that she has become the star flanker of the Xavier's school junior soccer team and is also doing very well on the track. And Cordelia Frost's new fresher class is huge, as is the contingent of parents and other relatives. Michael Madrox and his parents traveled here with us, and now we see quite a few other old acquaintances. Piotr Rasputin, the former Colossus has brought his younger son Volodya, both are long familiar to Hope and Irene from their vacations with Rogue and Magneto in the Savage Land. However, Volodya is not the biggest student of his class, Holling Wingfoot, the son of the She-Hulk, overshadows him by a centimeter or so.

Two of Rogue's inactive Meddler teammates are also there for the occasion, Hammonia with her daughter Astrid Voss, and Gambit with his wife Belle and their son Jean-Baptiste. Although they have returned to New Orleans in 2010 after his Jean-Luc LeBeau was killed, Gambit still feels out of place in the Thieves' Guild and apparently does not want his son to be forced into the Family business as he had been by his father.

The active X-Men are represented by the McCoys who came to see off their eldest daughter Josephine McCoy, who looks resplendent in her golden-orange fur, a little like a tiger without the black stripes, but with a figure that shows hints of curves to come. Trish remarks: "I was straight and flat as a board at her age. Effie's a lot more like my sister in that respect."

Hank and Trish's younger children came along for the ride, both furry like their father, but of different colors and a shade darker than when I last saw them: twelve-year-old Debbie is now a kind of olive green that you get in some Chianti bottles, and nine-year-old Benjamin a darkish crimson. Also with them is Effie's classmate Bronwen Worthington and her mother, Elizabeth, both still wearing black. At fourteen she is already quite the regal beauty, which is hardly surprising considering that her parents were considered the most beautiful members of the X-Men for a long time by many. Her face is framed by long, wavy hair that today is a rich shade of plum, while the feathers of her wings are of a slightly lighter tone.

Inside the hall the stage is now decorated with a bronze bust of Charles Xavier, a work by Alicia Masters, but not one of her better ones, I fear. For some reason he looks as if he is about to sneeze. Scott Summers opens the assembly and has everybody rise for a minute of silence for Warren Worthington III, then he begins his speech as the current acting head of the Xavier Institute and School.

A large segment of the ceremonies is taken up with honoring Sean Cassidy and giving him a stylish send-off to retirement. Old Moira MacTaggert came out of her lair in Scotland for the event and is of course also feted as the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist she is. In the end they have to deviate from the schedule, she and Hank McCoy get up on stage together to acknowledge the applause of the auditorium, for how often do you get to see both victors over the Legacy virus in one place these days?

But in the end this is Irene's day, at least as far as our family is concerned. It is a happy moment, but also an eerie one when Irene walks forward to receive her diploma. This is the first time that I get to see a child of mine graduate from high school. In the case of Graydon and Kurt you could say my lifestyle played merry hell with our relationships, and Rogue bolted her high school early to go out adventuring with me in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Now I'm sitting quiet as you please with the other parents, beaming with pride over Irene's grades and that little metal badge hanging from her mortarboard. How conformist I behave. Val would love the irony! It breaks my heart that she isn't here to sit next to me and Hope. We'll have to think of an excuse for Irene to go on a trip to West Virginia so she can visit Heloise and Valerie.

Continuing on the theme of Domesticated Raven, we go outside together for photographs. The Class of '14 assembles for a big group photograph, then the several families arrange smaller groups for their private photos. Irene poses with Ruth Summers for Scott and Madelyne. With Illyana, Volodya and Nereel for Peter Rasputin who takes tons of reference photographs for future paintings. With Hope and me for us so we'll have glossies to send to all the family.

I get called in to stand behind Irene and Valeria Richards along with Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman. Doctor Doom did not make an appearance at the graduation ceremony, but I hear he has already announced – or should that be threatened? – that he shall come to see her when she starts at State University. They should love that there, considering the circumstances under which Victor von Doom was expelled all those years ago.

Finally Irene poses with Candida Mayhew, both alone and surrounded by the parents and the little sister. Reney and Kansas became close friends in their fresher year and that is how they remained. Mr. and Mrs. Mayhew, a teacher and an accountant, have been surprisingly good about their daughter's roommate's activities (somehow, metapowered students at Xavier's always seem to end up fighting super-powered villains), even if you might not expect it if you believed the stereotypes about their professions. But now they'll be separated, at least for a time, as Candida has chosen to accept the scholarship she has been offered at Stanford, while Irene at first intends to combine her academic studies with honing the use of her powers at the Mansion in Westchester with the main X-Men team.

***

I love the time before dawn. The noise of civilization at last falls silent (or what passes for silence in this city) and for a fleeting few minutes all is peace. Moments like this help me to collect myself for the hustle and bustle of the next day. Not that I dislike Washington for its incessant activity, I would probably go crazy if I had to live in the country for long. Even when Destiny and I lived in the sticks with Rogue, we at least had the ships sailing up and down the Mississippi to provide a modicum of activity.

I like to savor this special time and the songbirds' dawn chorus, before the first commuters set out for their day's work. I am glad that woke up early enough today. Beside me, Valerie is fast asleep. She is usually the one who wakes up later; I don't need as much sleep. Today is no exception, and resting my head on my arm I watch her lying on her side, breathing regularly, her left hand on her pillow. It never fails to startle me at least a little when I remember to remember that just a few years ago she would not have found it so easy to lie in bed asleep in the same room with me, and if she had managed to fall asleep her face would not have borne such a peaceful, content expression, even though she did not know everything there was to know about me...

A gentle, familiar voice behind me recites:

"'And little she knew the arms that embraced

Had cloven a man from the brow to the waist'."

Joke all you want, Irene. And anyway, it doesn't describe how things were between Val and me at any point of our relationship.

"But you still think of her as the woman

'With hair like the sunshine and heart of gold,'

even if she wasn't quite 'a damsel of delicate mould,' don't you?"

She knew who I was and loved me in spite of what I had done in the past. And I never thought of her as an innocent saint or an innocent fool. We both were aware of the consequences of some of her actions. And while I maybe angry at her for... leaving me...

"...you won't let her go." She bows down to me and places her warm, slender hand on the crown of my head. "My poor Raven. You're too much like the women you loved in that respect, always finding ways of making life more difficult for yourself. Valerie probably would tell you you would have a much easier life if you could just let go of her."

Not just probably. She tried to encourage me to find someone else when she still lived in Rogue's mind. Just like you tried to set me up with Forge just before you let yourself be killed.

"You're still angry with me for that. Even after all that happened afterwards."

Well, a little. Don't think I'm not grateful for giving your life for me. Or that I'd want to undo everything that happened after that. My heart does not give a toss about logic. No more than yours or Valerie's would. I did not let go of you then. Probably still don't do so now, or else you would not keep pestering me in my dreams. But Valerie knew that and accepted it. Or was willing to face and deal with it. And I'm not going to bloody let go of her easily either. I just can't do it, even though I know it would be the sensible thing to do and though she still has not seen fit to talk to me.

"You haven't tried to talk to her either, have you?"

I can't, because of Heloise. There my super-ego is adamant. I have to respect her interests. Maybe Val no longer loves me now, maybe she still does but refuses to admit it out of consideration for Heloise or some misguided feeling that by pretending to be dead she will make things easier for me to fall in love with someone else. But if I did anything that gave so much as a hint of the appearance I was trying to hurt her clone-sister or try to push her into a course of action she does not want to go, then she'll definitely hate me and I'll lose her forever.

"I wonder if things would be easier for you if Valerie spoke with you or if you'd then find other ways of making your life a misery. But who am I to criticize you? The heart has its own reasons, as I can attest. I tried to be sensible when we flew to Muir Island, but I cannot pretend that I'm unhappy that you don't forget me. And maybe Val is secretly glad that you continue to love her, even if she won't admit it. At least I can think of no good reason why she should have stopped loving you."

***

That was three years ago. Now it is Hope's turn to graduate and I am once again flying north for the ceremony. Traveling with Alex and Lorna Summers, in fact, who have brought Christopher, Jr., to his first day at Xavier's. As our Hogwarts Express we used a Van Dyne jet provided by Nate and Max Summers, who dropped us off at Logan Airport and now travel on to New Jersey to visit Maxine's parents. But there is also another reason why I looked forward to today, for I will also get to see Heloise, who is transferring to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, where the staff is better equipped to deal with her special condition. I suspect that this condition is partially the reason why she skipped a class and will start out with Harriet among the sophomores.

We were picked up at the airport by one of Emma Frost's imposing limousines. It was a longish ride, but as the day is sunny I am not complaining. Much. Or at least not as much as Christopher 'Are we there yet?' Summers. But eventually the car drives through the front gate, up the driveway and stops before the main building. We get out and disperse on our separate ways.

The first familiar face I see is that of Irene who came over to see her younger sister. The presence of the X-Woman known as Overdrive has not gone unnoticed, and when I first catch sight of her she is signing her autograph into a student's yearbook. She hands it back and rushes over to meet me. "Mama, you look great!"

"Don't I always, dear? So, how are things in Salem Center?"

Irene has much to tell, her account is interrupted when Xi'an shows up and greets me with a kiss on the lips. I'm still not quite used to her public displays of affection and my daughter grins at the slightly awkward beginning to my response. But I'm glad that Xi'an came to meet me even though she knew I will be paying a visit to her home in New York after all this is over. Or did she come here because she knows that Jean Grey is here also to see her daughter Mary? But then she is dragged away by one of the new students, Maggie Cloudstar, who wants her to see her parents, Xi'an's former New Mutants teammate Moonstar and popular Country singer Josh Guthrie.

Irene has other things on her mind. "I hope it'll be quieter than last year," she says with a grim smile. Last year a group of intellectually challenged mutiphobes in battlesuits calling themselves the Extinguishers launched an attack on the commencement day ceremonies with a few souped-up Sentinels they had acquired from old Shaw Industries stocks. They had not taken into account how efficient the School and the X-Men had become at organizing the security at such events in very unobtrusive ways and in the hiding of reserves in unexpected nearby locations. Spoiling the first day at the Academy of the daughter of Magneto and Rogue definitely was an idea their leader, one U. S. Fitzmaurice lived to regret when Harriet's enraged parents caught up with him.

Irene tells me a little about the precautions taken for today, and then Rogue stands before us. As she and I embrace and she thinks I won't notice, she shoots a significant glance to her sister, who then announces she is going to seek out Hope and see if there is anything that she needs. Hmm.

Rogue and I walk out onto the lawn and sit down beneath one of the old oak trees (she always had a thing for trees). In the distance Harriet and Heloise can be seen talking to some other youngsters, presumably classmates. Heloise is wearing pants, a semi-formal shirt and a baseball cap, Harriet a leotard that covers her entire body, very much like her mother had to when she was a teenager. "I thought Harriet was making progress in learning to control her power?"

"Oh, she is. When ah think of myself at her age...! But it still comes hard, it's not easy for her to maintain control for longer'n four, five minutes at a time. We reckoned that since she's goin' into a hall crowded with strangers today, it'd be safer this way."

It develops into a pretty innocuous conversation. I had wondered if Rogue had an ulterior motive why she wanted to be with me alone, but apparently she just wants to have me for herself for a little while, for a little mother-to-grandmother talk about bringing up Harriet, among other things. It is still a while before the assembly is set to begin, so we are quite relaxed and I don't even mind when the subject of my relationship to Xi'an pops up again. And why not? It is still a little sporadic with her living in New York and me in Washington and only intermittent meetings, but these past two years we have become permanent fixtures in each other's lives.

A few minutes later Irene and Hope show up, with Taryn Ashcroft in tow, and there is another rounds of hugs. Hope is very upbeat about everything and talks about what she intends to do when she starts going to the Xavier Institute in Salem Center. "I think I'll concentrate on studying," she says, "one X-Man in the family is enough."

I also exchange a few pleasantries. The strawberry blonde telekinetic joined the school a year ago to become first Hope's classmate and then her girlfriend. She too will go to the Xavier Institute in the upcoming term. But she does not stay long, as she sees her father's car driving through the gate and she rushes off to meet her parents. Hope meanwhile walks off to join Harriet and Heloise.

Once they are out of earshot, I cannot help remarking: "I don't know about that one. Something rubs me the wrong way."

"Taryn seems nice enough to me," says Irene, loyal to her little sister to a fault.

"She seemed a little shifty to me." Perhaps she reminds me a little of myself at her age? "Didn't look me in the eye."

"Well, your eyes are a bit disconcertin' to look at, momma. Could've been 'cause of that."

"Yes. Maybe it's nothing. Just me worrying if someone's good enough for my child. Why are you laughing, Rogue?"

"Just thinkin' of how ah worried before ah introduced Magnus to you and told you we'd become an item. At least Kurt didn't have that problem, he already was married to Amanda in all but name when he finally found out you're his mom!"

In the distance Hope and Heloise are hugging. But that is not how a girl would embrace a younger relative, Hope's body language is different, as is that of the girl with her. What I see is a proud mother congratulating her daughter on her graduation day. Right now it is Valerie who is in charge of Heloise's body. I glance sideways at Rogue and Irene, they see it too. Rogue catches my look; she moves up behind me and puts her hand on my shoulder. "You okay, momma?"

"Why shouldn't I be?"

"Aren't you angry at us?" says Irene.

Because you tried to keep the knowledge that Val had returned from me? "Oh dear no. It's old history. Your sister and I already have talked about the matter, haven't we, Rogue?" It feels good to lean back against her. "I may have had misgivings in the past, but on reflection it was probably better this way. But maybe now it's finally time to take it out into the open. Maybe now that I'm getting involved with Xi'an she no longer has to worry because of me. And it is good she is here for Hope's graduation. I was bit sorry when she couldn't come to yours, Reney."

But then something unexpected happens. Coming out of her group hug, Hope starts, then picks the blue cap off Heloise's head. Which is shaven entirely bald.

"What the--?" Irene is as surprised as Hope and I.

Rogue already knew, though. "Yes, last Thursday she suddenly up an' shaved her head. Ah reckon she did it cause it's something Val would never do."

"It's a bit disconcerting, but I guess it is as good a way as any of asserting who you are." It certainly makes it impossible to overlook that she does not have a scar on her scalp at the place where Valerie had one after the Shadow King sent her out to shoot me. "Are there problems?"

"It's not always easy, but she manages. And if difficulties should arise, Emma should be the best person to find out and deal with them." Rogue has been supremely confident in Ms. Frost ever since she helped her to learn to control her absorption power.

Then the bell for the assembly sounds and the people still standing and sitting all over the Academy grounds get up and begin to converge on the hall.

"You know, bald actually looks kinda good on her," Irene ventures as Heloise, Hope and Harriet come nearer to us on their way.

I take a closer look. "Yes, you're right. She has a good kind of head for that style." It actually looks quite nice with the slight stubble.

"Maybe you should tell her," says Rogue.

"I think that's exactly what I'm going to do. But I'll wait until after the ceremony, when I can be sure she's herself again."

The Trouble With Love Beyond the Grave