Part One: See the shine in the black sheep boy.

It looked different than it had.

This was Scott's first, dull thought when he walked through the school's service entrance--the door with the security code least likely to have been changed in his absence--into the larder. In the dead dark of night, without the red warmth of his glasses, it looked foreign and unlike any place he'd ever called home. Even his hand on the keypad looked different, harder and rougher than it was before, red and chapped, one nail gone and another blackened from frostbite. They'd thought he might lose the finger. In the end, he'd been stubborn and kept it, though he'd lost most feeling in it and couldn't bend it so well.

Scott stopped there, inside the mansion, but just barely. He leaned back against the door, still feeling the outside air. It was cold that night, though not the bitter cold he'd become accustomed to; and it felt good against his back. The warmth inside was overpowering.

There was a light on in the kitchen. Scott saw the glow from around the swinging door. Squinting at the shine in the dark, he made up his mind for the last time. He put his changed hand on it, palm flat, and pushed. The door opened quietly, without protest, and swung shut behind him with a soft wooshing of air. The light he'd seen came from the hanging lamp over the oven, though one of the Viking's glass burners gave off its own powerful glow. The kettle began to whistle just as Scott stepped into the room, and Ororo switched the gas off without turning around.

"Back so early?" She poured steaming water into a big, heavy mug. "You didn't get into another fight, did you, Logan? That bar is going to start sending the bills to the school."

Scott watched her and said nothing. The first time he'd met her, another teenage runaway the Professor took off the street, she'd had hair, thick and pale, down to her waist. As long as Scott had known her, she'd been cutting it shorter and shorter. First a bit up her back and then to her shoulders. Bobbed just below her ears and then inches shorter, still. Now, it was closely cropped to her skull, multi-layered and disheveled. Deliberately messy, he was sure. Ororo always looked just as she meant to.

She dropped a metal straining spoon into the mug. It clinked against the sides, loud in the quiet of the kitchen. She picked the mug up, stirring the spoon with the other hand, and turned. She was smiling warmly, though she was expecting Logan. Scott saw how that had changed, too. Saw the place Logan had taken at the school and wondered how the man had changed so much that it was possible.

Ororo smiled when she turned, but the smile wasn't lasting. It fell at the same time that the mug dropped out of her hand, hitting the floor with a loud thud. It bounced once and then twice, spraying hot tea on the floor, the stove, Ororo's legs; but it didn't break. Her mouth opened and closed and opened again. Her eyes were wide, as though seeing an unspeakable horror.

"Scott?" she whispered.

He nodded and said, "Yes." His voice was harsh and rasping from long months of breathing salt spray and cigarette smoke, from shouting over the crashing din of the waves. It sounded foreign in the quiet of the kitchen.

"You're here."

"Here I am," he agreed.

"But you're dead. We thought you were dead."

Scott looked down at the ground, at his scuffed boots and dirty jeans, at his new, hard hands. He looked up again in time to see tears making their first tracks down her cheeks. He looked at Ororo, looked at the tears and the hair and the tea. He saw who she had been and who she was now. Scott looked at Ororo and answered, "I thought I was, too."

Ororo rushed at him, then, bringing with her a wavering uncertainty; and, for a moment Scott's hand twitched to pull at the glasses he no longer wore, no longer needed. But then Ororo was across the floor, lunging at him, throwing her arms around him. She was hugging him, and that last wiggling worm of doubt was gone. He didn't hesitate to wrap his arms around her, too, his strange, rough hands in loose fists behind her shoulders. Ororo was crying, gasping, babbling. He hugged her tightly and began to listen.

"Oh, god, Scott. Oh, god. There's a grave. There's so many. There's one for you. How could I do that? How could I give you a grave? How could you let me do that? Where have you been? Where have you been?" Ororo's voice broke. She grasped him closely to herself, as though the harder she held him, the more there he would be.

As though he might disappear, without a trace, if she let go.

"West." He spoke quietly, turning his face into her coarse, silver hair. "I've been west."