"Now is the winter of our discontent."

Richard III, Act I, Scene I

Storm's holiday present to the citizens of Bayville was going to be a surprise snowfall. The skies had been relatively clear for the last week, but that was all part of the plan. Before leaving for her sister's house, Storm had confided to Rogue that, at midnight, she was going to pull down a massive cold front that would bury most of the tri-state area in a picture-perfect white Christmas.

But snow or not, it was New York in the depths of winter, and it was cold. Rogue stood at the front doors and shivered. The cold came right through the insulated glass, and her sweater, and her skin and muscles, cutting at her bones. She was at heart a Southern girl (nevermind that it also snowed in Mississippi), and these crazy Yankee winters were too much sometimes. She didn't know how Jean managed to run from the garage to the front doors without either a jacket or gloves on.

Rogue opened the door for her teammate and shivered harder in the sudden gust of increased cold. Jean blew in with pinked skin and some shivers of her own. The door slammed shut behind her without Rogue's help; telekinesis at work.

"I tried to call everyone but I can't find them," Rogue said before the other girl could say anything. She crossed her arms over her chest and tried not to shiver anymore. "No one's pickin' up at the Daniels', Beast didn't leave a number, and I have no idea where the professor went."

"He didn't tell you?" Jean asked, visibly startled, and with good reason. The professor was a stickler for that kind of thing, especially when there were only two other people in the Institute. And eventually, after Storm had departed, one.

Rogue shrugged; a gesture of one-shouldered eloquence that described perfectly how difficult it was to remember things you heard when you were half-asleep. "He did. I wasn't paying attention."

Jean, rubbing her hands together, threw her an exasperated look. "That's helpful."

"Hey," Rogue snapped, immediately defensive. She pulled tighter into herself. "I didn't know it would turn out to be so important."

"I'm sorry," Jean said, wincing. "I'm just - We need help on this."

"I'm not disagreein'." She hated to admit that she was at a loss in this situation - with Scott missing and herself as the person responsible for bringing Jean into it, she wanted to have all the answers, wanted to find Scott on her own - but there it was. She was out of ideas, stuck spinning in circles, and she needed more input. "But we ain't got it, so what are we gonna do?"

Jean took a deep breath. "I hate making decisions. Okay. I'm going down to Cerebro to look for Scott. You get on the computers elsewhere in the house and see if you can find where the professor went."

Rogue thought about it, and agreed. She nodded and went off to the nearest terminal while Jean shed her duffel bag in the foyer and took herself down into the guts of the Institute. The search itself was short; Rogue found the information in the first minute. Professor Xavier had received a call from Haifa, Israel at four in the morning, had gotten onto a commercial flight at five, and that was that.

She wondered, briefly, why a call from someone halfway around the world could get the professor to leave so abruptly on Christmas Eve, but then figured it was none of her business. Instead of looking into it further she headed downstairs to see what Jean had discovered.

The door to the Cerebro room opened as she approached, revealing a tired and frustrated Jean sitting on the flat, perpetually chilled metal panels of the long walkway's terminus. The interface helmet was on her head, but the machine was offline.

"The prof's in Israel," Rogue said, walking in cautiously. Her hopes for easily finding Scott flared and then dimmed as she realized all the possible connotations of Jean's defeated expression. "Did you find him?"

"No," Jean said. She ran a hand through the ends of her hair. "I looked. He's not anywhere."

"Cerebro has a limited range," Rogue pointed out.

"Not for me." She rose and carefully replaced the helmet on the console, then brushed off her hands. "With Cerebro amplifying my powers I can 'see' most of the world. And Scott - we have a connection. I should be able to find him no matter where he is."

Rogue tried not to let her surprise show. So the Mexico City thing hadn't been a lucky fluke. Cerebro could pick up on mutant manifestations all over the globe, but that was its most rudimentary function. Using it to search for specific individuals, the professor could push Cerebro to about five thousand miles, maximum. That Jean could take it well beyond was somehow... unsettling.

Almost as unsettling as the rest of Jean's revelation. "What are you sayin'? That he's..."

"No," she said again, much more forcefully. "Scott is alive. We're going to find him. I just... I don't know how. Yet."

A silence fell over the room - a dead silence, leaden and gray, crushing them both under the impossibility of their strange, terrible circumstances. Jean and Rogue had never worked well together under the best of conditions, and these were quite possibly the worse. Rogue could see the other girl trying to think of a plan and failing.

That's because Scott does the planning, she thought, carefully holding it to herself in the presence of a telepath. All she can do is use him.

"You talked to Alex?" Jean asked suddenly, breaking her out of her thoughts.

"Huh? Oh. Yeah, I did. Not for too long, but long enough to get a feel for what happened out there." Rogue had a flash of insight. "Maybe he saw somethin' and I didn't hear about it."

"Maybe." Jean, already biting her lip, fidgeted with her hair again - all that long, lustrous, red hair that Rogue and Kitty had once, in a rare moment of roommate solidarity, plotted to cut off while she was asleep. In Kitty's case, just so she could take showers without having to pull red hair clogs out of the drains; in Rogue's case, just to put a dent in Jean's overdeveloped ego.

"Even if he did, we couldn't really do anything more from here, and there's no way we can get a flight to Honolulu now," Rogue pointed out, deflating her own idea. For a moment she was caught in a surge of depression and general bleakness.

But it had the opposite effect on Jean. She jerked her head up as though someone had electrified her. "Did anyone take the Blackbird?"

Rogue eyed her with a mixture of wariness and outright suspicion. "No. Don't tell me you can fly it."

Scott was the designated pilot, usually doing the flying even when the professor, Beast, Storm or Wolverine were available. Rogue had never seen Jean so much as touch the controls.

Jean gave her a half-smile, at once rueful and sharp-edged. "I've been here since I was twelve. Do you really think the only thing I learned was how to be obnoxiously popular?"

There was no good reply to that so Rogue made none.

"Come on," Jean said, brushing past her on the narrow walkway, heading for the door. "And grab your uniform, too."