Doctor Henry Philip McCoy was an impressive man.

Friends and strangers alike were daunted by the breadth of his vocabulary and his shoulders in nearly equal measure - a defensive linebacker caught in a lab coat. At first glance he didn't seem tall, but that may have owed to his perpetual slouch; when he stood up straight, he had to duck to clear most door lintels. The majority of his time was spent hunched over a computer, a book, a microscope, or lab utensils, and when he walked, usually lost in thought, he kept his eyes on his very big feet. He had a pair of granny glasses, a dimple in his chin, and a round face that, when he grew excited, shown like a polished apple. When he was irritated, the cheeks merely flushed hot pink, and the degree of his annoyance could be measured by the number of times he'd push his glasses up his nose. Just now, the count was at three, which meant he was moving from the merely irked into serious vexation.

"But Hank, you've got to help me. You know her. What does she like?"

"And I reiterate - as I have stated already several times - I have no suggestions to offer." He pushed his glasses up yet again (that made four), regarding Scott Summers with impatience. "Now please. I have tests to conduct." He turned back to the lab table littered with shiny-metal and dull-black equipment. The mansion's infirmary was his domain and Scott was an interloper.

Now, slumping down on a nearby stool, Scott drummed absently on the seat with the thumb of his good hand. He was finally out of the sling he'd worn since breaking his arm, but still wore a light cast, a dirty flesh shade contrasting badly with the smooth tan of his skin. Unlike McCoy, he was neither tall nor particularly broad, and his most distinguishing (still-visible) features were the high cheekbones he'd inherited from a Tlingit grandmother, and a mouth as full as a woman's. That mouth thinned when he became frustrated - as he was now. "Well, I've got to do something for her. I wrecked her car."

"I believe the best 'something' would entail paying to have it fixed," McCoy pointed out, then wished he hadn't.

Lips thinning even further, Summers looked away. "The professor is doing that."

Scott, of course, had little money of his own. Most everything in his life came on the professor's charity, and he was sensitive about that. McCoy had momentarily forgotten, and now sighed. The boy had an amazing ability to combine kicked-pup pouts with tight-jawed pride until one felt just miserable for him. "Look," McCoy said, "If you want to do something for her, why not take her to the opera?" But at that suggestion, Scott's expression blanched as stark as it might have at an announcement of immanent nuclear holocaust, and McCoy had to stifle a laugh. "You're not a fan of opera, I see."

"Rock opera, maybe. I always wanted tickets to Jesus Christ Superstar."

McCoy shuddered. "Andrew Lloyd Webber. Ugh. All pyrotechnics, no substance."

"Says who? It's cool music, and Ian Gillen sang the best Jesus. He was the lead for Deep Purple, y'know." Then Summers dropped his head back to regard the ceiling above with its banks of fluorescent lights, as if he might find the solution to his dilemma etched there. "I have to think of something." But this was vocalized more to himself than McCoy, who returned to his preparation of slides for the electron microscope. When Scott had been quiet for several minutes, Hank dared to hope that maybe he'd given up. Hank should have known better. Scott Summers was like a terrier when he got an idea in his head: persistent and mouthy. McCoy had completed only a second slide before Summers spoke again. "Maybe I could take her to see something on Broadway?" Then he sighed. "Yeah, right. Like I could afford tickets to Broadway!"

McCoy spoke without turning. "I could get tickets for you." Anything to make the kid go away. Usually, he enjoyed Scott's company, but just at the moment, he was more interested in the rate of nuclei decay in frog heart cells that had been subjected to a particular type of radiation.

Yet Scott had perked right up. "You could? You - I mean, you'd do that for me?"

Setting down his slide, McCoy turned finally. "I might." But he didn't believe in giving things away for free. People appreciated them more if they had to expend effort to acquire them, and if Summers had no money, he did have time - and young, strong muscles. "You have some knowledge of automobiles, do you not?"

Suspicious, the boy tilted his head and spoke slowly. "Yeah. My dad and I used to fix up old cars together. It was his hobby. He was a pilot. Air Force."

"So I've heard," McCoy replied, his voice dry.

That won a blink, then a smile. "I guess you have." The boy might be earnest, but at least he had a sense of humor.

"Ostensibly," McCoy went on, "vehicular care falls on my duty roster, but I rarely have time to devote to mundane upkeep." In truth, he found it unbearably tedious.

"And you want me to do it." It wasn't a question.

"Permanently."

Summers actually grinned. "If you can get us two seats to Phantom of the Opera that aren't nose-bleeds, it's a done-deal, Hank."

McCoy drew himself up to his full height - which was a good six inches over Scott Summers. "My dear boy, I can assure you that not only will your nasal cavities remain sanguine-free, but you will find yourself on the floor within twenty feet of the stage." Though why anyone would want seats to that particular debacle of Webber's, McCoy couldn't fathom. Even the dated Jesus Christ Superstar was preferable.

But Scott was ecstatic. "Holy shit! Twenty feet from the stage?" Hopping off the stool, he offered McCoy his hand. "The garage is mine. Thanks, Hank."

Moira had kept house for the professor for over twenty years, and took advantage of her seniority on a regular basis to berate him for sleeping too little or forgetting his vitamins - but she was not a chef, she said, and anyone beyond herself, Xavier, the groom, and the gardener were too many to expect her to feed. So when Francesco Placido had come to live at the mansion six months ago, his widowed mother had come with him to be the new cook. Like any Italian woman worth her salt and pasta, she could feed a small army, or a handful of teenage boys, without breaking a sweat.

Being neither male nor under twenty, Jean Grey usually tried to escape Valeria's maternal attention - and her carbohydrates - by waiting until the older woman had vacated the kitchen for early-afternoon siesta. Then Jean would sneak up from the lab to make herself lunch. One Wednesday afternoon in late April, she was making a BLT sandwich at the counter when Scott appeared at her elbow like one of the jin, a spirit of air and fire, waving a pair of tickets and sporting that enchanting grin. It gave him dimples, and gave her Very Bad Thoughts. At full-wattage, she thought he should have a Surgeon General's warning: 'Dangerous to female rationality.'

"Phantom of the Opera," he said, very obviously pleased with himself. "The Majestic. Two seats. Row nine - in the orchestra. Row nine."

She gaped. She'd have killed for those tickets. "Who's the lucky girl?"

"You."

Now she really did gape. Ever since they'd met concussively a month prior, he'd been orbiting her like a minor celestial body. She'd never had a little brother, had been the little sister instead, and rather enjoyed this new opportunity to play older and wiser. But she wondered if he may have gotten the wrong idea. "Scott, I - "

"Just say 'yes.' I owe you. I wrecked your car."

Lethal puppy seriousness. And he knew just how to beg without begging, too. She sighed. "All right."

The grin exploded onto his face once more. "Fantastic! Friday night, next week. Be ready to go at six." And he disappeared back out the kitchen door.

Jean shook her head. This was probably a mistake, she thought, fetching a diet Snapple out of the fridge from her personal stash; but if she had it to do again, she'd still have agreed. She was going to see The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, and bit her lip to suppress a very school girl squeal. So what if it was a bit of theatrical junkfood? Hank wasn't, she thought, the only one with the occasional taste for a Twinkie.

This isn't a date, Scott Summers told himself as he tried to avoid cutting his chin with a razor. It's a bribe. He was going out with Jean Grey because he had a pair of Broadway tickets that she wanted badly enough to consent to an eighteen-year-old escort.

But his hands still shook and his brain occasionally detoured into a youthful Neverland of what he wished could be, and he wound up cutting himself three times anyway, each a bright sting of pain like a stainless-steel admonishment. Finally, he dropped the razor into the sudsy water with a plop, and leaned over to brace palms on cool porcelain. "Get a grip. She's not going with you. She's letting you drive."

At ten to six, he was pacing, all nervous, in the wood-paneled den: over to the pool table, around the Ficus tree, across the Persian runner in front of the door, past the black-leather couch, and back to the pool table. Francesco Placido, who was inelegantly sprawled over a florid-red Queen Anne seat, quit reading to watch him, and pulled thoughtfully on the cigarette he wasn't supposed to be smoking inside. "Chill out, Scott."

Summers glared, but Placido just extinguished his cigarette, stood up and fished in his back pocket. Dragging his wallet free, he took something from it and came over to slip it to Scott. A condom. Trojan-enz Spermicidal Lubricant. "Non si sa mai." Just in case.

Scott blushed and snorted at the sheer innocent bravado of the gift. "Yeah, right! Get a clue! She's twenty-six, Frank."

"Così?" So?

Frank Placido might be the most shut-mouthed Italian Summers had ever met, but in some ways, the younger boy was still a walking Latin cliché. Slapping the condom back into his friend's hand, he said, "Forget it. And I have one already, if I really need it."

Grinning, Placido put back the condom and spoke in a fluent if heavily accented English. "You will do okay, hey? She watches you, you know? I see her watch you." He leaned across to straighten Summers' tie absently, then slapped him on the upper arm. "Bello e chic, mi amico! Fine threads. You will knock her out, no?" Winking, he wandered back to the chair and returned to the book he'd been reading. Beppo Fenoglio's Il partigiano Johnny. Frank had a recent and passionate fascination with the Italian Resistance to Mussolini's fascists during World War II. He saw himself as a partisan born fifty years too late. In the end, Frank believed that the good guys in the white hats (or the blue bandanas) had to win.

Watching him read, something occurred to Summers and he stalked over to lean across the chair, one hand braced on the back. "You know something? You see something, Frank?"

Placido glanced up, and Summers decided that he would cheerfully give ten years of his life for eyes like Frank's - if visible, of course. Deep-set and intense, and as black as midnight velvet under gypsy tarot cards. What fortune would he tell Summers?

"I see many things," he replied now. "I see enough to know to trust more what I observe. Men make their own futures, when they are brave enough. You go tonight. You be yourself. You two maybe start your own little history, eh? Maybe ten years from now, they talk about you. Scott Summers e Jean Grey, la coppia perfetta!" The perfect couple. He kissed his fingertips in illustration.

Snorting, Summers pushed himself away. He could never tell when Placido was being a jackass, a hopeless romantic, or prophesying - which was precisely the way Frank wanted it. But there was always something sad in his face, and wise, and sometimes, Scott wondered which of them was really the elder. Then again, if he could see the future in the kaleidoscope that Frank did, he might be old before his time, too.

A sound from behind alerted them, and they both turned. In the den doorway, Jean smiled. "Hi. Sorry I ran a little late."

"Wow! Ciao, bellezza!" Placido leapt to his feet to take her hand and kiss it, drawing her gracefully into the room to cover the fact that Scott was busy trying to pick up his jaw off the floor. Frank was a good friend to him sometimes. Dressed in simple dark satin that hugged all her curves, she stunned with pure elemental elegance and teased Scott's imagination with the slit high up her left side. His heart pounded and his tongue had cleaved to the roof of his mouth, yet she seemed perfectly at ease, laughing at Frank, then sniffing the air.

"You're smoking again, and inside, too. Bad boy." She shook a finger under his nose. "Don't come to me when you get cancer at forty-five, boy-o."

"Life is for enjoying, Bella. I like to smoke. My choice. There is too much sadness in the world to make more by worrying about tomorrow. I let the future take care of itself, no?"

He was lying through his teeth. No one in the mansion had more nightmares about the future than Francesco Placido. But it sounded good. Jean backed off, in part because she didn't feel like arguing with an Italian, even a shut-mouthed one, but also because he'd reminded her that he knew better than she did what his future held.

Summers had finally pulled himself together enough to approach, and she smiled at him - gentle, soft, but a bit impish at the edges. Her smiles always felt personal, a present just for the one smiled at. They made him stupid with longing: she was his Gloriana, his Faerie Queene

Upon a great adventure he was bond,
That greatest Gloriana to him gave,
That greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond,
To winne him worship, and her grace to have,
Which of all earthly things he most did crave..."You ready to leave?" she asked, jerking him out of mental meanderings.

"Uh. Yeah." Chivalrously, he offered her his arm. "Let's go see Phantom."

Scott was helping Jean into the passenger side of a little red classic Porsche when the garage door opened to admit a metallic-orange Lamborghini Diablo Roadster, all sleek and wicked and going too fast for the tight fit, but the driver managed to avoid crashing into anything.

Warren Worthington, of course. He sought speed in all things, be it on the road, at sea, or in the sky. But he could only drive that car out here; it wasn't street legal in New York City. Hopping out, he raised a hand in greeting. "Good God, man. Joe Cool in a suit and tie! Where are you off to? A funeral?" But he was grinning, and sauntered over to slap Summers' raised hand, gripping it tightly for a moment then bending to peer in the Porsche's passenger side. The wings that normally set him apart were strapped down and hidden beneath a tan, Egyptian-linen sport coat. "Jeannie - you look divine. Are you actually letting this clown take you somewhere?"

She didn't quite titter, but approached it at a glancing angle. Worthington had that effect on women, even those in their post-menopausal years. They lined up for his crooked smile and a flash from sea-blue eyes. He was lively, he was charming, he was rich, and he wasn't interested in getting serious. He held people at a distance by seeming to confide a great deal. Non-stop chatter. It took knowing him well to realize how little he ever actually said, and how little any of it reflected the mind of Warren Worthington, III. Arriving at Xavier's only a little after Scott, it was Warren who'd followed Scott about the mansion for the two months it had taken Hank to finish Scott's glasses, making sure that the younger boy didn't fall down staircases or bark his shin on the furniture. He'd seen Scott get frustrated with his blindness, and witnessed his fear that it might never change. And later, it was Scott who'd sat with Warren on the mansion roof the day that Warren's parents had taken off to Bucharest for the weekend and forgotten his twenty-first birthday. Scott had watched an angel cry. They'd never talked about those things, but words were Warren's shield. The real things in his life, the deep down things, he acknowledged in silence.

There were still times, however, that Warren's casual confidence annoyed Summers. This was one of them. "We're going to see Phantom of the Opera," he said.

Half laughing, Warren jerked up. "You're serious?"

"Yeah - so?" He started to add, 'Hank got me tickets,' but didn't. Let Warren assume he had his own means. "I wrecked her car. I wanted to do something nice. Why's it such a shock to think I might have a little culture?"

Warren waved his hands in amused surrender. "That wasn't what I meant. But Phantom isn't exactly culture, Gamma Gaze. That's the show all the tourists go see, along with the performed-into-insipid-perpetuity Cats."

It was out before Warren considered either the timing, or who was sitting in the car below, overhearing the whole exchange. Scott Summer's face had blanched white in chill humiliation - which hadn't been Warren's intent. He'd just been shooting off his mouth again like he always did. "Uh - I'm just kidding, man."

Summers knew he wasn't. "Sure." And he shut Jean's door to walk around to the driver's side.

"Really," Warren insisted. "It's a popular musical for a reason." But he was digging himself in deeper and knew it. "Hey - you guys have a good time."

"Gee, thanks." Summers shut his own door and started the engine.

Sighing, Warren backed away and watched the car pull out of the garage. "You fucked up big time, asshole," he muttered to himself.

Inside the Porsche, one of those dreaded, awkward silences had descended. Scott drove with knuckles tight on the wheel and his jaw clenched, while Jean stared out the window at the passing countryside, bathed in the deep green-gold of a spring evening. Beneath the elegant arch of budding hardwoods, beds of tulips and hyacinth glowed, as shocking and vibrant as a schoolchild's drawing. Beside the front gate, cherries had shed the last of their blooms like a late spring snow squall, and up on the surrounding hills, green was coating the stick-art of New York winter forests. She caught a brown flash beside the road on the right.

"Doe," Scott said.

"Wow. This far in town?"

He shrugged, and a moment of tense silence followed before he muttered, "Sorry."

"For what?"

"For taking you to a tourist show."

Turning her head, she smiled, finding him so young, and so earnest in his dignity. "Scott, don't be silly. I've only been to two shows in my life, both off Broadway, and I've never had seats this close. It'll be grand fun. I really appreciate the invitation."

The car had reached the lane's end, and he hit the brakes to glance both ways, then pulled out onto Route 126, past Harry's Hideaway Tavern, and headed for the Salem Center MetroNorth station. "It's the thought that counts, huh?" But it was said with sarcasm.

Eyes on the marching line of quaint New England suburban houses, she said with complete seriousness, "Yes. It is."

While among the show's more infamous and expected artifices, the crash of the falling chandelier at the end of Act I still caused Jean to start in her seat and clutch at Scott's arm. Like Steven Spielberg, Andrew Lloyd Webber knew well the art of theatrical suspense. "Sorry," she said when she realized it had been his bad arm. Letting go, she straightened his sleeve as the lights came up and the red curtain dropped for the intermission.

But Scott just laughed at her in a friendly way. "S'okay. The arm's mostly healed."

Rising, they escaped the gaudy, gilded glory of The Majestic's orchestra level to stretch their legs, and Jean made her way to the women's restroom, finding the inevitable line. The outer area was as shamelessly overdone as the rest of the place, sporting green marble counters under mirrors and banks of frosted make-up lights. Expensive baroque wallpaper bore tiny gold fleur-de-lis on a forest green background, and in the room's corner, two gold plush velvet couches gathered dust under fake silk greenery and grinning ceramic cherubs. She couldn't decide if she were more awed or more appalled by the decor, but the whole place certainly suited the grandiose melodies of Webber's gothic horror tale. She hummed a bit of "All I Ask of You," then caught herself and stopped. An operatic soprano she wasn't.

When she finished, she found Scott waiting patiently outside. A few passers-by glanced at the boy wearing sunglasses indoors at night, but didn't pause. These were the years before popular perceptions of mutants elicited irrational fear. To observers, he was just a young blind man in dark glasses and a nice pinstripe suit. "Ready to go back?" he asked.

"Sure."

The second act was more hard-hitting - and not because of the play's native pathos. In her excitement at the prospect of a ninth-row orchestra seat, Jean had overlooked the irony inherent in Scott Summers choosing this particular story.

"Why, you ask, was I bound and chained in this cold and dismal place? Not for any mortal sin, but the wickedness of my abhorrent face!"

She'd been escorted to a theatrical performance about a man forced to mask his terrible visage by a man forced to mask his deadly eyes.

"Pitiful creature of darkness - what kind of life have you known? God give me courage to show you that you are not alone . . . ."

She thought long and hard about Scott's incessant attention over the past few weeks. She'd found it sweetly charming, occasionally annoying, and unarguably flattering. But perhaps, in her amusement at his schoolboy crush, she'd overlooked something more cardinal - he was lonely.

If she didn't know a great deal about his background, how his power had manifested was no secret, and being the architect of dramatic disaster at one's own senior prom could hardly be a pleasant memory. Jean had never gone to a prom, but had stopped regretting that some time ago. After a certain age, it ceased to matter. But for Scott, she wondered? Everything about him screamed a self-confidence learned early - from his casual ease in his skin to the strut he couldn't quite conceal. He'd been popular once, she thought. And while the shy, science-geek that still lived inside Jean might have found a certain poetic justice in what had happened to him, she'd mostly outgrown that, just as she'd outgrown regret. He'd been popular, but nothing about him made her think that he'd been petty or cruel. He just needed a little attention, and a friend.

Exiting the theater, they walked aimlessly down 44th Street in Times Square, side-by-side but not touching. The wind sang between buildings, whipping at her dress and jacket and blowing stray paper against the sides of brick buildings made sooty-dark with vehicle exhaust. "Would you like to get something to eat before we go back?" Jean asked him, and was delighted to see his face light up.

A little attention indeed.

"Sure! But" - he glanced down at her feet - "can you walk far in those shoes?"

She smiled. "Don't worry. I spend ten-hour days on my feet in heels on a regular basis. Come on." She offered him her hand, friend to friend. He took it, and she dragged him off on a romp through Manhattan's midtown.

Born and raised in smaller cities where neighborhood suburban sprawl had preempted east-coast high-rise urbanization, Scott had always found New York oppressive, even threatening in a vague and unspecified way. It was quirky, it was colorful, and it was brash. Even LA was a pale imitation, like a cheesy storefront facade in an old spaghetti western. Or perhaps familiarity had simply bred contempt, together with resentment at the annoying tendency others had to equate southern California with Los Angeles.

He was from San Diego, dammit.

Now, he decided that he was fortunate to have a native New Yorker - well, more or less native- - to show him around. He was lost. Not directionally. He never got lost directionally: a function of his mutation. But he was lost at a more basic level. Where, he wondered, did one take a classy lady like Jean Grey for a good time on a Friday night?

This isn't a date, he reminded himself for the umpteenth time. It was . . . an excursion.

And Jean seemed more than willing to tell him where to take her. Or in truth, she took him. They wound their way through a revitalized Times Square, the Disneyland of tourist havens, her slender fingers hooked in his elbow so she could direct him better. He didn't realize it then, but that would come to define the nature of their paired existence: she steered while he pushed a path through the crowd. They passed myriad little tourist shops sporting "I New York" bumper stickers and key rings and shot glasses, Yankee's baseball caps and shirts, and assorted electronic equipment. One video store advertised: "XXX Features! ** Disney DVDs! ** Live Girls!" and that improbable juxtaposition bent Scott over double, laughing. Above them, the Jumbotron screen scrolled brightly with headline news tickers and expensive advertisements. The Disney theater was visible, the Virgin Megastore, the All-Star Café, and one of the stairwells down to the Times Square subway station.

And people. Even at this hour, people of every possible shape, size, and nationality crowded everywhere one looked - a seething, noisy human kaleidoscope in gaudy jewel-tone variety. 'The city that never sleeps.'

They browsed windows for a while, then she pointed off towards the Marriott Marquis visible to the north. "Let's go up to the View Restaurant. Forty-ninth floor. Have you been there yet? It rotates and you can see the entire city. It'll be my treat."

"Not been there, but lead on, Sacajewea. I'll follow you to the Pacific."

Laughing, she hauled him three blocks north on Broadway towards the hotel's spiking outline all brightly lit like an invitation to a plush existence beyond his wildest dreams. "The atrium is just outrageous," Jean told him, wrinkling her nose with amusement. "The kind of thing you have to see to believe. The hotel itself is one of those triple-A, four-diamond places. They have suites that go for three grand a night."

The idea that anyone could waste that kind of money on a bed struck Scott as either comedic or obscene. Then he remembered Warren, and reconsidered. It was no less comedic or obscene, but it was something Warren would do.

And Jean was right, he thought; the atrium left him gaping in dumb astonishment. "Thirty-eight stories," Jean whispered, and pulled him on, past lush greenery and modern smooth-line Italian furniture occupied by suits and power-skirts looking tired from a long day's travel, or laughing gaily from too much alcohol. Scott and Jean took the glass elevator up to a floor with shops and boutiques and a lounge amid the atrium trees. He got a coke, she got a glass of white wine, and they strolled the perimeter casually, window shopping. One display was dominated by a silver, blank-faced mannequin in ahideous pillbox hat and a wide-striped, blocky, skin-tight mini-dress that should have been fined for exceptional bad taste. Exchanging a glance, they broke up laughing, and a few hotel guests glanced over at them in surprised irritation. Embarrassed, they scuttled away, still giggling helplessly. When he could speak again, Scott said, "I'm almost afraid to ask the colors of those stripes."

The remark took Jean by surprise. "What do you mean?"

His sideways glance was quick and sharp. "I thought you knew. I can't see colors anymore."

And she should have known - she did know, in fact. She'd read it in his medical file, but forgotten. It was an easy thing to forget, an easy thing to take for granted. "They were pink, orange and purple."

"Together? Ouch!"

"'Fraid so."

They ambled along for a few minutes more. She sipped her wine; he drank his coke, and once or twice, he walked to the edge of the interior atrium railing to lean out and look up, amazed by the spectacle like a child at the zoo. Finally, he said, "When I lived back in San Diego, there was this one mall with all the ritzy stores - Abercrombie and Fitch, Banana Republic, The Sharper Image, Williams-Sonoma, Cyrus' Imported Persian Carpets - that kind of thing." She smiled and nodded, refraining from telling him that everything he'd just named (carpet store perhaps excepted) was a chain for upper-middle-class shoppers harboring pretensions.

"We used to take off to the mall on weekends with a pair of Polaroids," he went on. "The assignment was to take pictures of ourselves either with or wearing stuff we'd never be able to afford, or wouldn't be caught dead in, in public. The team with the best stuff - really nice or really awful - won."

"Sounds like bribe-worthy material to me."

"Except we all had the dirt on each other, so it wouldn't've done much good."

"Too bad we don't have a camera." She glanced back in the direction of the boutique.

"Too bad the shop's not open. I'd dare you to put it on, even without a camera." That made her grin and poke him in the side. He flinched away, then asked, "You ever do anything like that, back in high school?"

"Nope. I was a stick-in-the-mud."

"What? You? I don't believe it."

"I was." She nodded solemnly and took another sip of her wine.

"I still don't believe it."

"Honest. Cross my heart and hope to die." She made the appropriate gesture. "A big, tall, nerdy Amazon with a pony-tail, glasses only one step up from horn-rims, and a flat chest."

The direction of his gaze dropped involuntarily to her bust line - a little meager still but she'd since discovered the wonders of a push-up bra. She fell silent, remembering. When she spoke again, her voice was soft, and almost lost to the click-clack of her heels on marble flooring. "I was put in a sanitarium for the first time when I was ten. Catatonic. I didn't leave until I was fourteen, and then only thanks to the professor. But I had to go back a few times later when the voices in my head got to be too bad. I'm a latent telepath, Scott, as well as a telekinetic." She paused, adding simply, "I didn't get out much, in high school."

Scott remained silent, afraid that anything he said would sound trite and hollow. Yet it wasn't pity that stirred him, or even fear at her potential ability to read his mind - he was accustomed to Xavier, and he trusted Jean's ethics. Rather, he wanted to show her, all at once, everything she hadn't experienced: how to TP a house on Halloween, how to shoot pool in a game hall, how to sneak into the gym after hours to put Crisco on the ballcourt, how to drop Milk Duds from the cinema balcony onto the unsuspecting patrons below. "Do you still hear them? The voices?" he managed finally.

"No. The professor suppressed my telepathy entirely, in the end."

"Will it come back?"

"He'll release the blocks when I'm ready to handle it. He's says I'm very sensitive." He'd said, in fact, that she might one day be stronger than he was. That thought frightened her in the dark of the night. "He thought it might be a good idea for me to learn to use this first." And she stopped walking to extend her wine glass and draw her fingers away just a bit, holding it up by the power of her mind alone - but ready to catch it if she lost control. She still found it easier to shove a couch across a room than to hold up a simple goblet.

"Jean!" Scott hissed, glancing around nervously.

"Don't fret so. No one can see what I'm doing; my hand is in the way. Besides, haven't you noticed that others see only what they want to see? Normal people can't hold wine glasses with their minds, so unless I wave the truth under their noses, no one will notice." The last sentence came out more brittle than she'd intended, and she looked up at him, catching her own reflection in the mirror red of his distinctive lenses. They were his Mark of Cain, and she flushed. Who was she to lecture him? At least no one looked at her twice, walking down a street.

But he said, "It's okay," as if he were the telepathic one, able to follow her embarrassed thoughts. She wished she could read his eyes. She'd wondered before what they looked like behind red, but it had been a cursory curiosity. Now, her researcher's inquisitiveness pressed forward with new force.

"Do you have any pictures of you, before those?" She pointed to the glasses, and his eyebrows shot up over the top of them. Realizing abruptly how her question might sound, she slapped her free hand over her mouth. "God. How rude. Sorry."

But her anxiety just amused him, and he laughed. In his experience, the glasses bothered others more than they bothered him - the obvious thing everyone tried not to notice, like crutches or a wheelchair. But they had given him back his sight, and he hadn't had them long enough yet to grow to hate them. "No need to apologize." He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. "Actually, I used to have a picture of me with my brother and parents. I don't think I took it out." Opening the wallet, he flipped through it. "Yup, here it is. It's a few years old but . . . you can get the basic idea." Slipping the picture free, he handed it over.

She took it with a smile, this piece of his past, and moved to find better illumination from the high track lights overhead, studying the photograph intently. It was one of those Christmas portraits that families had made every few years, and which required fifteen takes to get a single shot where someone's eyes weren't shut or expression wasn't peculiar. In this, she thought Scott's father looked stiff and uncomfortable in his Air Force dress blues, but his mother was a pretty woman, photogenic with long cat-eyes and fair hair that had probably come more from a bottle than nature at her age, but she possessed the cream skin to support it, and her younger son had clearly inherited it. A brassy-bronze under studio lights. Jean let her gaze move finally to Scott. Even standing in the back with his father, she could see the bright blue of his uncovered eyes. Deep-set and sparkling, they matched his electric smile, but they were sharp, too, focused in a way that suggested intelligence. She looked up at him now, standing a few feet off and clearly watching her from behind those shades. Glasses made him appear older and more serious, and enigmatic, but they also concealed the piercing nature of his regard. He didn't miss much, she thought, and wouldn't soon forget that. Walking back, she handed over the photo. "You look like your dad." That made him grimace as he refit the picture into its thin plastic sleeve. "I take it that's not a good thing?"

"We don't exactly get along."

"Being a mutant was a problem?"

"Partly." He looked off, his face expressionless in an effort to contain something more volatile. Scott Summers never knew how to explain the strained love that bound him to his father: it was both as old as the hills and as new as the lightning in his eyes, an emulation and resentment all twisted by nature's unexpected surprises. Yet he knew, down in his heart, that his father still cared about him. It was simply easier for them both to maintain that care if they saw as little of each other as possible. Too close a proximity yielded shouting matches on everything from Clinton's economic policies towards China to the fine imposed on Newt Gingrich.

"I guess you could say I was the black sheep, even before these." He tapped the glasses. "It doesn't always take weird powers and trashing your high school to quarrel with your family. Sometimes all you have to do is register Democrat in a family of Republicans." But he offered that confession wryly - as humor, not an admonition. A gift of the personal in exchange for her earlier admission about her years in a sanitarium. Understanding, she smiled back faintly and they walked on, side by side but no longer casually touching, as much separated as bound by awkward revelations and the deep blue silhouettes of old monsters in the closet.

They went up to the rotating restaurant atop the Marriott to overdose on caffeine with Death-by-Double-Chocolate cheesecake and espresso. Jean flirted with the maitre d', who, suitably flattered, found them a little table on the outer rim by the wide banks of windows. There, they could look out over the city at night, lit in white and yellow and neon red like an earthbound reflection of the sky overhead. Constellations made from the Manhattan streets, a Zodiac pattern of high urbanity. Ever the gentleman, Scott held the chair for Jean, and she rewarded him with a smile. Then he asked her questions about her doctoral research and listened quietly to answers he didn't understand. He just wanted to watch her talk. Animated by her passion, she sparkled, spilled golden charisma onto the table like honey, catching fast whomever happened to be watching: Scott himself, a middle-aged Asian businessman at the table to their right, a passing waiter. It was a beauty that owed nothing to the flesh.

"Are you afraid," he asked her at one point, "that people might find out you're a mutant, and ignore your research, call you biased?"

"All the time," she replied, using her fork to scrape the last streaks of chocolate sauce from her plate. "But I have to do it." Looking up, she pinned him with eyes as dark as the chocolate. "I have to. It's just . . . . " She stopped, unsure how to explain. "It's this . . . need. I have to understand where we come from and why. What made us this way? Can we track it, map it, like the rest of the human genome? Can we predict who and how and what? I want to know, Scott. There is so much still to know!"

Smiling a little sadly, he said, "I wish I had something I was that devoted to."

"You'll find something." She played with her fork, licking off the chocolate. "You've lots of time still, to decide."

"Maybe."

After they'd finished, they left the hotel to make their way north to Rockefeller Center where they found a band who had set up for an impromptu concert on the plaza. The musicians proved more proficient than the average garage band, but otherwise, they could be categorized as an undistinguished pop clone of Hootie and the Blowfish. Upon seeing the bass player, however, Scott grew unusually animated, even for him, and lapsed into mostly incomprehensible mutterings on the man's vintage imported 4001 maple-top Rickenbacker bass, circa Paul McCartney's Beatles phase. Jean not only couldn't tell a bass from a guitar, it took her a good five minutes to realize he was talking about an instrument. Finally, she interrupted to ask, "How do you know all that?"

"What?"

"That . . . technical stuff." She wriggled her fingers in an imprecise but amused illustration. "Model numbers and things."

It made him smile. "Bass players are kinda gear fanatics."

"You play? I mean, you're a musician? Like in a band?"

"Yeah, like in a band." Then he looked away. "Or I used to."

"So find another band."

He tapped his glasses. "Yeah, right."

"You never know, Scott. It's been my impression that musicians usually fall on the liberal side."

He shrugged and deflected any further questions by asking her if she'd like to dance. She agreed, and they wove out into the plaza crowd, forgetting for a while the differences in their ages and backgrounds in the rhythm of a drum line. Sound and movement united them. When they finally slipped away, Jean let Scott put an arm around her shoulders, to guide her through the press of people. His warmth against her side felt natural, felt right, and looking over at him, she wondered, fleetingly, about future possibilities.

Then she dismissed that line of thought.

He was eighteen. She was twenty-six. Some chasms were simply too wide to leap.

But Scott Summers wasn't inclined to be daunted by such things as generations gaps. With brash, youthful zeal, he decided that very night that he was going to marry Jean Grey.

Notes: The quote comes from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, with some slight modification of the medieval lettering.