Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Marvel. Written with no expectation of profit or gain.

Notes: Part of antiochene's Firebirds universe, a retelling of AvX without the canon idiot balls, and was written for her as a gift. Follows Firebirds, Chapter 24: Waves That Beat On Heaven's Shore. It began as a request for "what would Dani have said to Scott?" and took on a life of its own.

"Physically, you're in perfect health," Hank said, and the white walls and ceiling of the medical lab streaked peachy gold with his relief. Or the space around his blue, whiskered face did, and since Dani stared up past him, same difference.

"Could've told you that." She reached out - again. Yep, still there. Funny that Hank's royal blue had never had a temperature or emotion before but now it seemed a cool, determined kind of color, tinged by the metallic edge of fear. It glowed with a shy sunset yellow, too, like the first crocus of spring.

"Are you experiencing anything out of the ordinary?" he asked and that yellow got mixed up with the metal again and felt kind of itchy.

Dani's finger tapped against the cool metal of the table beneath her - to the beat of something she'd been listening to the other day, maybe. Either that or to something someone was listening to somewhere else in the building. "Define out of the ordinary."

Across the lab, Strange snorted a sharp laugh that wouldn't have been out of place on Illyana. He tasted like Illyana some, too, like she used to, her mind. Spiky, amused, curious, like tequila. He wasn't afraid of her (the others seemed to be, a little). His fears were things she couldn't understand if she projected them.

Hank shot a quelling look at Strange, his emotions swelling with angry desire. Dani reached out to rest her hand on his arm, lost herself in the smoky-musky complexity of his emotions. "You're not as much of an animal as you fear you are," she murmured out of nowhere, and Hank's eyes went wide with staticky neon-yellow shock. "Enough, though. Strong and safe. Like my old friend Ridgerunner."

Without so much as a thought, the mountain lion appeared, lying across her lap. Her breath caught. "I forgot," she whispered. She'd forgotten that her projections could be so real...for everyone else, but never really for her. Still, she hadn't thought of him in years.

"I think that sufficiently answers your question, Hank," Reed Richards offered dryly, his emotions tasting of chalk dust and metal filings.

Strange didn't say anything, but she could hear him - didn't he usually float? - walking across the lab for a closer look. He put a hand out for Ridgerunner and drew it back when it didn't pass through him but rested between the cat's ears. His eyebrow lifted when he glanced at Dani. Somehow he looked both more and less imposing than usual without the stupid red cape.

She rubbed her hands against the soothing, familiar, worn denim of her frayed jeans. Breathed in her own history - everything from her first beer with Sam to the last ride with Brightwind - on her battered suede jacket. Those scents were real, she knew, but what did that even mean when the entire world had come alive again and...

Pushing herself upright, she released the projection of Ridgerunner. "Hope tastes like cinnamon."

"Danielle, maybe you should take it easy." Hank's voice rumbled, soft with a violet concern.

She shook her head, tears fresh in her eyes. "Cinnamon and mesquite, sage, burnt marshmallows, crap beer, the res after a rain-" Nate's kisses "-blood, ash, fire, rage and stardust. Hope tastes like everything. I can still feel her."

Reed's ears sharpened to points. He stopped the tap-tap-tapping of his fingers on the keyboard and came over to them at the exam table. "Hope or the Phoenix?"

Dani thought about that for a minute. Looked at her arms. Odd ghost flames in Indian copper flickered over her skin, like the Phoenix hadn't finished with her yet. It pressed against her mind, still, cleansing fire burning away the scarring along pathways and patterns Dani hadn't used in forever and a heartbeat.

"Both. Hope's there. I can feel her. She's tired. Exhilarated." She bit her lip and didn't tell them that Hope was scared, too. Scared for Nathan, Dani thought probably. But that wasn't their business. Not any of them. "The Phoenix is there too. Watching me, but not-" Dani waved a hand through the fear spikes from all three of them at once. "Not from a distance. Up close. It feels..." Her lungs seized and tears grabbed at her eyes again. "Warm, proud, pleased." Her eyes squeezed shut. She couldn't look at them, couldn't see-hear-taste-feel-smell their minds just then but said softly, "Like Jean. And 'Ro."

"Danielle..." Hank said again.

"Leave her be, Hank. Synaesthesia's a common response to magical or psionic overstimulation."

That came from Strange and it was surprising enough that it stopped the never-ending flood of salt in her eyes and mouth and nose, grief and gratitude, hope and sorrow, Hope and sorrow, twinned. Didn't do much for the sifting, wind-carried ash that was Nathan and Scott, though. She knew, even though she didn't know how.

Ignoring it, Dani let her power flow out to probe at Strange's mind. His mouth twitched, and she could swear she heard him thinking Fearless, aren't you?

"How-"

He cut her off with, "I'll give you some focusing exercises. After."

"After what?" Hank's fur smelled bristled, kind of like pine needles and growling black bears. He didn't like being overridden in his own medical labs.

That had been true forever and it made Dani smile a little when she answered, "The hangover."

Strange and Reed both laughed, but Hank smoothed one of her braids with a big paw of a hand. "Maybe we should give you some time-"

"Does Hope get time?" Dani's voice rose up over the beeping of monitors and shifting of fabric and uncomfortable silences. It filled the space - her own natural cutting insights somehow overfull with sound, pregnant with power. "Does Nathan or Scott? Did Sam? Rachel? Ororo?"

The violet of Hank's concern blared loud and vibrant. Reed pawed at his white lab coat, looking for the suppressor he'd pocketed. Dani knew it. Shouldn't but did. She shook her head at him. "You spilled cup-of-soup on your lab coat, Reed Richards. I can smell it. And your fear." His hands fell away with the same speed as Valeria's when she got scolded. Dani knew that too.

Strange just watched her, a cloak pulled down over his mind, gaze as iron-sharp as the new gray at his temples. She gazed back, all of Dani's considerable strength dwarfed by the lingering aura of the Phoenix as though it weighed and judged them from the deep wells of a once-and-always Cheyenne sometime Valkyrie's eyes.

"I don't need time," Dani said finally, the strangeness in her voice receding as raw emotion rose. It had always been that way with Hela, too, when she'd carried her soul, all unknowing. She pushed herself off the end of the table and came to her feet, not a Phoenix-touched psi, not a Valkyrie, just Dani, five-foot-nine inches of stubborn-skinny determined Cheyenne. "I need to kick some serious Sh'iar ass."

So white. Morgues were always so white and cold. Not even the silver of the drawers and the gurneys broke the unrelieved polar caps of nothingness. An empty psychic space, imposing no belief system, offering no comfort, no dressed up pretty-sad faces, flowers or wooden caskets here. It should be brown dirt and blue sky, rolling hills of bright green grass and the scent of hay and horses on the wind, for Sam anyway.

"I can stay," Magik - she was Magik again now, not Yana, not recently - offered stiffly, like she thought she should, not like she wanted to.

"That's all right." Go. Please go. I'd rather be alone. Dani still looked toward her old friend but not at her, polite in the Cheyenne way. Private in the Cheyenne way.

"I'll come back."

The word stuck in her throat, not the ones she wanted to say, but the one that was necessary: "Thanks."

Magik turned to go, put her foot on a silver stepping disk. It looked like something that belonged here in the realm of the silent, frozen dead. When it started to float away, Dani let out a breath, shoved her braid back over her shoulder. The disk stopped, the woman who glanced back at her looked less the Queen of Limbo, more a broken doll. "Dani?"

"Yeah, Yana?" It sounded tight, the familiar petname, but easier than Dani would've thought with Illyana gone from the team, from Dani, so long and Blink sliding playfully and easily into her place.

"It's good you have your powers back."

I'm glad you're you again, she might've meant, Dani almost heard, but she asked, "Because I'm needed?" instead of trusting it.

Magik paused a minute, lips pressed together in thought.

Her mind felt familiar, a cool tumble of smooth rock-logic, a hot jumble of fear and desire, even though Dani hadn't reached for it. She wondered if she'd been pushing against her 'cage' the whole time and that was why she couldn't stop feeling everyone now. At least the weird color-smell sight-taste sensory overload seemed to have stopped.

She shook her head. "No," Magik said finally. "Because you work better when you're whole."

At that, Dani smiled sharply and Yana smiled back, lifted a hand in a small wave, and then left.

"I guess she'd know, huh?" Dani said as she located the drawer Sam's body was stored in. "No one knows more about being in pieces than Yana."

Even after she'd pulled the tray out, Dani stood there a long time, her hand on the cool white sheet beside Sam's shoulder. She needed to look, to see, but she wasn't sure she wanted to. Didn't know if she could. But Dani Moonstar faced her fears, and she had to face this one - a world without Sam - head on.

"So, yeah," she told him as she drew back the sheet. "Hope gave me back my powers." Tears filled her eyes at that damned blond cowlick, still curled stubbornly the wrong way. "Can you believe it, Cable's brat? Turns out she's…" Her voice cracked, fingers curled into fists at her sides.

"Oh, Sam. This wasn't supposed to happen. I was supposed to get my powers back. You were supposed to leave the X-men and come back to lead the squad with me. We were supposed to be us again, but you had to go and die on me."

It wasn't going to happen like that, Chief, and you know it. You're the one who said it, Sam's voice, but only in her mind. It wasn't like when she thought she'd heard Strange and Yana before. Just a memory.

Didn't stop her from sniffing hard against her tears and sassing at it. "Yeah, yeah, fine. So it wasn't gonna happen and we both knew it. Doesn't mean I'm cool with this. Or I'm ever forgiving you for it." She dashed rare tears off her lashes with the back of her wrist and then the heel of her hand.

"I loved you, jackass. Even if it never would've worked between us, I loved you. Always will." It didn't feel so much like her heart was being pulled, still beating, from her chest anymore, like it had when she'd first heard. The world just seemed a little grayer without the blue of Sam's eyes, a little quieter and sadder without his big stupid laugh, a little lonelier without his shoulder to lean on.

"Don't be sore at me about Nate, wherever you are. If we live long enough to figure it out, be happy for me? I don't want to have to punch you over it." A small sob lodged somewhere between her heart and her throat when she touched her fist to Sam's jaw and it was so cold.

"It's really over this time, isn't it? We've died before and come back…but you're not coming back this time, are you?" Dani paused, listening to the nothing that only seemed to confirm it, and then confided, "I don't think anyone is."

Still no answer. Nothing but the cold, empty, white and the chalk-pale of skin without blood.

Dani didn't know what Guthries said, how they bid goodbye to their dead. If she'd heard at Jay's funeral, she'd forgotten. The four days of tears and mourning her own people allowed were over. She shouldn't be here, touching Sam or talking to him, but she'd been violating Cheyenne death taboos since she saw her parents' death all those long years ago.

"Feast in Valhalla, Sam," she finally said, soft, and bent to kiss his forehead. It was some time and some tears later when she straightened, lifted the sheet over him and closed the drawer on Sam's life. "You earned it."

It should've been so much easier, tugging on the silver handle, hauling open the next one. If nothing else, Rachel weighed half of Sam soaking wet. The drawer stuck, though, or Dani stalled, the task incomplete, and had to bite her tongue and the inside of her cheek, focus her mind on that blissfully blank white space before she could finish. Before she could pull back the crisp white linen and show off that blaze of flame-red hair.

She spun away, choking on an unexpected flash flood of grief. Red hair had always been Jean, who everyone loved and everyone mourned. It had always been Terry, Jean, Ray, but now… when Dani swallowed past the lump in her throat, ghost flames danced on her arms again, even the room seemed warmer, like a fire burned through it and went on its way.

"Sorry, Ray," she said at last when she could finally look at the girl who'd never quite been her friend but who'd been family anyway. "I guess you're used to that. Being all tangled up with the rest of your clan. How does that work, anyway, you being Nathan's sister but the Mother Askani and Jean being your mom? You know how I am with time travel. I never really got it." It seemed like a dumb thing to say to a dead woman, but she had to start somewhere and Hope was just too huge.

"You deserved better, you know. Than being just another Summers one day and the hope of the world the next. You deserve better than this, for sure." That was stupid too, felt stupid, since she knew Rachel well enough to know she'd gone to her death willingly to protect her father and her brother and her brother's daughter. That she'd do it again tomorrow and the day after and the day after if the Phoenix woke her up.

"We were all right, in the end, weren't we? Things were right between us?" Dani's chest burned and her head hurt, her jaw ached from the pressure of an ocean of tears. "I hope so." From somewhere deep, Dani dredged up a tiny, tight smile. "And not just because I don't want you haunting my ass for dating your almost-brother if we get out of this alive."

She leaned against the closed drawers, hands shoved into her pockets and stared down at Rachel, only half seeing her, remembering her and Kitty, heads together over some project or other, laughing together, instead. "It's stupid but I was kind of looking forward to the shovel speech. Maybe you and me messing with Nate's head."

Her smile faded and Dani sighed. "I know its bullshit to be standing here over your corpse saying I wish we'd gotten to know each other better after all these years, but it's true. Even worse to say I'm sorry I wasn't there. Not like there was anything I could've done to save you, but I am. I'm so sorry. I couldn't do anything for you, but I promise, Ray, I'll do everything I can for them. Your dad, and Nathan. And Hope. I'll do everything I can to keep her alive. I promise."

In that instant, everything went still. A strange thought, in a silent, frozen sea of the dead, but not an unfamiliar one. Dani had stood in the presence of things so much larger than she could even dream before. She had felt them in the eyes of a startled doe, known them in the laughter of the goddess Hela.

Stillness. Silence. Nose to nose with Power and not even a viewing glass between.

Dani didn't breathe but she didn't hold her breath either. She waited and she was. For an endless moment, she simply was. Then, flame brushed Dani's cheek like her mother's finger or an eagle's wing, and left Dani certain. Rachel knew.

After that, covering fire-bright hair with a white sheet again, closing the silver drawer on another life went easily. The body in the drawer wasn't Rachel. Just a shell. What remained of the Starchilde, of Nate's time-lost sort-of sister, didn't linger here.

As much as she might have wanted to see Storm again, her mentor wouldn't be in Wakanda any more than Rachel and Sam were here, and Dani'd never gotten to know T'Challa well enough to want to invade the man's grief. Here was as good as anywhere.

Less overcome than just kind of done with carrying the weight of it all, Dani slid down the wall into the loose, elbow-to-knee posture her team and her teachers knew for listening. That her head tipped back against the wall, eyes lifted, might've clued them in to other things going on behind raven-dark eyes, but not that many people would've made bold to ask.

Her fingers twitched against her bicep, the remains of some long-ago gesture crutch, as one of them appeared in front of her - as larger-than-life as she'd been in life, cape a waterfall off proud shoulders that had never seemed too slim for her huge sense of duty. Not to Dani, anyway.

"Hey, 'Ro," she said aloud, tears in her voice at the soft, silvery echo of reality from her own mind. It almost made her wish she weren't alone so she could borrow someone else's memories. Almost.

She was pretty sure she couldn't get away with saying she was sorry, not even to a projection of Storm, so she didn't try. "I probably should've seen this coming. Maybe I would have, if Hope had gotten to me sooner." That fell wrong on her own ears and she shrugged uncomfortably, tugged on her braid. "The thing is, I didn't. It was like, after Jean, Death was done with you all." Her teachers, the first generation, the giants whose shoulders her team had stood on…the broken, determined people who'd picked her up every time she fell.

"But it's got you and the Professor..." A breath. Her eyes closed against the truth of it. "I'm scared." Strange's fearless, aren't you? felt like mockery now. "I'm scared it's going to take Cable and Cyke, too."

'Ro's expression didn't waver as the projection tipped its head down to Dani. It didn't speak, but she could feel the weight of the words, the unspoken questions, though they weren't even echoes. Just a different kind of projection.

What was she going to do about it?

"I don't know."

The projection looked back at her, the unflinching gaze so damned clear. She'd pulled her from the day Dani'd told her and Rogue she wouldn't join their team.

Of course she had.

"Seriously? Screw you." It wasn't Storm she spoke to then, but her own mind that had picked that particular time and place. Because she'd known then, too. There'd been no question, despite the vicious struggle in her Cheyenne Valkyrie heart, from the moment they'd asked. There'd been no question since Hope broke the cage. She'd already said it to Rachel, hadn't she?

Protect the next generation. Support her teachers and friends, but her place, as it had been then, was with their future. With their hope. This time, it was just a little more literal.

"Scott's going to try to follow them," she said, since the 'what's next?' was patently obvious. "I'll do what I can."

Sighing, Dani pushed herself up to her feet as she let the projection fade. "The cape's still a tactical nightmare." I'm really going to miss you, 'Ro.

Even without her senses feeding her mixed-up inside-out upside-down and still perfectly true information, or Limbo's tortured landscapes to shake off, it took Dani a minute to orient herself with all the new information coming at her, the background, low-level awareness of Hope and the Phoenix almost twinned to each other. Being in a still new-to-her place didn't help much, but she'd always had good spatial awareness.

Trying to focus through the noise, Dani leaned against the wall in the corridor, tucked out of sight in case of medical personnel mistaking baggage for wooziness. Strange hadn't given her those exercises yet, so she fell back on the ones that Cable had tried to teach her eons ago, it seemed like. The Askani patterns had never helped all that much, but the one she remembered emleaped/em into her mind now, copper and touched with Phoenix-fire.

Weird.

But she did feel a lot clearer. So, whatever. Here and now, she'd take all the extra advantages she could get.

Letting out a slow breath, Dani pushed off the wall, squared her shoulders, and tucked her braids back over them. She set off at a sharp clip, boots loud on the floors of the too-quiet corridor.

Next stop: Stubborn Self-Martyring Summers Number One.

She turned a corner, felt the sheer, impenetrable cliff face she'd always associated with… Yep, Emma. She really should have seen that coming. Guess that ruled out precog. Too bad. With Dom dead, they could definitely have used it.

It felt like her entire face reassembled itself in the five seconds before their gazes met. It must've looked like it, too, since Emma kind of hesitated mid-step, then shook her head before she put her foot down, gliding forward as if she'd never had an indecisive second in her life.

"Danielle."

Of course. The words might be different but the battle hadn't changed.

"Dani."

But now that she had to stop, talk to the Queen Bitch, Dani noticed stuff. Like how her voice sounded rougher than Dani'd ever heard it. A charcoal smudge on Emma's white halter down by her waist from rubbing tears from her eyes and smearing her eyeliner after. A red droplet on her left shoulder that was blood, Scott's. "Huh."

Emma's face did the rearranging thing, going from cool composure to the usual talking-to-Dani annoyance.

"All these years, I wondered how you did it," Dani said with a tiny smart-ass smile. Mostly because Emma expected it from her.

Arms crossed over her chest, Emma played her part: waiting. I am not going to ask, Danielle.

Dani shrugged, mirrored Emma's posture and supplied the answer to the question Emma wouldn't ask, "Kept your whites so white," with just a hint of grudging admiration in the snark.

"What?" Emma's perfectly manicured brows (still, in the middle of battle for the world, seriously, how?) pinched together in confusion.

A slender, cool thread of power touched Dani's mind, probing.

Huh. Dani's eyes widened. Startled doe, Black Eagle would have said, but shit. She could feel that. She wouldn't have, before. Not from Emma. It was weird enough to earn a real answer: "When you didn't let Scott see you cry before, you smeared your eyeliner on your top."

Pinch turned into crease, and Emma's lips joined her brows in frowning. "That was three days ago."

Dani's shoulders tensed, frown matched Emma's. "Were you wearing that top?"

The feeling of clarity, triumph, hit Dani before she saw it on Emma's face. "Psychometric telempathic echoes," Emma said, sounding like she needed a punch in the jaw, and her smirk made Dani's fist twitch, offering it. "We haven't seen that from you since you were in your teens. I guess you can teach an old dog old tricks."

Huh. Props to me. Always thought the white was a telepathic projection, Dani thought, and idly but loudly wondered what kind of bleach Emma used while she said, "And a few new ones."

That sent Emma right back to pissy schoolteacher, back as straight as the stick up her ass. If you have something to say, spit it out, came the crystal clear thought from Emma.

"Bet you want me to spit it out," Dani said, maybe sing-songed, just a little.

Any time now. We do have a planet to save from extinction. "That would be pleasant."

"Before the Sh'iar destroy the planet?" Dani hooked her hand around her opposite elbow, cocked a hip and smirked.

"Danielle, you are-"

"Trying your patience. Yeah, Emma. I know."

Emma's eyes widened like one of Doug's anime characters. Pretty funny, really, until Dani felt Emma's shields slam up and cut off the contact between them. Then she swallowed kinda hard at the violent psionic confirmation of what Strange had been suggesting.

"You can hear me," Emma ground out. Dani couldn't feel her anymore but she looked like Dani'd hit her square in the pride.

"Alex, tell her what she's won." She wouldn't be Dani if she just let it go.

"'Props to me, then,'" Emma said, in the exact same tone Dani'd thought it, because that was how it went between them. So was Dani's free hand making vaguely rude finger gestures of get on with it, Emma. "You may recall I said you were a latent telepath when I first worked with you."

"Along with a lifetime supply of Acme Best Bleach, the White Queen has won an all expenses paid trip to Smugsville."

"Oh, do shut up."

Dani just grinned at her, white teeth flashing like flirting with a rival at a forty-nines. She held it a beat, then let it go, focus sharpening to lasers. "You're not fooling anyone, you know. The shields. The pristine white."

Emma's gaze narrowed just as dangerously. "Maybe you'd like to take this up after we stop the extinction of the Summers clan."

A band tightened around Dani's chest, squeezing off her breath. Point scored. Points. Lots of them. Still, it didn't stop her from saying, "There's blood on your hands. So much you can't sleep without smelling it and the smoke," when the clench loosened. "You're terrified."

The White Queen froze over, clipped voice bleeding frost. "I should backhand you for that."

"And I should beat you to a bloody pulp for what you did to my kids." That was almost pleasant. It sounded almost pleasant. Dani's head cocked, gaze slid past Emma pointedly to the door to Scott's office. "But that would just be awkward."

The ice thawed, Emma's hackles smoothed, but her voice took on a protective note. The shift to block Dani's view of the door probably wasn't even intentional. "You're going to see him?"

"I wouldn't advise trying to stop me."

"I wouldn't dream of it," came the cool response, and He needs all the friends he can get right now. Especially the ones that won't let him pretend he's all right, the warmer unshielded thought.

Dani blinked. Oooo-kay. That wasn't good. Emma not shielding about Scott was pretty much the definition of not good. She wouldn't give Emma the satisfaction of biting her lip, but her, "I'll do what I can," came softer.

You'll help. You always do. It's who you are, Emma thought, but her steady, cool, "I appreciate that," sounded grudging. Normal.

Shaking her head, Dani gave up the game and started past her to Scott's office. Normal was all well and good. Sometimes, it was the best thing for everyone, even if it meant her and Emma ten seconds from the world's nastiest catfight. But they did have the planet and their people to save.

Dani got two steps down the hall and then turned to look across her shoulder at the woman who suddenly seemed much smaller in her wake. "Thanks, Emma. I'm glad Hope gave me my powers back too."

Dani waited until the click of Emma's heels carried her out of range to let out a sigh, drop her shoulders and rub the grit of pride, grief and anger from her eyes. If she'd seen tear stains and Scott's blood on Emma, whose would she see on Scott? Her lips trembled against the aching press of too many answers, the strain of too many losses for any of them to bear.

And it was just getting started.

That one thought played over and over, not a mantra but a scourge, flaying at her calm and determination until her body sagged under the lash. She'd just about given into it, palm pressed to the tired wood of Scott's office door, just about walked away from that cat o' nine tails ripping into her when the chair creaked behind it, and she could almost see Scott bowed over his desk, hand over his face, trying to breathe through the pain.

And it's just getting started, flew at her through the crack she'd made by pushing against the door.

The salt-ache in her jaw washed away and the dark fog over her mind cleared on the bright burn of Dani's own anger, her unyielding never-say-die rising up in the face of Scott's despair. Better. Yeah. She watched him from the doorway a few beats, quiet, presence shielded, while she steeled herself to face the wreck of her mentor and C.O.

Dredging up a smile and some sass, Dani pushed the door all the way open. "Someone hasn't been getting his beauty sleep."

Startled, Scott lifted his head. Her power flared out at him, blazed through shredded shields. The lenses didn't hide the flicker of life in tired eyes, not to Dani. Not when desperation felt like desire.

He watched her watching him and the tiniest sliver of smile quirked at the corner of his mouth. "Dani."

"In the flesh."

His stubborn jaw softened, gave away another hint of a smile, like he couldn't help himself. But his mind flexed and flared at her, filled with anxiety, too. "You need something?"

If anything, she exaggerated the casualness of her lean in his doorway. "Yep."

Funny how after all these years of never seeing his eyes, she could read the lift of an eyebrow in the crease of his forehead. Dani grinned, small but genuine, and shrugged at him. "Hey, you're the one who asked a yes or no question." One hand still on the door frame, the other gestured at him. "Got a few minutes for your favorite X-trash collector?"

His head cocked, confusion in his face, and then she heard the memory surface - Dani's team. Cleaning up our messes. He nodded abruptly and offered her the chair across the desk from him with a weary, wary, arc of his hand. "The Sh'iar aren't any closer now than they were an hour ago. Sit. What's on your mind?"

Dani tilted her head almost to her shoulder, tapped finger to her temple, without sitting. "You're a smart guy." Her chin jerked in acknowledgment pulling her body straight with it. "You tell me."

The Shit. Of course, she doubted he'd ever say blared out at her as his face crumpled and took his shoulders with them. "Dani, I'm sorry." He stood up, but his hands didn't leave the desk. "I'm so sorry about-"

Flatly: "Don't."

Scott's thoughts went bleak, ash gray, again. She's pissed. Why wouldn't she be? I just killed her-

Sighing, Dani advanced on him, moving through the office space with a will and a purpose that had him backing a step. "Can we just skip the Good Will Hunting here and get to the part where you realize I'm on your side?"

His forehead ticked slightly, which Dani took for a blink from the surprise in his mind, and then he laughed, rough, like he'd forgotten how and shook his head. "Missed the way you cut right to the chase, Moonstar. It's… refreshing."

She bet. Not that the flash of a conversation with Logan in his hesitation had been less than straightforward, but definitely not friendly. Dani countered it with a teasing "That mean we're skipping to the hugging, Cyke?" that didn't hide the shared grief underneath.

When he didn't answer her except to tense his shoulders, Dani closed on him. Her arms slid around Scott before he could block or protest, and the first brutal spike of I can't gave way on a heaving sigh as he dragged her even closer.

For a good minute, she couldn't breathe to speak with Scott's heart pounding frantically under her cheek and his mind screaming needs he'd never in a million years admit. She got it. She didn't do hold me either. But where Emma needed normal, Scott needed something he couldn't have anymore, because the two people who'd given it to him - the Professor and Jean - were gone. Emma didn't count.

"It really isn't your fault, Scott," she finally said when she put a few inches between them, just enough she could see his face.

He took a deep breath, looked over her head at what she was pretty sure was nothing here and now. "I shot the Professor."

No flinching. Not now. Dani didn't do dishonesty anymore than she did hold me. "Yeah. You did."

He looked down at her, uncertainty in his mind and his voice when he asked, "You're not pissed?"

Dani shrugged. "Sure I am. Just not at you."

He didn't ask. The tension in the forearm under her hand and the ashen-gray, red lava-cracked desolation of his mind said he didn't really want to talk about it if she didn't need to.

Too bad.

"He was like a father to you," she went on, not hammering at him or probing with her power, and not good enough with the new piece of it to listen through the wailing winds for anything that didn't rise to the level of conscious thought. All she really heard was his tense-jawed, ruthless Summers' control fighting its way back in place. "If you shot him, after you'd already lost Ray and with Nathan and Hope, Alex, and maybe Nate on the chopping block, you did the right thing."

Scott jerked, shoulders hunching like she'd punched him in the gut. When pulled his hand away from her side, his fingers shook.

Dani just kept talking. A lot of words for her, but her less is more snark wasn't going to cut it here. "So yeah. I'm pissed. I'm pissed that you had to kill him. I'm pissed that Sam, 'Ro, Rachel, paid for why you had to. I'm pissed that a lot more people are gonna die. I'm pissed that Hope's spending what might be her last days with Nathan saving the world instead."

She tipped her head up. Even if she couldn't see his eyes, she wanted him to see the truth in hers. "Pissed at a lot of things, Scott. Just not pissed at you."

He staggered back half a step, lips pressed so tight together they all but disappeared. That and it's just getting started resurfaced, along with Scott's desperation, his commitment, his exhaustion, and even a little thread of relief that she would be here when they were all gone.

Oh, hell no, he didn't. Her temper flared to life again, or maybe it was the Phoenix's, since she did kinda feel like Jean just then. "Not that I don't appreciate you being my biggest fan, Cyke, but gotta tell you, it's not going down like that."

Nostrils flaring, Scott snapped his head up, gaze front and center. "What?"

"Want me to say it slower?" she sassed, sharp with anger, bright with determined affection. "It's. Not. Going. Down. Like. That." Because she could, Dani explained, "You going down with the good ship SS Summers. Not happening."

"Dani..."

"Did you forget I can sense a deathglow?" Truth, she wasn't sure she still could, and she didn't do treaty talk, but for this... Just like she'd do hold me because he needed it, if it rattled his death-grip on martyrdom, she'd let him think she knew something.

It didn't, she didn't think, but it did shake him enough to swear, "Shit. Dani," which she counted as a pretty major accomplishment. "Your powers."

She felt her mouth curve with an unfamiliarly easy, almost sweet smile. "It's okay."

"It's not okay. It's not. I'm sorry-"

Dani punched him in the arm. Lightly, but punched him anyway. "I'm pretty sure I said don't."

Didn't work though, not this time. This time he out-stubborned her and kept right on talking over her fiercest mock-scowl. "I'm sorry the first thing I said to you had to be 'I'm sorry' and not 'congratulations.'"

"This can only end in tears," she said dryly, but she'd let him talk. His mind tasted licorice-strong with how much he wanted to.

"God-" He raked a hand through his hair and sort of paced without moving. Nate did it sometimes. It was kind of cute, so obviously she crossed her arms impatiently. "With everything you've been through, you deserve some kind of a medal. Volunteering like that-"

"Not a big jewelry fan," Dani cut him off. "Save it for the Queen B-"

Scott's scrunched forehead, his hidden lifted eyebrow stopping her again. He was still her C.O. "We should be planning a celebration, not a war."

The sting of tears (for Sam and Ray and 'Ro, and maybe just a little bit for being able to feel how sincere he was, how much he wanted her to hear him, fine) had her biting the inside of her cheek until it stopped. "You can buy me a beer or three when this is all over," she said, fighting for normal - for herself this time. That was probably why she added, "I'll even let Emma come," after a beat.

Scott's lips twitched with another tiny smile, but this one felt more real. "Did I mention, it's really good to have you back?"

Instead of telling him she never left, she held up her thumb and forefinger, about a half inch apart. "Little bit." Then she leaned her hip against the desk, giving them both some breathing space. "Know what I'm sorriest about?"

"What?" The look he gave her was vaguely suspicious.

"That I didn't punch Logan when I was still a godkiller."

Scott let out a snort of choked laughter, and she joined him. Their laughter sounded and felt a little more manic than anything, but it was still good. When you forgot how to laugh, you started to die. And Dani didn't plan to let that happen.

In the end, even though Dani had been kept in the loop, it took far more than 'a few minutes' to say everything that needed to be said, and even then there'd been the matter of what to do with Blink. Flatly, they needed a teleporter of her skill and precision. Just as flatly, Clarice wanted nothing to do with an enemy powerful enough to take and use her like Selene had. She'd hurt too many people and while she trusted Dani and her team to watch her and keep her on the level, there wouldn't be time for that against the Sh'iar.

While Scott was desperate bastard enough to call Thor for her, neither he nor Dani had it in them to force a piece as damaged as Clarice back into play. He'd left it to Dani to see what, if anything, her self-shriving teleporter would be willing to do.

The call to Thor had led Dani to, of all places, the Valley of the Sun. It made a certain sense, if she thought about it. Wealthy Midwesterners went to Metro-Phoenix to die, and Hela always had preferred to take souls when they passed naturally. But the Indian casino Blink dropped them out to, well, the irony, for Dani, was pretty damned staggering.

They'd been standing there looking out over the newly constructed portal to Hel (construction was the second major industry in this part of Arizona, old folks' services being the first) for a good ten minutes, talking in fits and spurts about what Clarice would do against the Sh'iar (a lot more than Dani or Scott had expected) and what she wouldn't (be anywhere near the main offensive, which made sense) when Clarice finally said, "You're stalling."

Dani glanced along her shoulder at her, the twist of her smile wry. "You think?"

"Yes."

"I was kidding."

"I am not," Clarice said. She was like that. Playful one minute and deadly serious the next, not unlike Dani. "I should go with you."

Eyebrow at her hairline, Dani shot that right down. "No." Clarice wouldn't go near the Sh'iar but she'd go with Dani to Hel, to see a goddess who might have been Selene's sister? "Thanks, but no."

"You don't trust me?"

Maybe they didn't need a hundred years of baggage for her to start challenging like Yana. Dani rolled her eyes and elbowed Blink in the ribs. "I don't trust her. The last thing she needs is a teleporting champion for Hel."

Those pupilless glowing green eyes would've been unnerving if a lick of power didn't tell Dani the appreciative drift of her teammate's thoughts. "Thank you," Clarice said finally, dipping her chin. "I will wait for you here."

"If this works, I'll need a portal for two." A smile, strained, but affectionate crossed Dani's lips. "You can do flying horses, right?"

In response, Blink rolled her eyes, formed a glowing, crystalline pink javelin and tossed it at Dani. An instant later, Dani stood at the foot of the stairs ascending to a penthouse above the casino.

"You couldn't have dropped me at the door?" she complained pointlessly to the absent Blink, the words shattering the quiet and Dani's nerves. Probably, Blink couldn't have. Hela's illusions weren't penetrable for most mortals. Another way Dani had always been different, destined to serve according to Hela.

When she got to the top of the stairs, the door swung open. Just like when Cable (or Nate) did shit like that, Dani had to fight the temptation to knock anyway or make Hela come to her.

Power games with Hela would be even more pointless than complaining to Blink. What would be, would be. Dani'd known that coming in, and now she straightened her braids, pushing them over the shoulders of her battered suede jacket. Chin up, she let her mind go through the open door first, found Hela, but the goddess's mind, as always, remained shielded.

Also, as always, she wore venomous black and green where she lounged on a raised dais with other couches, lower and spread all around, like a spider in a web waiting for supper. Fitting for Hela. She did like to spin her plots and lure her prey. Nothing like the Navajo's Grandmother Spider, singer of all, Hela's webs destroyed, instead of making stars from dew.

Inwardly, Dani sighed and directed a less than ironic prayer for strength to her own ancestral gods, and even the one who'd come for her once in Asgard, but there was nothing the strange spirit of the dog soldiers, the Anasazi, Hotamintanio, could do for her here. She'd be chewed up in this meeting. She could only hope she'd be spit out, gristle and bones sent back to do the work she'd come for help with.

"Hello, Hela. That's a mouthful, you know. You should think about changing your name."

Apparently unimpressed, or unsurprised by the greeting (she had met Dani before after all), Hela barely stirred from her cushions. "Danielle, to what do I owe the honor?

Oh, here we go. Dani rolled her eyes and then lifted an eyebrow for good measure. Nothing like some good old-fashioned bravado to get you through. "Like you don't know."

"Pfft," Hela replied with a wave of one hand - the one that was actually beautiful, without the cloak, Dani thought she remembered. Did Hela prefer that side, could that be used strategically, sometime? Her self-soothing tactical thoughts were rudely interrupted by Hela continuing, "The threatened end of human, or at least mutant, life as we know it is no reason to be uncivil. Sit. I'll have coffee brought."

All the stories said don't accept invitations, don't eat while you're in Hel, Hell, Hades, etc. They also said don't piss off goddesses by being rude. Classic catch-22. Even though she couldn't feel the Phoenix in Hela's dimension-shifted penthouse, Dani figured between it and the whole thing with the Disir, she could risk a cup of coffee. So she sat, but kept her feet firmly on the ground. "Fine, but if you're expecting me to say it's good to see you or you're looking well, you'll be waiting a long time."

The goddess cocked her head, black-painted smile looking more cruel than amused. "Do you always insult people you've come to ask a favor of?

"Yes."

"Of course you do," Hela said, shook her head and sighed, like Emma playing at disappointed schoolmarm.

It didn't work any better for Hela than for Emma. Even all but drooling over the scent of her favorite extra whip, extra shot, Oreo mocha the servant set by her hand, Dani still served up sass. "It keeps them off balance." (And it kept her from feeling like a charity case, but since she'd come prepared to beg on Hope and Scott's account, that wasn't really the point.)

"Less so when you explain." Hela folded her hands in her lap without looking even a little bit demure. "It does tend to give the game away."

"That's all right, since there's no game," Dani said with an overly casual shrug. She gave in to the lure of the coffee, took a sip, and realized all at once just how tired she was. It tasted really good, like a Blizzard met a Red Bull and gave birth to the ultimate Sugar-Caffeine High, and the heat on her hands and chocolate on her tongue soothed a lot more than tactical analysis of Hela's potential weaknesses. "I want something, you're going to give it to me, and the rest is just details."

Weirdly eerie power-filled laughter echoed off the vaulted ceilings of the penthouse. "Surely you're not calling me a whore."

"No, I was calling me one." After the day she'd had, what was one more staredown with a cosmic power? Might as well call a spade a spade and Dani didn't even blink over the wry twist of her smile. "More of a sacred prostitute really, at this point. But that's just quibbling."

Hela laughed again, almost like a normal person this time. Take away the cape and the whole multi-level seating power trip and it wasn't that different from talking to Illyana on a Darkchilde day. You just keep telling yourself that, Dani.

"Very well," Hela said when her laughter faded away. "What is it that you want?

Straightforward. Dangerous with god types, but in all, Dani'd rather piss her off directly than offend her by accident. She rested her coffee on her knee, not caring if it sloshed or left a ring on her jeans, and met her gaze full on. "Everything you can give me."

Hela didn't move anything but one slim eyebrow.

"It's-" Vegas. "-an Indian casino." Dani told herself not to ask how Hela liked the new view. "Go big or go home."

Still doing her best impression of a statue, Hela asked, "And why should I grant you anything, let alone that much?"

Dani shrugged one shoulder a lot more casually than she felt, like none of it mattered, even though it might be the difference between Hope's life and her death. Or Scott's. "Because if I die, you'll have to find another packhorse for Valkyrie souls."

Finally, Hela broke the gaze lock and sipped the drink that Dani doubted was coffee, really. "That matter's been taken care of."

Huh. Somehow not what Dani expected. It made her bold to say, "I wouldn't stack your chips too high on that one. The Asgardians are always up to something." It wasn't much, but it might mean something to Hela, so Dani offered up, "Plus Val's been acting pretty squirrelly."

Hela didn't do anything so obvious as tap a finger to her lips or hmm out loud, but her gaze narrowed, and Dani could tell she'd said something interesting. Especially when Hela came out with, "You may have a point," but then she went and added, "Still, there are others who can do what you do."

Easy come, leverage, easy go. "Yeah, but housebreaking a new bitch is messy. And let's be real. You like me, or I'd be dead already."

"I could enjoy your company just as easily if you were dead, you realize," the goddess said dryly.

"But you couldn't threaten to kill me," Dani returned, equally deadpan.

"True."

It wasn't riddles or winning contests, but this wasn't Dani's first rodeo. She almost tapped an impatient foot when she stopped the bullshit posturing for the bargaining: "So?"

As if she were bored, Hela drawled, "The return of your full Valkyrie powers, a big sword, and 'a ride home', I believe it was the last time. In exchange for a boon to be claimed later."

She already had the sword and the armor when Hela felt like letting her use them, and Brightwind occasionally, plus the extra strength and durability. "That and sixty guilders worth of beads buys you a square millimeter of Manhattan, a venti Starbucks latte, and one really pissed off barrista."

Nostrils flaring just enough to show a little annoyance, Hela said, "Charming, Danielle," and gestured with her cup for Dani to get on with it.

Maybe she should've pretended to think about it, or asked for more than she needed, but they didn't have time for games. Plus, there wasn't a lot of 'more' with, "What I've already got, as much power as you can, uh, bestow, and as much of your soul as you can spare."

Hela's eyes widened, mouth pulling wide with surprise. She leaned forward, fingers tapping against her thigh, and her, "Why on earth would I let you carry my soul again?" sounded like she'd been power-swapping with Thor.

"Because I'm charming." The glib response came automatically, as self-protective as an empathic glamor that said nothing to see here, just your average Cheyenne. The real answer was a hell of a lot more dangerous, but Dani kind of had to give it. This time, she managed something like polite - white people polite with her voice and Cheyenne polite with her gaze below Hela's eyes. "Because if the Sh'iar wipe out humanity trying to exterminate the mutants, there'll be no Midgard for the Asgardians to screw with and you'll be worse than dead. You'll be irrelevant."

Yeah, she didn't like that. The nasty, poisonous smile was a dead giveaway. But Hela knew truth when she heard it. She conceded the point with a huff of a sigh and a tip of her hand. "In exchange for being my champion."

Not good, maybe better than boons to be named later, but open-ended meant forever and then some. "For how long?"

"As long as I require your services," Hela replied, as haughty as Emma in the front foyer of the Hellfire Club.

"A year," Dani countered, and then immediately thought of another caveat. "When this over."

Well into it, and apparently enjoying herself, Hela demanded, "Two years, when it's over. Win or lose."

"If we win." If they didn't, Dani'd be dead. She didn't want to be brought back to serve. "If we lose, we renegotiate."

"Presumptuous."

"Hey, we've already agreed you're not going to kill me. And I've got nothing to lose the Sh'iar aren't already threatening to kill. I can afford to be presumptuous."

For a breath, maybe longer, Dani saw something soften in Hela. Her mind, which usually remained closed, opened enough for Dani to feel something almost compassionate from the goddess of death. "A part of my soul, all the power I can spare, your armor and weapons, until the battle with the Shi'ar is over, in exchange for your services as my champion for two years if the battle is won. If it's lost, we renegotiate-" Hela paused and collected Dani's gaze. "-assuming there's anything left to negotiate with.

Maybe a final offer, maybe not. "And I get Brightwind. For good. As long as he wants to stay with me."

Hela eyed her. Dani could almost hear her thinking really, you'd jeopardize all of this for a horse?

Dani shrugged. If she had to be Hela's champion, she wanted her partner. "Every little girl wants a flying talking pony."

"You realize what I am risking?" Hela demanded, emotion breaking over the 'professional' negotiator-face that had nothing to do with the horse that didn't even belong to her.

"No guts, no glory," Dani shot back. She spoke smartass like a second language, but she also knew when it was time to stop, so she put her coffee aside again and said steadily, "Yeah, Hela, I do. I know what I'm asking you for." And the value of what she was giving up, but she couldn't think about that now. Couldn't think about the costs. "I also know that Thor's helping us. If you help us and we win, that's gotta be good for something with the rest of the God Squad."

Hela sighed and she actually sounded tired. "Fine, and the 'flying talking pony'." Before Dani got too triumphant, Hela lifted a finger. "Three years."

"Three years. Sure." Dani's heart pounded in her chest, her lungs squeezed down to almost nothing again at the thought of three years of her life in hock to Hela, at her beck and call when her people might need her, but she managed a cheeky "What difference does it make?" as the goddess's power descended on her. "Thirty is still the old thirty."

Cheeky was the last thing she felt by the time she returned still wearing her Valkyrie armor, via Scott's office for a tactical update, to her own room. Decorating hadn't been on the top of the priority list, which made the familiar but unfamiliarly placed barefoot figure on her bed all the more obvious when she flipped on the light. And more welcome. She told herself it was that, and nothing about him making it feel more like home. More hers. Mostly because her ribs already felt too tight.

Unusually, he got off the first shot as he pulled himself upright and closed his book. "Wild stab in the dark. You're not going to stop doing the Valkyrie thing any time soon."

Even though he sounded the same as always, wry, he felt Summers-y. The prickliness of worry overlying the gray fog of sorrow shot through with the metallic taste of fear, with a unique lightness of curiosity and bubbling heat. It wasn't until after she took off her headdress and asked, "What are you doing here?" that she realized-

She could feel him.

If she tried, she could hear the babble of his thoughts and they were all about her. Her day, what she'd been through, how she looked, how much-

"You got your powers back," he was saying, blue eyes focused intently on her, mind full of aching want and wonder. "You think I was going to be anywhere else?"

The feel of him thinking that she'd probably toughed out everything that she'd been through, that she'd need someone who she didn't need to be brave for...it was so full and rich and real, warm but not as bluff and solid as Sam, sharp and jagged in places, like her. It stalled her mind and her tongue, made the, "Blink, right?" come out delayed, confused, instead of penetrating like she meant it to.

"No, not Blink," he said, and it felt, as much as sounded, mulish and defensive. "Me. I asked her to bring me-"

It was too much. Too much information. Too much 'd never felt anything like this before. Never felt him before. "Nate."

"I wanted to be here." He just kept talking, feeling, filling her mind in ways that no one else except Hope seemed to be able to do. "I wanted to be here-" When he stood, she remembered again how tall he was, how big, and that mattered somehow that she couldn't have put into words. But her fingers itched to reach for him. "-because even if we never say it and we're not sleeping together-"

"Nate." Desperately, Dani tried again to stop him, put the headdress down on the chair (it wasn't magicking away, just then, maybe because it was hers again, she didn't care).

"You're my girlfriend and I should just BE-"

Needing to stop the noise, needing to touch him, not sure which, Dani lifted her hand and put it over his mouth.

Nate flushed.

The stew of his emotions got thicker, spicier, until Dani needed to taste it. Balancing against his broad chest, palm over the span of his tattoo, Dani lifted onto her toes and kissed him hello. It came rushing back at her, the mixed up smells having shapes and thoughts having colors from the morning, and Nate's mouth under hers tasted like the most important part of Hope's everything.

"Here," Nate half-whispered into her kiss, then took a slow breath. She felt it against her tingling lips when he let it out again.

How had she never noticed the way he looked at her before? The depth in those white-boy blue eyes and the Cheyenne respect there? How had she missed the tenderness in the stroke of his hand down her arm, or the fact she didn't flinch from the intimacy of his fingers straightening her braid and laying it flat against her shoulder?

The answers swarmed her like a cloud of stirred hornets, but they were all cover for the single, simple, truth. She'd been deaf and blind, feeling her way with mitten-swaddled fingertips, until Hope uncaged her.

"I was going to call," slipped out instead of the I'm so sorry his patience with her and his losses deserved.

He tilted his head, gave her a curious, crooked little smile with his fingers still holding the end of her braid. "No you weren't."

"Probably not," she admitted. But a surprise to her: "I wanted to." She wanted him, she realized. All day she'd been pushing at the awareness of Scott and Nathan the lingering touch of the Phoenix left her with, trying to find Nate. Dani didn't know how to tell him that, not in words, but her fingers had already begun unbuttoning his shirt. "They have a dress code around here no one mentioned to me?"

That summoned a little smirk from him, and she felt him waver, then decide to risk the caress of his thumb along her cheekbone. "No hot chicks to impress."

"Done trying to impress me?" she asked, eyebrows lifting as she fell back into the comfortable, familiar banter with him that didn't feel comfortable or familiar at all. Layered, like the scent of the mountains after a rain. Potent, like stirring embers in a bonfire that'd burned down before putting new wood on it. "Can't decide if that's good or insulting."

"You weren't here." It tasted obvious, sharp and at the same time casual, like a shrug and who else would I be flirting with?

Three simple words. Three words she hadn't realized she'd been waiting for and the thing that stoked her fire was that he'd probably said them dozens of times in dozens of ways. She just hadn't heard him. Hadn't been able to. "Here now," came her answer in a hot murmur of lips and teeth against his collarbone.

Whoa. Her eyes widened, fingers twitched and twisted in his shirt at the arousal spike in Nate, desire so intense it pulled her power to him and left her breathless.

"Dani?" Nate sounded like he felt, voice rough and hungry, aroused and maybe a little scared, too.

"You don't want to get naked?" Dani asked, trying for wry and hitting somewhere around wary. So, okay. Yeah. She was maybe a little scared, too.

The answering flare from Nate scorched the Phoenix-scoured pathways in her reawakened brain. She couldn't help grinning (hey, sue her, no one had ever wanted her like this, not first, most, so much that no one else existed, or if they had, she hadn't had the powers-sensitivity to know it) as he stumbled through his, "No. I mean, yes. YES. I just..." into a full-stop.

For the longest minute of the longest day since the one she'd lost her powers, Nate just looked at her. Like he'd never seen her before, it felt like, and her shoulders slowly tensed under the scrutiny, climbed toward her ears under the heavy weight of her armor. Then something in him shifted and his voice went soft. "Are you sure?" Protective. Of her.

Yes.

"I'm your girlfriend." What? Wanting Nate like air and water didn't make her not Dani. If he expected her to suddenly turn into a cuddly simpering idiot, he didn't know her at all. "And we should probably talk about that. And some other things."

But her hands had the touch of his skin, her power the taste of his mind, and her body felt heavy with need. She'd wanted him before now. She just hadn't been sure enough of him. Now she was. "In a few hours."

His eyebrow lifted. "And you're not just reacting to the sensory and emotional overload of-"

"NATE." Her eyes flashed, but she was laughing. He wouldn't stop pulling his pseudo-shamanic therapeutic crap on her any more than she'd become a kitten. (Most of the time.)

"In a few hours," he said with a rough laugh. "Right. Yeah." His gaze went to where he'd been fiddling with the breastplate of her armor. She let him struggle with it until he finally gave up with a horny, exasperated huff of, "How do you get this thing off?"

This time when she willed it off, it went. Left just Dani. Just Dani, smiling at Nate, because he wanted her. He had, since before she got her powers back. Would have, if she'd never gotten them back. She knew.

"Have I mentioned how good you look in your jeans? Not that you don't look good in the armor. You look good in everything and..." His brows pinched, lips twisted in a pained, apologetic smile. "Inside voice."

She laughed again and patted his chest. "It won't help. At least not 'til whatever the Phoenix aura does to me is gone. I can hear you thinking."

"That's terrifying." Nate paused, face turning crimson. "So you heard the part about-"

Him wondering what color her underwear was? "Red."

"Fuck." His hand covered his eyes, but then it was on her, with his other one, lifting off her shirt. When he inhaled, the raggedness of it tore through them both, and he had to steady himself with his lips against her pulse. "Dani."

I know, Nate. I love you, too, she answered his unspoken thought, but what she said was, "Not tonight."

He pushed back from her, pushed her back to arms' length. "I thought you wanted-"

"I do," she told him, no room for doubt in her voice. Still. She glanced down at her fingers stroking the edges of his shirt like he had her braid. "Just not... those three words." She'd heard the three she needed and those three needed to wait. "Not tonight."

Nate cocked his head at her. Not mad, but uncertain. "Why?"

No bullshit, no treaty talk, not with Nate. She shrugged, met his gaze. "Sam." If he couldn't deal with it, then-

His eyes went soft again. "Crap. Dani, I'm-"

Of course he could deal with it: you weren't here. She shook her head. "Don't."

"You're the boss," he said, striving to find his, their, balance.

"Don't do that, either. I don't want to be the boss tonight." Tired, raw, terrified of what she'd committed to, and if Scott sounded an alarm, she'd will her armor back on and slaughter every Sh'iar that ever so much as thought of shedding a drop of Hope's blood, but if she didn't have to... "I just want-"

Nate cut her off with a smile. A real, steadying smile. The one she'd grown to rely on, the one that told her she'd gotten it right even when she couldn't feel the rush of accord from her teammates. Gods, she loved that smile. She lifted her hand to his face and traced the crooked curve of it with a fingertip.

"Leave this one to me, pretty girl."

Pretty girl? Dani lifted an eyebrow at him.

"Beautiful? Hotness? Legs? Skinny?" he suggested between unhooking her bra, sliding it off, and kissing at her skin wherever he could reach.

It felt like the top of her head would fly right off, and the whole whatchamacallit with the mixing colors, scents and emotions came back again, but this time it was just Nate. Her and Nate. Together.

"I'll figure something out, goddess." His callused fingertip drew a shiver down her spine with its path from between her breasts, over her belly to the button of her fly. "Angel."

Dani swatted his shoulder (gently for her) and that led to her ruffling (okay, stroking) his hair when he crouched to take off her boots. "Sweetheart, princess, treasure..." all spilled out of his mouth on his way back up.

She shushed him with her hand hooking in the waistband on his jeans, pulling him toward her by them, then kissed him hard enough to make her head spin - and his with it, like telepathic surround sound - before she opened the fly with her gaze locked on his. Her fingers dipped to stroke the swell of him behind the half-opened zipper.

Nate exhaled a heated "Sexy."

"Sexy," Dani agreed after she stripped his jeans and boxers, the heat in her eyes not left over Phoenix-fire but months of saying no when her body screamed yes.

Less self-conscious than she expected (which, she really didn't know why she'd thought he'd be shy, since he never buttoned his shirt at home), he took a step back to look at her. "Damn." He grinned. "It's true. Summers guys get the hottest women."

Dani rolled her eyes at him, but it was kind of sweet, in the stupid way Nate was always sweet. "Now who's under the influence of the end of the world as we know it?"

"I'm not the one who needed Sh'iar warships and a mutant miracle to know I wanted this."

He went to lift her up, but she shoved him backward to the bed, straddled him and - no more waiting, not now - slid down over him with a shuddery sigh filled with the bittersweet cinnamon-orange chocolate and sage-smoked need, salted jaw-aching country-fair in summer taffy sweet first-in-a-long-time love, clawing, tearing, grasping-for-handholds uncontrolled spiraling desperation and, more than anything, crisp clean pine-cooled, sun-warmed rightness and relief.

"Shut up, Nate."

Dani?

"Again?" Dani murmured, more of a sleepy-husky laugh than a word. The world might be ending, but they couldn't possibly make up for all the lost time in the few hours before-

Are you awake?

-someone needed her for strategy meetings or talking someone through getting their powers back or stopping a speeding Summers' martyr train.

Under her cheek, Nate's heart beat steady and slow. His hand rested in the dip of her lower back, comfortably splayed like he protected her kidneys the same as he had her heart all these months. Her hand spread over his abs, possessive, now that she knew how they both felt, and protective like she had been since she first found him.

Getting out of bed couldn't possibly have been less appealing, even if he wasn't awake to make time stop for her again.

Yeah. An image of a slow-rising glow over the city skyline told her by whom and where she was needed, and Dani sighed softly, not protest, but acknowledgment. Be there soon.

For Hope, she'd abandon bed with the distaff-Summers she'd fallen for without wanting to. But not without tipping his mouth to hers - morning breath be damned - to kiss him again, stroke her fingers along his jaw and murmur, "I love you," like she hadn't before their hour and a half of sleep.

Nate roused, laughed a surprisingly fresh (must be all that vegan crap he ate) breath against her mouth, and teased, "Again? Gonna have call you 'bunny'," way too awake as he buried his hand in the unbraided mass of her hair then rolled to pull her under him.

"How fast can you be?" she groaned against his neck, wanting him and to be there for Hope equally.

In the half-light, she saw those sky-blue eyes open, realization clearing the sleep-and-sex clouds from them. His eyebrow lifted, head cocked.

She exhaled, dispelling the sensual tension in her belly. "Hope."

"Go," he said, rolling them over again as his hand smoothed down her hair and pulled her eyes closed with it.

Hope could wait another minute, she decided, and lay her cheek against his chest. X-men might lead charmed lives, but Death had come for the Professor, Jean and Storm, Sam and Rachel, so many others. If it came for her next, she wanted to take this moment with her. Wanted him to have it.

The moment passed without another ping from Hope and without more prompting from Nate. Dani kissed his chest and pulled herself from bed. Quickly, she bird-bathed in the sink, pulled on her jeans and a tank, and Nate's jacket. She didn't bother with shoes or braiding her hair, that still felt too right loose with the memory of Nate's hands in it.

When Dani emerged onto the roof, blinking at the pale gold blazing through vermilion clouds and splashing off brilliant glass, Hope cocked her head, Nate-like, and smiled at her. She had to resist the urge to lift her hand to her cheek to cover where his tattoo was probably burning brighter than the sun.

"It's not," Hope said mildly, no recrimination for how long it had taken her. She opened one hand and, above it, a pattern formed that looked familiar. A little like one of Nathan's Askani meditation forms, but also blazing Cheyenne symbols and Asgard signs in Indian copper. "It's here, though."

The pattern rotated and Dani understood: Dani's own pattern, and Nate had started to twine in through it. Her stomach growled, saving her from unnecessary intimacies. "We couldn't have done this over-"

The pattern disappeared as Hope flipped a hand back to where, "Black coffee and oatmeal," in Thermoses sat on a cinder block.

"Thanks," Dani said, not even a little bit grudging at Hope reading her mind instead of waiting for her to talk. The Phoenix aura had faded, but the sight-line telepathy stayed. Multi-layered conversation just made sense now, and if anyone had a right to be strolling her neural pathways, it was Hope. She poured a cup of coffee into the Thermos cap, breathed in the steam and then took a sip. Sighing out her bliss (what? Nate, coffee, a gorgeous sunrise...she was happy in spite of everything, sue her), she asked, "So, what's up?"

"I wanted to thank you for what you did. You know, going to Hela."

Hope still stared out at the sunrise, and Dani stayed where she was, giving her space. It didn't mean she wouldn't call her on the half-truth, though. "You're welcome. But you could have done that when I was awake and fed or without calling me up here. So, let's try that again. What's up?"

Sturdy shoulders shrugged a casual lie. "Pretty sunrise. Might not be that many left."

Teen brave face. Dani remembered it well, being stronger than people credited, wanting to be seen as stronger even than that, needing to lead and not wanting anyone to know the fear those straight shoulders didn't quite hide.

Sighing less blissfully this time, Dani stepped up to the edge of the roof beside Hope. Quiet without being patronizing, she said, "Make you a deal. You skip the treaty talk and I'll promise you everything you say stays between us."

Hope's expression turned mulish, terrifyingly like Cable when he set his mind to something. A seventeen year-old girl shouldn't have to wear a face like that. Not ever.

"Didn't want to be alone," Hope finally admitted, even quieter than Dani. She glanced along her shoulder, fear cracking the ice in her eyes. "Alone with the Phoenix."

Hands cupped around the Thermos cap, Dani nodded and took another sip, waiting to see what else Hope might have to say.

"It likes you." That sounded more like an explanation of why Dani than anything else, but then Hope tipped her head again, like she was listening for something far away but getting closer. "It kinda feels possessive, too, like it's jealous of Hela."

Great. Just what she needed. It was like she wore a cosmic Kick Me sign on her ass or she'd been implanted at birth with the divine equivalent of a loser magnet. "They can duke it out when I die."

Hope shuddered, light green eyes stricken beneath the spill of rust-red bangs. She shook her head and her fingers spasmed at her sides. "Don't die, okay?"

Dani ducked her head to catch Hope's gaze and hold it. "I'm not planning on either of us dying."

"That makes one person in my life."

Abruptly, Dani kind of wanted to punch the entire universe in the jaw. Starting with the Phoenix.

Just as abruptly, Hope surprised Dani with a grin. "You punch a lot of people."

Tracking the drift of Hope's thoughts from Dani's memory of the last time she punched Sam to their fight in the mess hall, Dani laughed. "Hey, you started that."

"Nuh-uh," Hope protested. "Well, maybe." She held out her hand for the coffee.

Dani gave it to her. She figured it was the equivalent of a completely unnecessary peacemaking, and she'd shared drinks with people she liked a lot less.

Over the rim of the plastic lid, Hope asked, "What's a cosmic loser magnet?"

Man, the kid was all over the place. Dani couldn't exactly blame her though. The amount of information buzzing through Hope's head made Dani dizzy at two removes. "If you have really bad luck with guys, like you always attract the worst kind of jerks, Amara'd call you a loser magnet." She paused and then shrugged, smiling a little. "I've got a pretty spotty track record with immortals."

"So you're a cosmic power magnet," Hope said, nodding. "I guess we both are."

From where Dani sat, carrying the Phoenix and getting pushed around by Amora or set up to kill Odin or even carrying Hela's soul weren't anything alike. Hope wasn't a magnet. She was more of... Dani tried to stop herself from thinking messiah. The last thing Hope needed when she was trying to make connections with someone, anyone was to have Dani pin a Destiny's Bitch label to her jacket.

"Nah. You're just a Summers," Dani said instead. "You can't help that the Great and Powerful Oz thinks you're the best thing since Dorothy and Toto went over the rainbow." Which really wasn't much better, but at least it was sort of funny.

"Do you ever wonder what's going to happen when you die?"

Apparently Hope didn't think so, since they were back to martyrdom. Dani sighed and took the coffee back from her to refill. "You mean again?"

Hope lifted her shoulders and, eyes squeezing shut, shook her head a little. "For good."

"Not really." Dani told herself that Hope wouldn't appreciate her folding her up in her arms. It made her think of Nate and how many times he'd probably had to pin his arms to his sides not to reach for her. "It won't change anything."

"Nate's not a loser."

Dani blinked at the abrupt change of direction. "Where did that come from?"

Hope rolled her eyes. "What's it like?"

Muttering, "What's what like?" into the coffee, Dani reached for the oatmeal with her other hand. It floated to her and she sighed. Summers telekinetics. You'd think she'd be used to it by now.

"Was it worth waiting for? You know, the sex."

Seriously? Dani just eyed her.

"What?" That was almost impish, and Dani immediately forgave Hope for prying. Even when she added, "You were broadcasting so hard every psi around had to shield."

Somehow, around the coffee she was setting down and the oatmeal she was picking up, Dani literally facepalmed. "Can we go back to talking about, oh... anything but this?"

Hope shrugged, flashing her a grin that Dani really wished she'd see more of. Crooked and sweet, like Nathan, Nate and Scott. Warm, like Jean. "Mostly everyone's happy for you. I am, anyway." The grin faded, sliding into a fragile, tragic smile. "I don't want you to be alone, if-"

"Don't." Dani dropped the oatmeal but it didn't fall, even when she threw her arms around Hope and hugged her tightly. "Just don't." She couldn't say it wouldn't happen, but if Hope wanted to know every detail of every orgasm Dani would tell her, as long as she stopped thinking about that right now.

It took a few seconds, but Hope put her arms back around Dani and just held on. Dani let out a slow breath, and eventually pressed a kiss to the top of the kid's head. Maybe the others forgot, but to Dani, she still looked like one of her students. Like Sofia.

"Dani?" Hope said quietly after a while.

"Yeah, Little Red?"

A tentatively happy warmth radiated from Hope at the nickname, like a late afternoon sun breaking through the thunderheads. "Think I'll ever have someone like Nate?"

This close, touching, Dani didn't miss the flash of a boy, devoted to Hope, who'd hid her in his closet for two years and died protecting her. Emil.

No treaty talk, but also no hesitation, Dani put Hope at arms' length so she could see the sincerity in her eyes. "If we survive this, you can count on it." Nate's tease from last night came back to her now and she smiled, brushing the hair out of Hope's face. "Being a Summers might make you Phoenix catnip, but if there's anything else you all get, it's how to love."