The morning announced itself badly.
Midoriya surfaced from unconsciousness the way you surface from deep water slowly, with resistance, and with the immediate sense that something had gone wrong while he was under. He was on the couch. His shirt was torn at the collar. There was something on his neck that he was not going to think about yet, and something on his face that smelled like lipstick.
He sat up.
His head responded to this with a firm and detailed objection.
Across the apartment, Laura was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table with the empty bottle in front of her, squinting at the label as it owed her an explanation.
"You hungover?" he asked.
"I think so." She set the bottle down. "This has never happened before."
"You're serious."
"My healing factor," She stopped. "It turned off. Whatever this was, it turned it off."
He looked at the bottle. Then at his shirt. Then, at the label, she was reading.
Irma stirred in the armchair. Celeste opened her eyes from the floor, looked at Midoriya, and went visibly pink, which, from Celeste, was genuinely alarming.
"I meant to tease you," she said. "No, " She gestured broadly at the general situation.
Irma put her face in her hands.
Laura looked between all of them. "I only brought the bottle out after things got started." A pause. "In my defense."
"That is not a defense," Irma said, muffled.
Midoriya was already standing, moving toward the bathroom. He needed to see what was on his neck before he could form any coherent thoughts about last night, and he needed to do it alone.
He closed the door. Looked in the mirror.
"Yeah," he said quietly to his reflection. "Okay."
He stood there for a moment. Then he washed his face, came back out, and tossed two bottles of water into the living room without a word. Irma caught one out of the air on reflex. Laura caught hers by hand, read the label more carefully, and made a short noise.
"It's formulated for mutants," she said. "That's why it hit us like that. The alcohol compounds interact with " She shook her head. "Logan's going to be furious."
"That was Logan's?"
"He had it hidden." She looked at Midoriya. "Don't ask me how I found it."
The Stepford sisters collected themselves and made their exit. Celeste departed with significantly less swagger than she'd arrived with, and Irma caught Midoriya's eye on the way out with an expression that conveyed approximately seven different apologies in one glance.
The door closed.
Midoriya turned on the TV to something mindless. Then he picked up his phone.
The screen loaded.
He stared at it.
Seventeen missed calls. Texts stacked from numbers he recognized: Kitty, Scott, Bobby, Ororo, two he didn't immediately place. His voicemail indicator read full.
He opened the texts.
Laura appeared in his peripheral vision, moving toward the couch, and then she stopped.
On the television behind him, between segments on something else, the camera cut to aerial footage of the Xavier Institute. Or what was left of it.
The anchor's voice was measured and professional, reporting on significant structural damage to a private educational facility in Westchester County, the cause unknown, and emergency services on the scene.
Midoriya spat out his water.
He stood up.
"Laura."
She was already looking at the screen.
"I have to tell you something." He turned to face her, and whatever she saw in his expression made her go still. "The reason you found me freaking out yesterday wasn't about Kitty. It wasn't only about Kitty." He exhaled hard. "My powers. They're coming back."
The silence lasted about two seconds.
"What?"
"I know."
"Since when "
"A while." He ran a hand through his hair. "I didn't know how to tell anyone. I don't even hate it, Laura. I finally had something that felt normal, and now " He stopped. "If this is serious. If people are dying. I can't just stay here."
She looked at him for a long moment. He watched her weigh the instinct to argue with him against the news playing on the TV behind her.
"How much have you got back?" she asked finally.
"I don't know. I haven't tested it." He looked at his right hand. The skin along the back of it had shifted slightly, subtly, something moving beneath the surface that had no business being there. He watched it settle. "More than I thought."
He picked up his phone and called Logan.
The line picked up on the second ring.
"Hello?"
"Mr. Logan. It's me."
A pause. "Kid. I thought this was Colossus's number."
"I got mixed up." He cut straight through it. "Is everyone okay? I saw the news."
"Some of us are still picking up the pieces." Logan's voice was rougher than usual, ot injured, just ground down. "We lost a few people."
Midoriya closed his eyes for half a second. Opened them. "Is Laura's name on that list?"
"She's not here. Where is she?"
"With me." He put it on speaker.
"Tell her not to steal my bottle of expensive whiskey." A beat. "That stuff costs a fortune. Specifically because it shuts off healing factors. Which is the whole damn point of owning it."
Laura opened her mouth.
"Don't," Logan said, apparently anticipating this. "I know you can hear me."
She closed it.
"What happened?" Midoriya said. "Who attacked?"
"We don't know. That's the honest answer. But it's connected to Jean." The line shifted wind, movement, and the sound of debris being cleared somewhere. "She woke up last night. Out of the coma. And then she went ballistic. That's the only word I've got for it. Whatever it was, it wasn't subtle."
"Is she?
"She's here. Charles has her. " A pause. "Can you get to us?"
Midoriya looked at his hand again.
"Yeah," he said. "My powers are returning."
A silence that had a very specific shape to it.
"...Kid."
"I know. I know you didn't train me last night, I know you're going to say it wasn't the Phoenix, I know all of it." He picked up his jacket from the floor. "I've known my powers were coming back for a while. I hate it. I genuinely hate it. But if people are dead and this is Jean, I'm not sitting it out." He paused. "Even if it kills me again."
Another silence.
"You've got a large pair on you," Logan said finally. "I'll give you that. Get here fast."
He hung up.
Laura was already by the door.
They ran out of the building into the open air of Mutant Town's morning. The Stepford sisters had been halfway back to Irma's place and turned around when they heard the commotion; Midoriya didn't stop to explain. He hit the street, felt for the power that had been quietly reassembling itself inside him for weeks, and pulled.
He left the ground.
Not gracefully, it was rough and uneven, like a car engine turning over for the first time after a long winter, but it held. He rose four feet, six, ten, stabilized somewhere around fifteen, and hovered there while his body relearned the mechanics of it.
Laura stared up at him.
"This is embarrassing for me," she said.
"Hold on."
He came down fast, scooped her off the ground, and went back up before she'd finished objecting. She grabbed his arm with both hands and said something specifically anatomical about what he could do with this plan.
"Sixty miles an hour," he said, already moving. "This is nothing."
"Nothing "
The wind took the rest.
He found the portal at the edge of town by memory, punched through it, and came out on the other side, moving fast. Laura held against his chest, both of them cutting through the sky at an angle, the suburbs spreading out below them in the early light.
He pushed harder. The power answered rough-edged, unpracticed, but present. He could feel where his ceiling used to be and how far below it he currently was, and he didn't try to reach it. Not yet. He ran at sixty, steady, and covered the distance to Westchester in under thirty minutes.
The Institute came into view.
Or what was left of it.
The east wing was structurally compromised. He could see it from the air, the way the damage radiated outward from a central point like something had detonated there, something psychic and massive that had shredded stone and steel as a side effect. Emergency vehicles were parked along the outer road. Personnel moved through the grounds below.
He descended in the front garden and set Laura down.
She fixed her hair and said nothing about how any of that had felt.
Logan was already walking toward them across the lawn, and behind him, Scott Summers, yclops, out of uniform, with the particular expression of someone who had been awake since something terrible happened and had stopped pretending otherwise.
"What happened with Jean?" Midoriya said, before anyone had covered the distance between them.
Logan jerked his head toward Scott.
"We were talking," Scott said. He had the careful voice of a man replaying something he'd already replayed forty times. "Just alking. I brought up something from before his powers manifested. Something ordinary." He shook his head. "And then she just lost it. Everything in a ten-foot radius detonated. There was fire. Not normal fire." He met Midoriya's eyes. "Something on fire that shouldn't have been. She was burning, and she wasn't burning; she was just surrounded by it. Like a corona. Like a "
"Where is she now?"
"Charles has her."
Midoriya was already moving.
He heard Charles before he saw him, or rather, he felt the particular quality of quiet that surrounded Charles Xavier when he was concentrating on something difficult. It was a specific kind of stillness. Midoriya had learned to recognize it.
He found him in what remained of the library. Half the ceiling was gone. Books were scattered across the floor as something had exhaled too hard. Jean Grey sat in the middle of it in a chair someone had brought in from elsewhere, and her eyes were closed, and the air around her head shimmered slightly with something that wasn't heat.
Charles turned his wheelchair when Midoriya entered.
For a moment, neither of them said anything. The Professor looked at him with the expression of a man who had spent months preparing for this conversation and still didn't feel ready for it.
"You've been busy," Charles said quietly.
"We're not here for that." Logan, from the doorway.
Midoriya didn't take his eyes off Charles. "What did you mean when you said it could be Jean or me? The Phoenix." He kept his voice level. "I want to hear it from you. Not a memory you planted. From you."
Charles went still.
"So it triggered." He exhaled slowly. "That's not how I wanted you to learn that."
"I know." Midoriya stepped closer. "I've known since the night I crawled out of my grave. I could feel it. I didn't understand what it was until I overheard you and Hank, but I felt something that night that I can't explain, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it." He paused. "That's part of why I left. One part."
"Izuku "
"I'm not angry. I'm past angry." He stopped in front of the chair and looked at the man directly. "You want to know why? Because learning that I might be the Phoenix was the best thing that happened to me. It was the first real reason I had to run. Not from responsibility, not from a fight I couldn't win, just run. Be somewhere. Be nobody for a while." He gestured at himself. "I was fourteen years old in a courtroom. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? I have never in my life had the option to just leave. And finding out I might be carrying something that could end everything was the first excuse I'd ever had that felt big enough."
Charles was quiet.
"I hate that my powers are coming back," Midoriya said. "I genuinely hate it. But Jean is sitting in that chair, and people are dead, and something is happening here that's bigger than what you've told me." He held Charles's gaze. "So tell me the rest. What's the chance that Jean and I are both?"
Charles looked at him.
It wasn't the look of a man with a prepared answer. It was the look of a man who had run every calculation he knew how to run and had arrived at a result that didn't fit any of his models.
Fear. And beneath it, something that was almost not quite open.
"I don't know," Charles said. "That's the honest answer, Izuku. In the history of what I understand about the Phoenix Force, a divided host with two simultaneous candidates isn't something that has precedent. It shouldn't be possible." He glanced at Jean. "And yet."
"Or," Midoriya said, "neither of us is the Phoenix."
"That's also possible."
"And something else is happening."
"Yes." Charles's voice was careful. "That is also possible. And in some ways, the most likely explanation. Something triggered Jean last night. Something external. Something that interacted with her abilities and produced a reaction none of us have seen before." He looked back at Midoriya. "And you were in Mutant Town when it happened."
"Mr. M confirmed none of his portals were used."
"I know." He folded his hands. "Which means whatever this is, it didn't come from you. It came from somewhere else."
The library was silent except for the distant sound of work being done on the damaged east wing.
Jean Grey breathed slowly in her chair. The shimmer around her head hadn't stopped.
Midoriya looked at her. At the quality of light around her that wasn't quite fire and wasn't quite anything he had a word for. He felt something respond to it deep and quiet, below thought, like recognizing a frequency.
He didn't say that out loud.
"What do you need from me?" he said instead.
Charles Xavier looked at him for a long moment. Like he was making a decision he'd been putting off for a very long time.
"I'm not entirely sure yet," he said honestly. "But I'm glad you're here."