Note: Many moons ago, Artaxastra wrote a beautiful piece giving Magneto and Mystique a beach house in Baja California. She's graciously shared the idea with many others, so here's my promised take.

John and Pietro stay at opposite ends of the house. John keeps a room on the second floor with large north windows, for the sunlight -- a precious commodity, hard to come by this time of year in Montana. His living space is sparse, and meticulously neat; a bed in one corner, a desk in another. They have no computer, and no grounded phone line, although there is a car, and a cell phone whose number is closely guarded. A row of tattered paperbacks huddles in a plywood shelf by the desk, which John spends more time with than the bed. They are not his, but have been fished from boxes in the garage. The ink of old names fades on inside covers: some John recognizes, and some he can only imagine. He is fascinated by the dialogues carried out in the margins, Xavier's precise cursive versus Lehnsherr's angular hand. Lehnsherr always presses too hard, leaving layers of pages crisscrossed with phantom strokes.

"Hey. I know you can hear me. Open up."

John sighs and lets his forehead hit the desk. Pietro has no concept of knocking, much less of complex sentences. Or rather he does, but he has no patience for them. Not surprising, considering he has little patience for much of anything. John picks himself up, palming his lighter, and unlocks the door. Pietro peers through the crack with the quick, roving eye of a jackdaw. "Keeping busy?"

Sometimes John likes speaking just slowly enough to make his housemate squirm. Today he simply doesn't have the energy. "What is it?"

"Going out for the mail. Need anything?" His face is surly on the last sentence.

John is smugly grateful: before Pietro started asking, he'd had to subsist for three weeks on Easy Mac and Gatorade. He'd written to Lehnsherr, asking if money was somehow a problem. With the next post, Pietro had returned ashen-faced and laden with groceries. It's been a month, and so far no more problems of that sort.

"We're out of shaving cream," he replies finally. "And none of that scented woman's shit, it wasn't funny the first time."

"Right." He smirks again. "One can manly Gillette for Allerdyce. That's all?"

"Stamps."

"Stamps? Why d'you need stamps?"

"For mailing letters, dipshit."

"Dipshit yourself. We don't mail in the States."

"Look, would you just get them and go?"

Pietro shrugs. "Whatever. Back later." His face disappears; John catches a flash of silver hair under the hall light as he turns a corner and flies down the stairs. The front door slams -- his all-clear bell. With no change in expression or bearing, he shuffles back to the desk and seats himself again.

John always tells himself he can get a lot of writing done when he's alone. After all, what else is there to do, after a while? A house can only be paced so many times before the space inside the windows becomes as meaningless as that without.

But it's a hopeless exercise these days: before long the characters turn into Bobbys and Rogues and other ghosts. The other day, when he'd finally thought he'd created someone all his own, he sat back with the manuscript and realized Jean Grey was talking. Disgusted, he'd set the papers alight in the grill out back, pointedly letting the flames enjoy their meal unaided. Write what you know, an old teacher urges in his ear; John wants to prove he knows a lot more than that.

Pietro will be gone for two hours. That's how long it takes him to run to Silesia, do their errands, and run back. The town is one hundred and thirty miles away, south of Billings. John has never seen it, but the driving directions are in the car's glove compartment, written front and back and through and through.

The hours are long as shadows in Montana. Sometimes John will sit down with a road map and an encyclopedia and match the history to a name. Havre echoes a city at the mouth of the Seine, in France. Polaris is Joni Mitchell's stuck-in-a-rut Northern Star. Silesia is in central Europe, where miners haul coal and iron and steel from out of the rock. After the Second World War, the Poles and the Czechs claimed chunks of it for themselves; the German population was forcibly expelled. What a place for a post office box, he marvels. He can never quite settle on what kind of irony is here, or whether Lehnsherr is brilliant or just a sadist. Other times, when he is less interested in escaping and more in getting his bearings, John spreads the map on the floor and measures the relations between town and town. The house is closest to Sumatra, which is halfway between Bascom and Ingomar, Comanche and Van Norman, Custer and Mosby. (Secretly he knows it's also equidistant from Westchester County and the edge of the world, but he'd never write it down for fear that would make it true.)

He's never done this for the return address on their letters. There's something comforting in not knowing how far it is between himself and Erik Lehnsherr, just that it's far. A number, he tells himself, can always be breached. (That's a good line, he notes, and congratulates himself. In the book his quality will force them to adore, it will bring his critics to their knees. He needs to keep a better list of his good lines; you never know which turn of phrase will break them all for you.)

After fortysome minutes of silence, John gets claustrophobic and paws through his miniscule closet. He suits up in down vest, gloves, hat and jacket, knowing full well those won't entirely block the cold. He's always had a natural revulsion to the cold, making his friendship with Bobby Drake all the more meaningful maintained and all the more formulaic broken off. He doesn't have a clear idea of what he wants to do, and even less so when the prairie stares him full in the face, effortless in its vastness. After ten minutes of letting the wind scour him, disturbed by the eastward drift of his musings he decides to visit the car. It's a brownish Chevrolet, a mid-80's model almost as old as he is. They haven't taken it out of the garage since Lehnsherr's stony-faced henchman parked it there, ten hours after he'd collected John at the Denver airport. "You wait here until you're called," he'd grunted -- the only thing he'd said at all, and then just turned and walked off. Sometimes John constructs elaborate mechanisms for his destruction or lack thereof; more often he remembers what it feels like to be moving, and the anticipation -- however uneasy -- of a new destination.

Frost is caked thick on the vehicle: guess he should have shut the garage door better last time. Keys -- does he have keys? Or will he have to go back inside for them, in which case forget the whole thing? No: they're where he left them, zipped in an outer pocket. He swears at the door as he tries to yank it open, and threatens the ignition aloud when it won't turn. The engine complains, and then rumbles to life, and John sits there for a minute wondering what would happen if he were to torch it all -- one glorious firebird rising in the middle of nowhere.

That would mean, in some form or another, not being around to catch the look on Pietro's face when he returned. Not worth it.

Something in him rather fancies greeting Pietro as an archangel sometime upon his weekly return -- St. John Allerdyce, with his fiery wings and flaming sword. Sounds like it could be kinda cool. But no, the writer insists, Biblical conceits are tired, worn and wholly unimaginative -- and that is a crime he privately loathes most of all. That was always Bobby's problem, he remembers -- no vision. Drake was immobile, too patient, not restless enough: change only came with glacial velocity to that boy. Like he was dead and didn't know it, John tells himself, taking comfort in his carefully-cultivated sense of resentment. (Another good line. Where's a pen when you need one?)

He twists and presses one palm into the back of the passenger seat, intent on backing out before realizing all the windows are still iced over. He sits there for a minute glaring, and then sighs and unearths the scraper, stolen or picked up or otherwise acquired from a Triple A long ago. "It never ends, does it," he mutters as he puts his whole body into scraping the car free of frost. Every clear swath, every pile of ice sparks something in him that feels like the greatest defiance. He's shivering by the time it's finished, but he brushes away the scattered shavings with a small glow of smug satisfaction. Five minutes later, the car has been backed into the driveway, turned around, and gunned a few times for good measure.

He stares at his gloved hands clenching the wheel. Now what? It isn't like he can really go anywhere: this place is one big blank page, where his sense of direction is as much use as a dry pen. He'd never find his way back, and then where would he be?

The Chevy doesn't have the best heating system, and John knows he's just wasting gas sitting there. He stills the engine and goes back inside, but he leaves the car out. What would Pietro care? There's nothing dictating this has to be secret, after all.

The return is never easy: John always has a hard time warming back up when he's come in from the cold. There's a heat vent in the floor near the fridge and he stands over that for a while, his muscles tight with lingering chill. But it's boring just waiting around, and though he's still shaking off the winter, he clutches the jacket tighter about the shoulders and ventures upstairs.

Pietro has left his door ajar. He's always so confident John will never intrude on his space: he never says his father will hear of it, but it's coiled beneath that smirk, ready to pop out. John isn't entirely sure how long it's been since he left, and he doesn't wear watches these days. Even so, what's he owe Maximoff? Bitch doesn't even let him shave without trying to humiliate him. He runs the tips of his fingers, now too-hot and throbbing after the change from outdoors to in, over the stubble along his jaw. They feel each bristle acutely, and give him permission to push the door open and cross the threshold.

The room is a mess. A path through haphazard piles of belongings joins the dresser, the bed and the door. On a small desk, smaller than John's, a thirteen-inch TV sits crookedly atop a cheap DVD player in one corner; a collection of torn envelopes and movie cases crowds the other. He examines the titles with interest and some amusement: Help!, Ocean's 11, Beavis & Butt-head Do America, Muffy the Vampire Layer. A travel case of CDs yields several pages worth of trip-hop, techno, and Eastern European folk music. There are no posters on the walls, and one medium-sized suitcase (empty) stands against the half-open closet. John furrows his brow. He turns to the other end of the desk, and eyes the clutter of correspondence scattered across the surface. A slash of squared cerulean leaps out at him from beneath a pile of letters. Without thinking, he fishes it out.

There are three shades of blue in the photograph. First is the sky, and mirroring it is the ocean in the distance. Thirdly is her skin, and in places it's hard to tell whether she's blending in or just invisible in some spots. Her back faces the lens, and she rests her elbows against the bleached wooden railing of an old deck. She is looking to the right, into a breeze that blows her hair back, which she has let grow long and coppery in the sun. The curve of her back gives shape to the word sinuous. She does not know the photo is being taken.

Whoever snapped this image saw her as beautiful, which John has never managed or understood before. Whoever took this picture loves her. He gulps, and keeps on staring. The light snags on a raised pattern of jagged lines at the top, and he turns the photograph over to find a message half-carved in another language.

"What are you doing in here?"

The voice jerks John's attention from Mexico to Montana. Pietro is halfway through the door, drenched in sweat. The look on his face is ugly. His glare darts from John's face to his hands, and he snatches the picture without looking at it. "Get out of my room, Allerdyce."

The first instinct kicks in, to fight back, and he plants his feet. "What's it to you?"

Pietro pushes him back and aside, his eyes never leaving John's. "This is my room. My stuff. I thought you'd picked up on us not messing with each other's things. Guess I overestimated you."

"Didn't know you knew words that took so long to say," John sneers, and even as he says it he thinks, Dumb! That would look terrible on paper. He starts to feel foolish, like he's being lectured by a fellow kindergartener.

"Usually short words do it for most people, so here's two for you: fuck -- off."

John has to laugh, for his own benefit as much as Pietro's. "Where to, exactly?" He spreads his arms, pasting a cocky grin over his lips. "I think I may have at long last run out of options."

Pietro shrugs, and turns his shoulder to John, organizing the letters according to some unknown or nonexistent system of his own. "The world's a big place when you take your head out of your ass." John notices several more pictures swimming through the heaps of paper. He makes a grab at one: Pietro's hand slams down on his before he's even halfway there. The older boys tsks. "Please." Contempt drips from his every pore, and he swats John away. "As if I didn't have reason enough to wonder why he bothers keeping you around."

The words sting. They should be empty but John only sees the hollows as space for fuel. "Really? 'Cause I could prove my uses to you, Pietro." The stung hand moves to his pocket, and he traces the lines of his Zippo through the fabric of his jeans. "Just say the word -- I've got no fondness for this house, or you."

He snorts without flinching. "Oh, I'm impressed. What, you think you're the only pyrokinetic he has on board? Whatever you do, it won't be special and it won't make him pleased. Actually, go ahead -- raze the place. It'd only make me right. I've been telling him for months you're more trouble than you're worth -- perfect excuse to get rid of you."

John cocks an eyebrow, falling back easily into his trademark "make me care" attitude, Zippo in hand at eye-level, elbow propped on one crossed arm. "Have fun with that. Like he'd go to all this trouble if he didn't want me for something." He flicks the cap with an expert snap of the wrist; the distinctive chinkt! calms him down a little.

"You think letters and pocket money are trouble?" He shakes his head, examining John with the same superior fleer his father favored when discussing homo sapiens. "Pssh. You are dumber than I thought."

It isn't even a very clever line, and part of John protests this: something as small as that has no right to wrench him so. "Wait--" He can see himself splitting into two boys. The first falls to his knees as surely as though his ankles were sliced, winded and wide-eyed; the second closes a fist over the lighter until his knuckles are white, his brow in knots. "What?"

"Yeah, boo hoo, blink blink blink -- you heard me. You really never wondered why we're both being left to rot up here while they're out playing their oh-so-noble 'change the world' game?"

The reply goes several ways in his head, the writer in him throwing out retorts with the frantic desperation of a man bailing water from a lifeboat.

"I'm the secret weapon! I control fire! He needs me!"
"In his last letter, he said I'd continue to serve the cause--"
"I left New York for this!"
"I am going to change the world--"

John's knees sway beneath him. "I -- thought he was --"

"You thought you were being saved for something, didn't you." Pietro sniffs. "Why aren't you being trained, then?"

"I was!" (This is true. He had stayed with Lehnsherr and Mystique for exactly fifteen weeks after leaving the Blackbird. She would put him through the paces for hours and hours a day, attacking him in every shape imaginable. John was never the most graceful of teenaged boys, but he learned to roll with punches and exploit his opponent's momentum, if he got the chance. She never said anything, only smiled, and her true face was always untranslatable. Lehnsherr would give him books, and make him talk about them -- race theory, ethics and philosophy, histories of persecution, the latest in anti-mutant propaganda. The assault was constant, but John always told himself he was learning more here than he ever would with Cueball.

He has not forgotten the day they sent him here. The sun in Taos only changes by gradients, so smoothly you hardly notice the night is falling until the horizon flares with pinks and purples and blues. "What do you want me to do up there?"

Lehnsherr sets down his glass of water and crosses his legs. "You will receive instruction, when the time comes. Until then, I want you to continue what we've been working on -- keep up your gifts and so forth. Can you do this for me, Pyro?" Mystique arches her neck and rolls her shoulders, one unshod foot brushing against the older man's ankle.

John is puzzled, but he doesn't want to fail or disappoint, and so he nods. "What about you? Where will you be?"

The light colors Lehnsherr's hair a strange alloy of silver and gold, and he smiles. "Somewhere in keeping with my affinity for the desert.")

The room feels cold under the sweep of Pietro's eyes. John strains to instill some conviction in his voice, and shifts his weight from one foot to the other. "They thought it would be best if I could find out -- stuff -- about myself... on my own."

"How very monkish. Not to mention a pile of self-indulgent crap. Do you believe every piece of shit that comes from out of his mouth? You're here because he doesn't want you."

"Is that what he said?" He tries to conjure a thread of indignation: it follows the line of his spine, a hotness that licks at his ribs and cheeks. Coward. Why didn't he say it to my face?

(Stop being an idiot. Don't pretend you don't know the answer to that, John.)

"Want me to show you the letter? 'Headstrong' and 'rash' were definitely used. That and 'average powerful' -- you're not strong enough to interest him, Pyro. You're not worth the risk of mucking everything up because you can't perform."

"I can fucking perform, all right?" And the lighter is unsheathed before he even knows what he's going to do with it, the flames lurching and expanding with a strange, unnatural meiosis of their own. And John knows this is it -- time to canonize himself, work his miracles, fiat ignis, fiat flam--

Between one rise and fall of his eyelids, the lighter is gone from his hand. "Do I need more proof than that?" Pietro huffs, blowing on one singed finger. "Irresponsible. Witless. Liability -- that's you, Allerdyce. Get used to it."

"Give me back my lighter," John croaks.

He barks a laugh, short and humorless. "Fat chance, if you're gonna pull another trick like that. Without it you're just another freak with a useless gene; think I'll keep you that way."

This was to be expected. No matter -- John is a writer. He has other weapons on hand. "And what's that say about you, Pietro? How'd you get landed with me? Boss's son and all, left in the wastelands of America with a Brotherhood reject, making sure he doesn't squeal? You're okay babysitting a worthless kid while he's down in Baja porking your mom?"

The time between the anger contorting Pietro's face and the high-speed collision of his fist with John's head is negligible enough to be instantaneous. "That woman is not my mother." A gush of blood pools at the back of John's throat, and he struggles to push himself upright, to spit in his hand. The outline of the other boy is vibrating and indistinct, like the wings of a hummingbird: this is what happens when Quicksilver shakes with fury. "Of course I'm keeping an eye on you," he snaps, finally. "I'm his son. He trusts me. He doesn't trust you. He said you've bolted other camps before."

A new trickle of liquid runs down John's upper lip. He sniffs and runs the sleeve of his jacket over his nose. "It's not my problem I know when to leave."

The two exchange glares for an interminable age, and John learns a new variation on uncomfortable silences.

"I know about your letters," Pietro smirks.

"Is that so?"

"In a house this small? Privacy's a joke. Besides, what kind of babysitter would I be if I didn't monitor you?" When John doesn't reply, he crosses his arms and leans against the desk, his air triumphant. "So who is Bobby? Not to pry or anything."

The back of his throat is dry, and his whole mouth is filled with the bitter taste of iron, seasoned with gall. John starts to wonder why he didn't realize he's being had all along. Stupid.

He drags himself backward, until the rear post of Pietro's bed frame holds his back erect. He wipes away some more blood from his mouth and examines his fingers. "You don't give a shit about me," he sighs, and meets Pietro's scornful gaze. "What's really keeping you here? 'Cause I've got some ideas, in light of all this new information."

This time, he makes no effort to restrain the amusement, and snickers. "They're all wrong, but I'll never say no to good entertainment. Hit me."

John pulls one knee into his chest and shrugs. "I think you think about this all in terms of your dad. On the one hand, you're pissed as hell he's sent you so far from the front, but maybe you hope he's doing it to keep you safe. Then again, maybe he doesn't want you either -- maybe you think he thinks you're no good to him, and you want to prove him wrong. Like, you do this one thing right and he'll appreciate you for it. Then again, you're succeeding if he thinks about us as little as possible, so that's kind of ironic. You keep hoping he'll call you back, though -- you don't see this arrangement as permanent, you never have. That's why you leave your suitcase out, and don't put anything on your walls. You want to be able to get up and go when the time comes. You keep hoping for that phone call -- it's why you never turn the cell off.

"Listen man, I don't know much about your life, but I know hope when I see it and you're choked with the stuff. What you don't let yourself see is that hope traps people. It ties them down and keeps them waiting until one of two things happens: they realize that whatever they were holding onto is just dust, or they die, still clinging fast. Hope isn't freedom: it's got you trapped in fucking knots in a shitty little house in deepest, darkest Big Sky country. Whatever it is he's doing to me, he's sure as hell doing it to you too."

When John makes up stories, he loses himself easily in the weave and in the sound of his voice. He isn't looking at Pietro, who is tight-faced and keeping very still. His housemate cracks the vertebrae in his neck and slips both hands into his pockets. John straightens out his leg and tilts his head. "So how'd I do?"

Pietro breaks out of a reverie of his own, and reassumes his ubiquitous sneer. "Oscar material. Really."

He spreads his arms faux-modestly. "I aim to please."

"Bang-up job." The late afternoon sunlight seeps half-heartedly through the south window. Pietro keeps his eyes half-hooded and on the overcrowded floor. "He says he'll tell me about my sisters if I help."

"You have sisters?"

"Yes, Allerdyce, I have sisters," he snorts, and rolls his eyes. "Two of them. And I haven't seen either one in months."

John nods, and tongues a cut on the inside of his cheek. "...You didn't get me stamps, did you."

"I didn't think you should have any."

"Fair enough."

John has never found that moments of clarity have good cinematography: the world does not slow down; sound and color are not leeched from the picture while the camera zooms in on the realization dawning on his face. He wedges his feet awkwardly beneath him, curses, and hefts himself up. His jaw feels twice as large as it should, and he knows that's going to be one hell of a bruise come morning. Cradling his face in one hand, he pushes past Pietro and stumbles across the short hallway. He's surprised Pietro doesn't call out after him, or try to stop him, but he isn't disappointed.

He stands in the doorway, surveying his room. His presence is sparse, so thinly spread he might almost not even be there. A threadbare JanSport backpack huddles at the back of the closet, and he finds it with no trouble. Two or three changes of clothes, a toothbrush, deodorant, a bar of soap -- it all fits with room to spare. Of the books, he takes three: a pocket thesaurus, Watership Down, and The Sound and the Fury. He can't imagine Pietro will do anything with the rest, but it gives him a spark of amusement to imagine him trying to sit through Finnegan's Wake or The Prince. Maybe he ought to leave a Hemmingway on the table, as a parting gift -- A Farewell to Arms, perhaps.

Lastly, he slides open a drawer and grabs a bundle of papers and envelopes. The JanSport swallows the letters; the zipper slides smoothly to close the affair.

There. He's already wearing everything he needs to stay warm, and everything that tied him here rests on his back. He turns to leave, but Pietro is blocking the way. He clutches the Zippo in his left hand. "Where are you going?" The demand is strangely toothless.

John shoulders the backpack. "To a post office. I need stamps."

Pietro is pale. "And then?"

One corner of John's lip twitches, and he shakes his head. He slides around Pietro once more and hops down the stars, hustling through the front hall and crossing the kitchen to the back door. The Chevy is parked where he left it. He pats the pocket of his outermost jacket: the keys are there too. He doesn't shut the door after he goes out -- after all, who's to say he owes Pietro even that?

The leather seats of the car are stiff and freezing again, but at least he won't have to scrape off any more ice. The engine turns with relatively little conversation this time, and John is relieved, because he needs to think about where he's going.

Pietro bangs against the window on his left. John jumps, and swears. It's like that blue sideshow from the Blackbird, back in May -- instantaneous appearances always creep him out. Pietro motions at him to roll down the window, and he does. The wind barrels into the front seat, whipping both boys' hair across their temples. "Are you coming back?"

"You know, it's anybody's guess, really." The other boy purses his lips. "Are you done?"

After a moment, Pietro thrusts a fist through the window. The hand opens, and something hot and square drops into John's lap. "Jesus Christ! Was that nec--" His fingers recognize the lighter, and he stops. Pietro's face is unreadable: he stands there a moment longer, and then backs away. Somewhat unnerved, John rolls up the window again and sets the Zippo on the dashboard.

The last time he looks in the rearview mirror, Pietro is still watching him, his hand to his ear as though holding a phone. John forces the disquiet down, and wonders if he should see what the glove compartment has to offer. The sun throws long shadows into the headlights, and illuminates a horizon he's never seen before. That shiver is neither chill nor fear, but the taste of anticipation.