Storm And Wolverine

Some partnerships take time to form.

Ororo Munroe and Logan were not, at first glance, an obvious pair. Ororo was graceful and precise, accustomed to standing at the edge of the world's weather, feeling the sky as though it were a part of herself. Logan was short, blunt, and more likely to cut through a problem than reason around it. He had been on enough missions to know that most problems were not worth overthinking. Ororo had been on enough missions to know that not everything could be solved by making a fist.

They were sent underground on a Wednesday.

The mission was reconnaissance — scout a Brotherhood safehouse located in a network of tunnels beneath an old manufacturing plant in the hills of upstate New York. Professor Xavier had tracked movement there through Cerebro and wanted to know what was being stored, and whether anyone was inside. A quiet two-person scout. No complications.

Ororo did not bring this up afterward, but she had quietly noted that Logan was a person who was very good at creating complications.

The tunnels were dug into clay and rock, reinforced with old steel beams, lit by panels that buzzed slightly. The air was cool and very still. Ororo noted the stillness immediately. She could feel weather systems from hundreds of kilometers away, could sense the pressure and humidity of open air like a second heartbeat. Underground, with rock above and around her, that heartbeat went almost silent. She was cut off from the sky.

She kept this to herself.

Logan took point without being asked. His hearing was extraordinary — he could detect the difference between an empty room and an occupied one just by the way sound moved in a space. He moved without hurry, checking each intersection by tilting his head and listening before he stepped around any corner.

Three doors in, they found a junction of six passages.

Logan listened. "Clear left, clear right, clear ahead. There's something moving, two levels up."

Ororo closed her eyes. Even here, far below the surface, there were traces of moving air if you knew how to feel for them — the faintest threads of ventilation, the breath of machinery somewhere far above. She turned slowly until she found the direction where the air thinned and lightened.

"Up is that way," she said, pointing down the center passage.

They moved in good coordination from that point. Logan leading at each turn, Ororo reading the invisible language of the air at each junction. They did not talk much. There was no need to. Each of them was doing the part of the task the other couldn't.

At the fifth door, Logan examined the lock and then stood very still for a moment.

The lock was magnetic. The entire mechanism ran on an electromagnetic circuit. Logan's adamantium claws would trigger every sensor in the building the moment they touched the door.

He stepped aside without being asked.

Ororo looked at the junction box beside the door. She had called lightning across entire mountain ranges. She had stopped blizzards in their tracks. But she had never tried to be as small as this — as precise as a single patient spark delivered along a wire no wider than a pencil.

She pressed two fingertips to the wires. She breathed slowly. She found the circuit and followed it to the magnetic lock.

Then she released the smallest, most careful pulse of static she had ever attempted — quiet as a whisper, steady as a hand placed gently on a shoulder.

Click.

The door swung inward.

Logan looked at it. Then at her. "Huh," he said.

Ororo understood immediately that this was approximately the warmest compliment Logan gave.

They surfaced through a drainage grate forty minutes after they had entered, stepping into cold November air. The Blackbird sat on a frost-grey field thirty meters away. The rest of the team was outside, watching.

Cyclops walked toward them. "We were about to come in after you."

"Didn't need it," Logan said.

Ororo looked at the pale November sky overhead — the wide open sky, with the cold air moving freely above her. She breathed it in.

"We figured it out," she said.

It sounded simple. But it meant something more.

Goodnight. It's a good thing to discover who you work well with.