Priya Legacy

Once upon a time, in the autumn, a new student arrived at Professor Xavier's school. Her name was Priya, and she was twelve years old, and she was more nervous than almost anyone Rogue had ever seen walk through those tall front doors.

Priya's mutation was an unusual one. Whenever she felt scared, or startled, or even just a little bit overwhelmed, every electronic device nearby would freeze and restart all on its own. Lights flickered without warning. Laptops crashed in the middle of a sentence. Her phone had died so many times over the years that her parents had simply stopped replacing it, tired of the expense and the confusion.

Priya walked the halls of the mansion the exact way Rogue remembered walking them herself, many years before — shoulders braced, always a little apologetic, certain deep down that her power made her a problem to be managed rather than simply a person to be known.

Rogue found her one quiet afternoon sitting alone just outside the Danger Room, watching the older students train through the observation window instead of joining in with them.

"First week's the worst," Rogue said, settling down on the floor beside her without waiting to be asked, the exact same way Storm had once sat down beside Rogue, years and years before.

Priya kept her eyes on the window. "Everyone else's power helps people," she said quietly. "Mine just breaks things."

Rogue almost laughed, though not unkindly, not even a little bit. "Mine used to make people fall asleep against their will, whether I meant it or not," she said. "Took me years — real years, hard ones — to turn that into something worth having at all."

Priya looked over at her properly for the first time. It was the look of someone realizing, all at once, that they were not quite as alone as they had believed.

So, over the weeks that followed, Rogue made a quiet habit of training with Priya in the evenings, after the younger students had gone off to bed and the mansion had grown soft and dim around them. She taught her the breathing tricks Wolverine had once shown her, back when Rogue herself had been the nervous new arrival. She taught her the same slow, steady counting method Cyclops used to keep his own aim calm under pressure, no matter how loud the world around him got.

Priya's control came slowly, the way real control always seems to come — not all at once, not in one triumphant burst, but in small, quiet steps stacked carefully on top of each other. A lightbulb dimming gently, instead of shattering outright. A laptop stuttering for a moment, instead of dying completely. Little by little, evening by evening, something steadier began to take root.

One evening, as Rogue stood at the open window preparing to fly out over the grounds for a quick patrol, Priya finally worked up the courage to ask the question she had clearly been carrying for weeks.

"Does it ever stop being hard?" she asked. "Controlling it, I mean."

Rogue paused at the window, the cool night air brushing past her, and thought back through all of it — through Cody Robbins on a porch swing in Mississippi, through Mystique's shifting faces, through months and months of quiet failure inside the Danger Room before her very first controlled, careful touch.

"No," she said, honestly, because Priya deserved honesty more than comfort. "It doesn't stop being hard. But it gets more yours. And that turns out to be better than easy. That's better than better."

Priya sat with that for a moment, turning the words over the way you might turn over a smooth stone in your pocket. Then she smiled — small, but entirely real, the first Rogue had seen from her since she'd arrived.

"Will you teach me how to fly?" Priya asked.

Rogue smiled back, and held out her gloved hand toward the open window, toward the wide night sky waiting just beyond it.

"Yes," she said. "I will."

And somewhere in that small, ordinary moment, a promise passed quietly from one girl to another — the same promise Storm and Xavier and a whole school full of patient friends had once passed to Rogue, back when she was the one who thought her power only broke things.

Goodnight, Priya. Goodnight, Rogue. Tomorrow, there is flying to learn — and so much more waiting, patiently, to become yours.