Wolverine Teamup

Once upon a time, there were two X-Men who could not have been more different.

Storm read the sky before she moved. She observed, waited, and chose the precise action that fit the precise moment. She was patience and accuracy.

Wolverine simply moved. Fast, fierce, and entirely himself, he thought that observing too long was just a fancy word for hesitating.

They argued about this. Regularly. With feeling. The walls of the Xavier Institute had absorbed many of these conversations, and the walls, if they could talk, would probably say: it's fine, give it five minutes.

And they would be right.

Their friendship — the real, iron-strong kind — was proven on the island of Genosha.

Genosha sat in the Indian Ocean, a place with a long and difficult history. Mutants had once been treated very badly there, in ways that left quiet scars in the community for years — scars that people carried without talking about them much, but which were there all the same. The X-Men had come to rescue a young mutant named Lila Cheney, who had been captured and held in one of the island's old security facilities. The mission was meant to be swift. It was not.

A security response separated Storm and Wolverine from the rest of the team, driving them deeper into the facility. The blast doors behind them sealed. They were alone.

And then Storm felt the power-dampening field.

It was like walking into a fog with nothing to do with water. A technological interference that severed a mutant's connection to their gift. Storm could sense the weather far above, the way you might know the sun is shining when you're in a basement. But she could not reach it. The air in the corridor tasted flat.

She breathed. She assessed. She did not let the feeling grow into something larger.

"My powers are dampened," she told Wolverine.

He looked at her for exactly one second. "Mine aren't," he said.

SHING. The claws came out.

They moved through the facility together — nothing like how they usually worked. Storm had no wind, no lightning, no fog. What she had was everything else: her memory for spatial layouts, her ability to read structure from ventilation patterns and sounds in the walls, her complete steadiness in the dark.

She navigated. He cleared the obstacles. When she said "left" he went left. When he said "now" she moved. No second-guessing.

They found Lila in a lower chamber — unharmed, frightened, enormously relieved. They turned for the exit.

Three blast doors sealed in sequence. Red electronic locks.

Storm stepped up to the first lock and placed her palms on the cold metal. She searched inside herself for the thread of electromagnetic connection — the part that worked the lightning. Genosha's machines were trying to silence it. It was thin as a candle flame in a wind.

She did not ask for more than that thread. She worked with exactly what she had.

Wolverine waited behind her without fidgeting, without saying a single word. Which may have been the hardest thing he did all day.

Thirty-five seconds. Thirty-eight.

CLICK.

The lock opened.

Wolverine looked at the open door. He looked at Storm.

"You're not totally useless down here," he said.

Which was Wolverine for: that was extraordinary, and I am very glad you are my teammate.

Storm smiled. "Noted," she said.

Two more doors — thirty seconds each, a little faster now. They walked out into the blinding brightness of Genoshan midday.

Storm stopped for just a moment and breathed in — the whole open atmosphere, rushing back into her like light through an open curtain. The clouds above, the updrafts, the small charge in the eastern sky that would be rain by evening.

She was whole again.

Lila took her hand. Storm squeezed it gently. The three of them walked toward the extraction point.

Behind her, Wolverine said nothing. But in the strong Genoshan sunlight, if you looked very closely, you might have seen something at the corner of his mouth.

Something that could, by some stretch of the imagination, be called a smile.

Not all friendships begin warm. Some begin like two stones in a tumbler — rough and grinding, resistant to each other, each one convinced the other is doing it wrong. But the years have a way of smoothing stones into something that fits together.

That was Storm and Wolverine. One reads the sky before she moves; the other simply moves, and trusts the world to arrange itself accordingly. Between those two ways of being in the world there is a great deal of room for friction, and also — if you give it enough time — a great deal of room for something else.

What they had built was worth every argument.