Aedus listened as the experts went back and forth. Katrina seemed to be of the same mind as him, that you didn’t need blondes to mutate, for his part he didn’t mind the development. He wondered if Katrina was from the same school as Agnes.

“ A tour would be nice, but it looks like we have some remodeling to do first.” If you are going to get wet, you might as well swim. If he was going to joining them, he was going to do it like he did everything else.

He would have to ask Jude exactly how he came by his powers someday, He was fairly sure that something cheeky was a foot and the way the man winked seemed to say it was better not to say in front of the fairer sex. “Oh, I see.” He didn’t. I have to say, I’d be willing to try my best to help as I am, but I don’t quite know if I am up to doing much against someone capable of starting the apocalypse. Let me know , if you figure out how your other option might have helped me. Actually, Could we look for it, or do you need time to cool down?”

Aedus pulled out a pen and wrote his number down on the pieces of band aid paper, twice ensuring that they would both have one. As for the numbers he needed, he put them directly into his phone. “I’ll be sure to keep a look out for your text. If you guys are just doing this for the night I could come back after I let them know this delivery was completed.”

Phone numbers. So logical. Sometimes Jude really did seem like a grown up after all.

Katrina put Aedus' number into her cell phone. It was an old one, red, and a little clunky by today's standards, but it had been a gift and she still liked it.

“Yeah, we'll be remodeling for awhile, so any help you can provide would be awesome.” Especially the heavy lifting parts. She felt wimpy when it came to moving the bigger boards, and it would be good to have a few more someone's around that weren't old men, children, and skinny teenage girls. At this point, poor Jude was kind of alone when it came to that sort of thing.

“Well, uh, it was nice to meet you, and thanks for the package. I suppose we'll be seeing you again soon.” Katrina stepped forward, putting her trust in him by sticking out her hand to shake his hand. They were on the same team now, so they could be friends.

"Don't need time to cool down." It was disorienting and often draining, but a simple and straight forward guy like this was no problem, really. "But if you really want to explore your options, we should probably sit down." Except... that... as he looked around, really there wasn't any good place to sit.

Jude shrugged and offered Aedus a handshake after Kat. The conversation seemed to be winding down, but they could take a peek at his future again. All three of them apparently.

So he lowered his sunglasses.

And looked him real good in the eye.

And then slid the glasses back up onto his nose as he cleared his throat.

"I sink a second reading will have to wait." He looked at Kat meaningfully from behind his sunglasses (so the look was probably lost altogether) before he went right back to sweeping.

The guy didn't have a mutation yet. So why didn't Jude have Alister's power anymore? He shoved the broom hard across the floor like it was the floor's fault.

It was almost addicting seeing the possible future, would other possibilities show up now that he had seen these possibilities. Surely seeing things would affect how and what he did. I mean he was already trying to figure out how and why he was going to give Katrina a sunflower…where would one even get one.

Aedus shook Katrina’s hand delicately as to not bruise her pretty little palms, between the paper cut and dropping the wood when he knocked he had a feeling she didn’t need any help gathering bruises. He looked for a place to sit and didn’t see one either. He shook Jude’s hand quite a bit more firmly but it wasn’t a macho hand break contest by any means.

“Hmmm, ok, well tidying up should be a priority anyhow, I’ll be back in about thirty minutes to help.” That was Odd, Jude seemed to be up for it one moment and then changed his mind the next. For Aedus’s part he looked back in Jude’s eyes and smiled lightly playing it off as if it were a normal thing to do…perhaps it was French thing to make eye contact when you shook hands…that made a certain amount of sense.

Aedus waved and took off on his bike, he would see them soon anyhow, working together on something was a pretty good way to get to know people.

It was kind of quiet after Aedus left. Jude swept, Katrina grabbed a dust pan for the growing pile he was making. There weren't any crickets out at this time of day, but if there were they'd be chirping right about now.

Katrina was reminded that the last time she'd really talked to Jude, she had kinda sorta yelled at him. It seemed like a long time ago, to her, but to him it was still fairly recent. What was it that he had said right before she had stormed off? Something about coming back to talk to him when she had grown up and gotten shoved back into the role of a child. She could understand much better now where he was coming from.

“Jude?” Katrina looked up from her dustpan duty, but saw only herself reflected in his sunglasses.

“About before; I'm sorry. I shouldn't have been so quick to judge.”

Quick to judge? Jude pushed his pile into the dust pan Katrina held as he drew out of his own thinking to tackle what Katrina had said. Once the pan was full, he stopped and took the sunglasses off. Seemed that he didn't need them now and it was troublesome to keep them on.

"Are you alright?" His tone was gentle. It was clear he didn't think there was anything wrong with her, but that something had to have happened for the change of heart. He knew about her year just as surely as she knew about his ten. A bit different, but somehow quite the same.

"So long as you're alright, I take it as a compliment zat you sink differently now." Apparently looking older really did make all the difference. He didn't feel that he acted all that much different. Maybe a few less dino tee shirts and maybe he kept his tongue in his head a bit more now instead of stick it out at whoever deserved it, but really... he didn't feel too different.

"Do you feel very different?"

He realized that the back room was as swept as he could manage without picking up more of the debris so Jude leaned the broom against the wall and tried to carefully pluck up the larger pieces of glass that had once made up the front portion of a cupboard.

She dumped the dustpan into the kitchen trash bin. It was getting fairly full of things you normally didn't have in a kitchen trash bin. Shredded curtains, for example, and half the contents of the plate cupboard including pieces of the cupboard itself.

“It wasn't just a year. Well, it was a year, but it was more than that, too.” Katrina made a frowny face at the big piece of glass he was trying to manage. It made her nervous that he was going to cut himself, but then, Alister hadn't sent a whole box of band-aids. Just the one.

“My powers grew up a little, too, and it helped me relive some dreams I had forgotten about. The same kind that made you feel ten years older.” So, she now wasn't sure if she was sixteen, seventeen, or twenty-three. At least being sixteen all over again wasn't as bad as being twelve all over again, like Jude had been.

“I'm not sure if I feel any different. I mean, I didn't even expect to be able to come back to this time. I thought I'd never see everyone again, except in those dreams. I was just coming to terms with that and starting to make new plans, and now everything is back to normal that doesn't feel like normal at all.”

Katrina pulled her arms tightly around herself and rocked back on her feet, eying his progress with the glass with concern.

“So, I'll be okay. It's just.... weird.”

"How was it more zan a year?" He didn't ask her like he didn't believe her, he asked because he legitimately wanted to know. If anyone was willing to believe her, it was Jude.

He juggled the glass into a trash bin and only managed to scrape himself in the process. Not enough to bleed, just enough to sting. The frenchman shook his hand out over the bin just to be sure all the glass was there instead of clinging. Now most of what was left were the really big beams.

"I sink you'll be okay too. I remember waking up and sinking zis was ze dream. It took me a long time to realize I wasn't going back." That was about the time when he got really depressed and then Ghost showed up. She really had saved him.

"You had someone withs you, non?" He chucked a small chunk of wood at the trash can across the room and flicked his wrist like it was a basketball shot. It clanged inside noisily. Trash cans had much larger hoops than basketball goals. "It's good to stick close withs someone who understands. At least at first."

Katrina nodded, then whispered, “Slate.”

Jude was right, Slate understood, and that would make things easier.

“He was in the dreams, too, a whole ten years worth of them. We were so poor, we spent our evenings playing games with nuts and bolts. Then we'd dream of the future together,” quite literally. “When nightmares followed me back into reality, he was always there to chase them away again.”

Katrina smiled, then shook her head at herself. “Sorry, if you don't want to hear silly sentimental stuff, stop me at any time.”

They were done with everything except the big things. They'd have to wait for those. Katrina wiped chalky dust off the counter with her hand then hoisted herself up onto the ledge.

“Did you have someone like that?”

"Wow." That sounded kind of horrible and really boring. And he couldn't help but wonder if it was sentimental because it was a dream about the past. He'd never thought of his time in the future as sentiment. At first, he'd thought of it as gospel. A perfect prediction of the future.

How wrong he turned out to be.

"Ghost. We were mutation partners in ze future for ze whole Gulf Stream sing." He twirled his finger in the air. In a way, he was lucky that his future had been focused entirely on learning the finer points of control of his power and how it interacted with another's power. As it turned out, he was doing the same things today just in a different way.

"I had to go along on her vigilante trips to make sure she came back to ze program." He was hoping that she was just on one of those little vigilante trips now. The Future Sight team had promised to look for her, but... that really wasn't their priority right now. "Zis Ghost here and now is a lot more..." he had to cast about for the right word to fit what he needed. "A lot more meek zan the one I knew."

She hadn't yet been changed to be that Ghost. That was where the future and the past differed.

Ghost was his partner? Like, two cops were partners? She didn't even consider what other type of partner they could have been. That would have been just too strange.

It made sense to her that events could change from what was predicted to something completely different, but to think that a person's personality could change so drastically was difficult. She could kind of see it, a little bit, with Slate. In the dreams he seemed still so young and innocent, still like a child sometimes, even though he was an adult. In the current time something seemed to have helped him grow up a little faster. Either way, though, he was still Slate.

Ghost being a vigilante, though? She had a hard time picturing that. Maybe as a cat burglar that sneaked into people's apartments in fake wigs to steal their passports. Even as an X-man, she didn't seem like the type to be on the front lines, more like a supporter. Going it alone as a vigilante? That really was a change for her.

“It must be weird, her being like your mom now, when before you were equals.”

Speaking of Ghost being a mom...

“Oh, I forgot to ask before. How's it feel to be an older brother? Or rather an almost-older-brother?”

From equals to mother son? "Yeah. Tell me about it. She always gave me a little more leeway zan she would have a normal kid, I sink." Also because she was way too nice now. Jude figured that if he'd really tried, he could have been a kid again. But he didn't want to be. And Sebastian might have tried to steer him, in his own way, but Jude really didn't respect him in the same way that he had respected Ghost.

"Older brother?" That was so like this Ghost. Leave her alone for a second and she'd find something to adopt. Maybe it was Strike or someone else from the future? "She say who she's adopting zis time?"

Katrina blinked, and tilted her head to one side.

“You mean she hasn't told you?” Maybe Katrina shouldn't be the one breaking the news, but it was too late to not tel him now. Jude really needed to get home more often to stay caught up on these things. Or maybe Ghost and Sebastian weren't ready to tell anyone yet. It was still pretty soon after they found out, and Katrina wasn't even really supposed to know.

But Jude. He should definitely know.

“They aren't adopting anyone. They're having a baby.”

There was a simple explanation for this. She was confused. "No. Kat. Ghost iz gone. Ze Iris Clinic got ransacked, zere were police and it was a crime scene and everysing." Of course... Ghost being gone didn't mean that she wasn't still pregnant...

"Oh no." Screw waiting around for Aedus. They had to go look for them now. Jude went over to the counter where he'd stashed his wallet and keys and stuffed them back into his pockets along with this phone which now had Aedus' number in it. He went for the door.

Pregnant ladies didn't go out hunting bad guys. He had to go find her. Now.

“Wait, what? No. This place got ransacked. Iris Clinic couldn't have been...” She was just there, like a week ago, plus a year.

“She's gone? What about Sebastian? Were they hurt? Kidnapped? How long have they been gone? Are the police looking? How about the X-men? What happened, exactly?” They needed all the clues they could get.

Jude grabbed keys. Katrina didn't have anything to grab, she just followed. Except for a brief pause to type out a quick text message.

“Aedus: Family emergency, had to run. Call you later. -Kat and Jude”