Stacy X

The scent of Krakoan blossoms hung thick in the air outside the bower, its massive petals pulsing faintly like something breathing. Couples drifted toward the entrance, hands laced together, murmuring low as they slipped inside for privacy the flower always seemed to promise. You stood near the threshold with a small box tucked against your side, half hidden by the folds of your jacket.

Nightcrawler saw it first. His tail stilled behind him, and the easy warmth that usually lived in his face drained away.

"Is that what I think it is?"

Anna Marie followed his gaze and stopped walking altogether. Her eyes narrowed, not with his hurt but with something colder, sharper.

"Sugar, you know what the law says. First law of this island. You don't get to hand that out like candy."

Kurt looked stricken, like something sacred had cracked in front of him. Anna Marie looked ready to march you straight to the Quiet Council herself.

Before either could say more, Miranda stepped out from the bower's shadowed entrance, one hand smoothing her hair back from her face. The motion caught the light on the fine dusting of pale green scales along her hairline and cheekbone, more scattered down the edge of her jaw, and matching patches ran along her forearms and the backs of her calves where her skin caught the light differently from everyone else's.

"It was me. It was my idea. Don't look at them like that."

Kurt blinked.

"Stacy, you cannot be serious. This is Krakoa's promise. Every mutant child born here matters, more than anywhere else in the world."

Miranda's voice went quieter.

"I know what it's supposed to mean. Come inside. Both of you. Let me show you why."

She led them past the outer petals, into the humid warmth of the bower's inner chamber. The walls curved into cradles of living flora, soft moss beds glowing faint gold, vines curling protectively over small sleeping shapes. Infant mutants dozed in nests of woven leaves. Toddlers with half-formed powers, a flicker of scales here, a static charge sparking harmlessly there, tumbled across a floor that cushioned every fall.

Anna Marie's breath caught.

"These are the abandoned ones."

Miranda crouched beside a cocoon shaped crib, the scaled patch along her forearm catching a faint gold light as she brushed a vine away from a sleeping child's face.

"Some were left at the portals. Some were surrendered because their families couldn't handle what they became. Some just... appeared, and nobody claimed them. Krakoa doesn't have an adoption system, Kurt. There's no registry, no home matching, no vetting. A child ends up here and just... waits. Grows up in a nursery instead of a family."

Kurt's jaw tightened. He looked around at the small bodies, the shifting colors of dreaming mutant children with no names attached to a hearth.

"So your answer is fewer babies."

"My answer is choice. Nobody's being forced into anything. I'm not out there confiscating anyone's plans. I'm just making sure the option exists, for mutants who aren't ready, who don't have support, who know they can't give a kid what this island promised them. Because right now the island's promise and the island's reality don't match. And the babies pay for the gap."

Anna Marie was quiet a long moment, watching a small green skinned infant curl a tail around a floating dust of golden pollen.

"You should've told the Council. Not just handed out boxes in the dark."

"Would they have listened?"

Neither Kurt nor Anna Marie answered that.

Kurt reached out and let a sleeping child's hand curl around one finger, small and trusting.

The bower's inner chamber smelled of warm sap and something faintly like honeysuckle, the kind of scent that made newcomers relax without knowing why. Miranda was already inside, sleeves pushed up past her elbows, the pale green scales along her forearms catching the soft gold light filtering through the petal walls. She had a fussing infant balanced against her shoulder, one hand cupped beneath a small tail that kept curling and uncurling in distress.

A few of the older toddlers looked up as you slipped in through the outer petals, then went back to their game of stacking mossy blocks that reshaped themselves every time they toppled. In the corner, a pair of twins with mismatched skin tones, one bark brown and rough, one pale and faintly luminous, lay tangled together mid nap.

"You're late," Miranda said, not looking up, though there was no real edge to it.

She paced a slow circuit of the nursery, bouncing the fussing infant with the ease of long practice, humming something low and tuneless under her breath. One of the toddlers abandoned the block tower to tug at her pant leg, and she scooped the small thing up one-armed without missing a step, balancing both children like it cost her nothing.

"Most of the Council types who swing by here do it once," she said. "Get their photo taken holding a baby for the Krakoan gazette, and never come back."

The luminous twin stirred, made a small unhappy noise, and Miranda crossed to crouch beside the nest, freeing a hand to smooth the vine blanket back over both children without ever putting the other two down. The scales along her jaw caught the light as she leaned in, more texture than color in the gold haze.

"Kurt that fool doesn’t even see what he done" She said it fondly, not unkindly, straightening back up with the toddler now half asleep against her collarbone. "The others love these kids, I know they do. But loving them once a month isn't the same as this."

She gestured with her chin at the room around her, at the leaf cradles curved into the walls, at a small mutant across the nursery whose skin kept flickering between shades like a lightbulb deciding whether to work, at another who'd wedged itself into a mossy alcove and refused to come out no matter how the older kids coaxed.

The fussing infant finally quieted, going limp against her shoulder. Miranda eased herself down into the moss, still holding both children, and for a while the only sounds were the rustle of leaves underfoot, a soft argument breaking out between two toddlers over a wooden rattle, and the slow gold light of the bower settling over the room like something holding its breath.

"People who show up because it's Tuesday," she murmured, mostly to the sleeping infant now, "are rarer than you'd think, on this island."