Travelling to Manhattan was a strange experience for Josh. It was like coming back to a house he’d used to live in, to find that the new occupiers had moved the furniture around and what was once your favourite bedroom is now just a place they store boxes. Painful in that it showed that he had moved on from a part of his life that he felt strong love for, but also inevitable and irreversible. He could no sooner have avoided the fact that he could no longer go to New York with impunity than he could have peeled the gold from his skin. He used to travel to the city regularly, back when he’d lived in Queens with his family, but after his powers manifested and Westchester had become his residence, he’d travelled less and less. He could buy much of what he needed online, and the hustle and bustle of city life he’d once so loved lost some of its magic once the people in the crowds were staring at your strange gold skin, wondering how dangerous you were, how many times you’d protested alongside terrorists and dangerous mutants, when the last time you killed an ordinary human was, why you were in this city- their city, their clean, human city- and when you would love them alone. Josh’s mutation was a remarkable thing. It could heal people of disease, it could cure people of wounds and injuries and even bring those who were close to death back from that scariest and most predictable of life’s events, it was a truly superb power and he adored using it to help those in need. Yet it was also very, very visible and sometimes that presented its own problems. He had been fine when he’d merely been a mutant, and the worst risk was encountering a girl he’d liked before his manifestation in Macy’s over the Holidays, but once he had gained his gold skin trips to the city had become absolute rarities.

Today was such a rarity. Josh had travelled in to the city in order to get away from the Mansion for a few hours. The place was great, but around Christmas time especially it could get very heavy. Kids who’d suffered the not-uncommon tragedy of parent abandonment for their mutation spending their first Christmas alone, kids waiting eagerly for parents to come and swoop them away on vacation, fights over gifts and break-ups over mistletoe. Add all of that together, and you got a situation no one wanted to spend a great deal of time in and Josh, being nearly 20 and therefore trusted a little more than younger students, could spirit himself away to the concrete spires for a few hours and get lost and stared at in the fields of people doing Christmas shopping. Josh picked up a few pieces. A DVD for David, a CD for Nori. He was not great with gifts, and shopping made his head throb and his eyes water after more than an hour. He escaped his way out of the busiest shopping streets and found himself staring out across the winter-blasted beauty of Central Park. The weather was icy and biting and snow had come down heavily, coating everything like the front of an idyllic Christmas scene, a layer of shiny beauty lying on everything, twinkling away. Could Josh be blamed for deciding to go for a walk in the park? He moved south, looking out over the frozen lake and the confused birds who had not migrated south for the winter and now found their swimming hole a not-so-convenient patch of ice. He smiled at the hail of quacks and tweets, then walked on. He grabbed a hot dog from a vendor and munched away, steam rising from the tasty piece of meat as he coated his lips with mustard. He listened to a busking musician, wrapped up even more thoroughly than Josh with a case full of coins and snow, as he played what Josh recognised to be a little Elvis Costello, but he couldn’t place what. He dropped the change from his hot dog in the guy’s case and gave him a smile.

Eventually, he slipped from green and returned to grey. He checked his watch. Somehow, he had spent a whole hour in Central Park. Crossing in to the city, he found himself outside the Lincoln Center, where it seemed a vast number of people were congregating. He didn’t know what was happening. It could have been anything: an art exhibition, a small movie premiere, a fashion show. The Lincoln Center was the sort of place where such things usually occurred. Having had enough of crowds for one day, Josh ducked down across the plaza, and found himself passing by the rear of the Center’s primary exhibition area. He walked past a clear glass door, pulling his coat around him. He saw a group of people, all wearing black t-shirts and headsets, gesturing wildly, backstage staff for something, but Josh didn’t know what. A second later, he heard a loud, female voice. “Hey, you!” Josh turned around. “Yeah, come over here.” The woman was slender, brunette and in her early thirties, wearing the same clothes as everyone else, with a security pass dangling around her neck. “How’d you like to get backstage at a fashion show, kid?” Josh took a glimpse inside. He saw a woman walk past, quite possibly nearly twice as beautiful as any he’d ever seen (except Rahne). His jaw literally dropped. “Cool.” He tried to sound casual, but his voice had risen by several octaves. He was brought inside. “Get in here, then.”

He was led through several backstage corridors. He spotted several very, very beautiful women, flustered men, dressed flamboyantly and pricking, stitching and cutting in final preparation. “Now listen. This isn’t a free pass. You aren’t dreaming, and I don’t go around handing out free passes to fashion shows to teenage kids.” She explained as Josh tried to not get too distracted. “But it turns out that this show’s got a big interest from Change and Frost Industries.” Change was the largest pro-mutant charity and pressure group in the United States, and one of the largest in the world and Frost Industries, who Josh was pretty sure made something to do with computers or something, were one of their biggest donators. He remembered researching the group in his mutant history class. “So with them involved we... we needed a few more…” She looked awkward. “A few more genetically challenged individuals. And other than the skin, you aren’t bad.” Josh tried to feel insulted, but he was backstage at a fashion show. He was led to a small dressing room. “Look, just sit around back here for a little while and try not to touch anything, OK?” He felt remarkably like a schoolboy. “We’ll come and get you when we need you. When we get you, just sit in the front row of the show and don’t to talk to anyone.” This really was surreal. Josh nodded. He appeared to have had an attack of bashfulness in the face of a legion of stunningly beautiful supermodels. How surprising.

Josh had been sat for a few minutes, thumbing through a magazine that seemed to have been abandoned on a table, when he spotted someone he recognised pass by. A few others had walked past. A tall, eye-catching blonde snapping at people like she owned the place despite quite clearly being a model (she was wearing lingerie and a cape, at least) and a tiny Italian man grumbling to himself. The woman he recognised was a model herself. She had been all over the papers a few weeks ago, and her brother was the Mayor or the DA or something, Josh didn’t keep up with politics so wasn’t sure. Her name was…Clemency, Clarissa? He glanced at her and she actually glanced back. He smiled very shyly. “Um, hi.” He was getting tired of sitting here waiting for something to happen.

Grace was an old hand at fashion shows, having just finished her fourth year of working the runway for VS’s annual fashion show, not to mention the assorted shows she’d worked for various designers. She loved them, of course, being something of an attention whore, and nothing beat the feeling of strutting down a runway knowing that every eye was on you. The get-ups were often outrageous, by normal clothing standards, but it was a bit like playing dress-up, or having Halloween any day of the year. The more outrageous the outfit, the more fun she had.

That part would come later, however. In this particular moment she was still in the ‘getting ready’ stage of things, golden tresses wound around large curlers and wearing nothing but a flimsy robe of silk over her underwear. She’d just had her makeup done, and while making her way back down the hallway a glance inside one of the dressing rooms arrested her forward momentum. Gold skin? Gold skin? You didn’t see that every day.

He seemed a little uncomfortable, with his almost awkward smile and shy little hello when he caught her looking, and Grace flashed him her most sunshine-bright smile in return. “Hi handsome,” she chirped back at him, slipping her way into the room and sauntering over to lean against the vanity next to his chair. “You look nervous. Never been in a show before?” Grace had never considered herself particularly prone to nerves until her first fashion show, when she’d been so nervous that she’d had to call her brother to babble inanely about how all the other girls were so much prettier than her, or skinnier than her, or whatever other small insecurity her mind decided to capitalize on.

These days she was past all that, obviously.

Curious eyes rested on the skin of his cheek, brows furrowed ever so slightly as she contemplated it. At first she thought he’d been painted for something (odder things had been known to happen), but the more she looked at it the more certain she became that it was actually real. Mutant then, not that she cared much one way or the other. “That’s real, right?” Without much care for personal boundaries Grace reached out a hand towards his face, intent on swiping her fingers gently across his cheekbone to see if his skin felt as metallic as it looked.