Storm reaches Australia with her weather powers restored, but that doesn't return the X-Men to their earlier life. The team has survived Dallas and accepted a new kind of secrec…

Storm reaches Australia with her weather powers restored, but that doesn't return the X-Men to their earlier life. The team has survived Dallas and accepted a new kind of secrecy. Ororo must lead people who have effectively removed themselves from the lives of friends and family. The takeover of the Reavers' base in #229 supplies a headquarters, not a ready-made moral arrangement. The group has to decide what to do with what it finds there and how to live around Gateway, a man whose knowledge and choices do not fit neatly into their chain of command. Then #230 provides an early answer to what these supposedly dead heroes can still do. Returning stolen possessions to their owners is a mission with very little resemblance to winning public approval. The recipients do not need to know the X-Men are alive for the kindness to count. Secrecy has not eliminated the possibility of helping individuals. Ororo's leadership also has to stretch across an uneven household. These teammates are adults with pride, romantic complications and very different tolerance for isolation. Their need for a commander doesn't cancel their need for company or for a few hours when their entire identity is not an emergency. The outing in #244 gives Storm room to exist alongside the other women away from the base. It is a welcome change of setting without becoming a magical cure for the tensions they brought with them. The ordinary world remains available, but only in fragments. That makes this Storm distinct from the powerless leader of the reconstruction. Her tremendous abilities are back. The difficult part is still deciding how people should live together and what protection is worth when it asks them to disappear. A distant Australian home does not remove those questions. It gives them a new place to accumulate.