Notes: In the comics, Bolivar makes and gives Larry the "amulet" after Mrs. Trask's death - which Larry predicted at age five; Larry worships his father; Chalmers accidentally tears the medallion off of Larry in the middle of an argument, and the Sentinels immediately recognize Larry as a mutant; Larry has a sister, Tanya - aka Sanctity - who is a mutant time-traveler and a character from Rachel's Askani years. Also in the comics, Kate/Kitty's psyche travels into the past before Rachel does, and Rachel stays in her past/our present (until she goes into the far future to become Mother Askani and raise her "brother" Cable... that's another story...). And finally, in the comics, Franklin died during the big escape, not after it, and Kate was the one who triggered Rachel's Phoenix powers. None of these things helped my fic, so they got dropped. (I took some liberties with the entire DoFP timeline, too.)

She hovered on the edges of the estate for several hours. The delay wasn't to study the security system, which she had already penetrated easily once before. It wasn't to think, either, although she had things to think about now. She found a perch in the heights of a spreading oak tree and sat, letting the wind slip fingers through her hair and blow her scent out to sea. Letting the idea of a life without pursuit - she was well and truly dead this time - settle deep into her bones.

But it wasn't in her to sit still for too long, and she climbed down while the sun was still high. Without a sound, she made her way across the grounds and into the house, and found it deserted. The faintest sounds - a humming under her feet - reached up, and she knew the students were all training. But the one she had come to see was still aboveground.

She padded on quiet cat's feet to the study at the rear of the house, opened the door without knocking. From inside the room came a rush of scents: ash and burnt wood in the fireplace, musty paper from the books, peppermint from the cup of tea sitting on the desk. Sun-warmed wood and fabric. Lingering traces of cleaning agents - fake lemon that couldn't mask real chemicals. And from behind the desk, the scents of the reason for her visit.

"Hello," the man called Professor Xavier said. He did not look alarmed and she could not detect any fear. He had known she was coming; she hadn't made an attempt to mask her presence this time. "Wolverine is not here."

She wandered around the perimeter of the room out of habit, checking for traps and bugs and danger. But all was still and quiet. "I'm not looking for him."

"Of course not." He folded his hands together over the desk, over the newspaper he had been reading. The expression on his face was calm and compassionate, and so was his tone. "How can I help you, X23?"

She came to a stop in front of his desk, hands hanging loose at her sides. One of the newspaper headlines said that there had been a massive and unexplained explosion in the New Mexican desert. She stared at it for a long moment, deciphering the words of the article in her halting, self-taught way. Former government employee Bolivar Trask was the only person missing. He was presumed dead.

She let a memory of Bolivar Trask and the fire swim past her psychic defenses, let him pick up on it, then met his eyes with her own. "I didn't destroy the Sentinel factory. Another mutant did."

One eyebrow went up. "Oh?"

He was expecting her to tell him more, but she wouldn't. It had been an offering only, to prove her good intentions, and a bluff, to hide the truth. The truth was, she didn't know why she'd done what Rachel had said - the X-Men were the last people she wanted to go to. She only knew that she had come, and now, standing in the Institute, she would have to see it through to the end. The knowledge chafed like a knotted rope around her neck.

Her fingers closed into tight, brief fists before she forced them open. "I want to stay here."

He regarded her for a moment. She couldn't tell what he was thinking. The fake lemon was irritatingly strong; it masked any scent she might have used to help her decipher the neutral look he was giving her.

"There are rules in my home," he said at last, gently. "You would be expected to follow them. Eventually, I would also like to send you to high school with the other students."

She felt the icy coiling in her stomach that signaled fear; she did not want to live with rules, and she did not want to brush against the non-mutant world. She wanted to hide away and be alone... But she wanted to stay and see it through. She wanted to be on the team and she wanted to be all alone. It was too confusing for her to sort out, so she did what amounted to instinct: she went with her orders.

Wolverine was here, and she was dead, and she was going to stay. It would not be so bad to live in Xavier's house. Not so bad. For awhile, at least. Then she could - she would - leave. And never come back.

She had one stipulation and laid it on the negotiating table now: "I'll be free to come and go."

Professor Xavier gave her a warm, sympathetic smile and touched her mind softly, showing her the truth of his next words. She snapped her psychic defenses up instantly, crushing the soft touch under a wall of bristling spikes, but he did not lose the smile, and his words still held truth: "We would never hold you against your will, X23."

The moment of her decision hung around her, shimmering in the afternoon sun, wrapping itself around her like the wings of a bird. She stripped off one glove, then the other, and held out one bare hand to the man behind the desk. And she did not know whether she meant to shake his hand or slash open his throat, but the peace she'd absorbed slowed her reactions until he had taken her fingers in his, and then the moment was past and the decision made for her.

She felt for a second the weighty hand of inevitability instead of the dry, light grasp of Professor Charles Xavier.

"Welcome," he said simply.

Larry Trask unlocked the door of his house and let himself inside. The suitcase in his hand thudded to the wooden floor gracelessly. He heard the musical crunch of breaking glass from within, but the sound meant nothing to him.

Nothing.

He was drowning in a sea of nothing.

His father was dead. His mother was dead. He was all alone. And there was only one place to put the blame.

He had not loved his father, that was true, but perhaps he had. Regardless, he felt lost without the man's presence in the world, no matter how remote and uncaring.

Methodically, silently, he went through the house, turning on lights, checking the thermostat, all the things he had done every day since he was thirteen and his life alone had begun. He'd thought he was alone, anyway. That aching feeling could not begin to compare to the raging abyss inside him now.

He fixed himself a meal and ate it, despite the fact that he was not hungry and it tasted like ashes. In the silence of his house he could hear the explosions, the alarms, the shouts and cries. He could see the flames and smoke of the final explosion spread itself across his vision, replaced a heartbeat later by a brilliant firebird.

One place to put the blame. One faction that was guilty. One way to ease his pain.

After the meal, he went into the study and flipped on his computer. He sat for a moment, staring at the blue screen, thinking of the blueprints in his father's office, of the space station that only he knew about now, and then he booted up his design program and began to draw. He drew robots. Better robots. Robots the mutants would not be able to destroy.

His anger grew as he worked, mercifully leaching into the nothingness and taking away some of its crushing weight, and his mind raced over plans. He could get Judge Chalmers to handle the public face of things - he could approach the government and ask for his father's contract - he could build an army. Yes - his own army, and install it in the space station, and use it to gain revenge against the mutants who had torn away from him the last remnant of his family.

X-Men, his father had named the intruders.

So the X-Men would be the first to go.

It was more than right that he should be the one to avenge his father; it was perfect. Undeniably clear. The path he would take was laid out for him like a blueprint of destiny - the fate he'd been fighting with in the dark for his entire life. In the flickering, ash-choked light of the explosion, that fate had become welcome.

As he drew the next generation of Sentinel robots, his mother's medallion glinted in the pale light of the computer. He did not know it, but the medallion emitted a tailored low-grade radiation that his mother the expert, fearful of her husband's project, had concocted especially for her only child. He did not know it, but even as his mind seethed with thoughts of revenge against the mutants, the medallion continued to mask and suppress his own mutation.

Just as it always had. Just as it always would, until the moment of his death.

If Lawrence Trask had taken off the medallion, he would have known exactly how fast that moment was coming.

Rachel felt the world slow and coalesce around her, gathering substance and form and gravity as she reentered the normal flow of time. Her body became heavy again, a physical object acted on by physical forces, and her five normal senses switched on one by one. She breathed in the scents of her home, and opened her eyes in sudden dismay.

The ruined skyline of lower Manhattan stretched above her in a jagged, gap-toothed grin. At ground level, empty doors and windows gazed out unseeing. Trash and mountainous debris from the last great superhuman war against the Sentinels littered the street. A ragged poster peeling off of one wall proclaimed the fugitive status of mutants who had long since been slaughtered and buried in prison graveyards. Overhead the sky was a steely, stormy gray mass of clouds and watery sunlight. It was nothing that she hadn't seen a thousand times before.

If she walked a few blocks or so, she would find herself right back in the enclosure of the South Bronx Mutant Internment Center.

"This can't be," she said. Her voice echoed off the crumbling walls of the concrete canyon, multiplying her disbelief a half-dozen times. She put a hand to her neck automatically, checking for a collar. She wasn't wearing one, but that changed nothing. She'd changed nothing. A bolt of panic shot through her, and she repeated more loudly, "This can't be!"

But it was.

Dazed and shocked by her failure, Rachel stumbled through the wreckage, seeking safety automatically from Sentinels, and from the roving street gangs that were the only ones who lived in these places now. The habits of half a lifetime were coming back to her even as she railed against the necessity.

Her future should not exist. It should have been erased from reality as the past was changed. She hadn't even been trying to jump back to the year from which she'd left - it was too dangerous, now that everything in the past was different. Now that her mother might have lived a few years longer.

But... but it seemed as though the hand of fate had plucked her from the timestream and dropped her right back where she'd begun. No changes. No chances. No hope.

She stopped and leaned against the last remaining wall of a smashed storefront as she tried desperately to figure things out. Her memories were shot, though; she had the feeling that something similar had happened to her before, but she couldn't remember when, or how she'd fixed the problem. She knew who she was, what she'd been doing - trying to change the past so this future wouldn't happen - but the specifics of the last few hours of her life were suddenly mired in a gray fog.

What had gone wrong? Had she not changed things enough? Had she changed too much? Had she gone back to the wrong moment in time? - a real possibility, given the big gaps in her memories. Was the true turning point, the key to undoing all this misery, lying somewhere else in those days of future past?

The inconsequence of her effort and all the deaths of her loved ones, the futility of it, made her want to scream in rage and frustration. She was a goddess, she was fire and life incarnate forever, but she could not fix her own time.

"I have to fix this," she said, mumbling it. Her disappointment threatened to crush her soul and her will, but the part of her that was a goddess burned on undimmed. Her feet turned towards the South Bronx 'Center, but what she would do when she got there, what and who she would find, she had no idea.

I have to fix this, she thought, more firmly. She would. No matter what, she would...

-END-