Call Back Yesterday

A Place to be Calling Home

 

 

Because of the fallout from Alcatraz, Remy didn't know the date until he channel-surfed through GNN. The time and date pinned the tickertape news to the bottom of the screen: May 15, 2005. He only absorbed the significance when he reached for his beer and realised the ticking sensation at his wrist was gone.


McCoy pushed his glasses onto his forehead. "I'm sorry for doubting you but yes, you do have a microchip embedded in your fascia."

"So why didn't anything happen? I'm supposed to get an alarm or something."

"It's broken. I'm surprised infection hasn't set in."

If his tracer was broken, how was he supposed to go back home?


Summers drove him to Wyoming County, back to his sphere if it was still there, if it had ever been there. To his relief, no one had moved it in the nine days since he arrived in this time. Evidently, no one could move it. Scratches at the base and near the crown revealed the attempts.

"Looks like you were telling the truth," Summers said after looking inside at the gear.

"Good. I was starting to think I'd gone--" Remy stopped himself in time.

"Psycho?" Summers filled in, his lips twisting upwards in an approximation of a smile. "So, how do you go back?"

"I don't know. My microchip was supposed to take care of everything. I just sit in there and let it happen."

"Give it a try."

On went the gear. He felt stupider wearing the helmet with an audience. He sat in the bucket seat as Summers closed the door. Then he waited. For a long time. Feeling absolutely fine.

After what felt like an hour, Remy had to get out. He unlatched the door, holding his breath as it hissed open. Summers peeked in from the side. "Did you check the batteries?"

"Fuck."

"Maybe you left the headlights on."

Remy glared. "Yuck it up, Winky."

Summers grinned. It... fit, so much more than the dour expression he'd been wearing since Remy knew him. Kind of freaky, was what it was, too.

"Why aren't you mad?" he asked Summers on the way home.

"At what?" He was genuinely puzzled.

"Me. The world. You was grizzled and pissed for half a year after you thought Jean died at Alkali Lake but less than a week after-- well, after, you're cracking jokes? Should I be giving you some of that olanzepine? I'm sure we got some left over somewhere."

Summers didn't answer but Remy knew he wouldn't. He stepped over a line, a bad habit of his when he wanted pressure off himself. Talk about the other guy, make it about them instead. To his surprise, Summers had a reply for his question.

"I already grieved for Jean all those months. Seeing her again..." He shook his head. "That last moment just before she died, she sent me everything she ever felt about me through our link. And I sent her everything back. It was... it was so goddamn beautiful."

For one pants-soiling second, Remy thought Summers was going to start crying but thankfully, he manned up.

"The first time, I blamed everyone for her death, especially myself. This time, she made sure I knew it was all her disease. Nothing anyone could have done would have been able to control the Phoenix personality, not after six months without meds. Sometimes, people are just broken and there's... there's nothing you can do about it. No matter how much you love them." Summers let out a sigh then shook himself like a wet dog. "Uh. Sorry about that."

"Already forgot about it, hommes."

"Thanks." A couple miles later, he asked, "Are you sure you're not a little telepathic? We had a student come through once who was an empath. You couldn't help but like her."

"You hitting on me, Winky?" Remy threw him a smile, one guaranteed to fluster any heterosexual male.

Summers wasn't one inch flustered. "I'm just saying you drew a lot more out of me in this conversation than I meant to reveal. Even the professor hasn't been able to let me talk it out."

"I guess I'm just a trustworthy soul."

"I guess so." Then in another second: "Uh, you weren't hitting on me, were you? 'Cause I'm flattered --"

"Jesus!"

"-- but I'm mostly interested in women. I haven't dated men since college and you're not really my type."

"Hell no! Fuck. I hate this decade."


McCoy called in a favour from Reed Richards and Susan Storm. A dozen paparazzi followed the pair from the sphere to the school gates. In the evening, the country's entertainment news and blogs would blare about connections between mutants and the Fantastic Four but inside the school, the scientists were oblivious. They holed up in the medlab with Hank, prodding and scanning Remy for hours. At least Sue was the main geneticist. If Remy knew doctors were this pretty, he'd've gone to the hospital every day of his misbegotten life. At best, he could say McCoy's bedside manner was a hell of a lot better than Stryker's. The medlab still gave him the creeps though.

"That's the fifth vial of the stuff you got from me," he said, wiggling his fingers.

"We need enough a lot of blood to run accurate tests and more to store for time-sensitive observation." Sue swirled the contents of a full vial around. "I wish we had a sample from your first day."

"More testing for the crazy, hein?"

"My brother and best friend are astronauts, my boyfriend has a PhD in a type of theoretical physics so new it doesn't have a name yet and I turn invisible. In contrast, time travel's been an academic topic since the mid-fifties. Of course, I also expected Reed to be the one doing the travelling." She threw Richards a distracted smile. "That man has a knack for tripping into impossible phenomena. Okay, I'm done."

Richards stretched his neck from the laboratory end of the room. "What exactly did Logan and Network tell you about travellers to the future?"

"Something about the future being nonexistent to me as someone from 1993 so I can't exist in it."

"Any details on why?"

"Naw, they kept explanations stupid for their guinea pig. Wouldn't be surprised if they didn't know exactly what happened either. Seemed to me like they fly by the seat of their pants through all of it."

"Did they specify any signs and symptoms?"

Helplessly, he shrugged. "Just that it looks like Parkinson's. And it'll come in a year."

"The first manifestations will come in one year or death in one year?"

"I don't know! He was using it at a threat; I wasn't exactly writing a prescription."

"At least we have symptoms and a time frame," Sue interrupted. "We can monitor your condition while we figure out a way to fix your tracer."


To keep him busy (and out of the school's goods), Xavier paid Remy to go places where the X-Men couldn't, places that needed a little more finesse and a lot less exploding. He became the X-Men's ears in skid row, to the people who didn't trust the X-Men, Magneto or the government. He kept tabs on known sympathisers on either side of the three-way fence. He burned data on mutants at the main office of the Friends of Humanity and dropped off incriminating evidence at the desk of CNBC's Trish Tilby. He bugged the office of the new secretary of Mutant Affairs and the secretary of defence. (Xavier didn't send him to do that; he just wanted to see if he could. It was fun.)

Because of all that, he worked with Summers a lot. The guy went from whiskered and depressed to a machine which everyone seemed to take as a good thing. Only Remy, always nosy and on the lookout after that weird conversation, knew about mini-bar bottles of alcohol hidden in various crannies around the school. Hey, if it kept him going...

Rogue, Drake, Pryde, Jubilee, Sharra and Rasputin graduated in August. Drake and Pryde became roomies (likely something more) in Columbia. Sharra entered the police academy in the same city. Jubilee bought a wrecker of a car and drove out to LA to discover herself. Rasputin stayed on Xavier's salary as the handyman and art teacher. With his job description filled and Grey dead, Logan roared off campus again, leaving Rogue at the front doors clutching his dogtags in her bare hands. Remy wanted to hit him, bad as when he first showed up in New Orleans demanding access to the Island.

"Wanna go for a drive?" he asked her as soon as Logan's bike could no longer be heard.

"What for?"

"What else are you gonna do?"

They rode Rogue's Kawasaki once around the property then out into the sleepy little hamlet of Salem City then past even that. No planned direction, no real destination, just the engine eating tarmac and the horizon beckoning and Rogue soft under his hands. He didn't mind riding bitch so much in this trip.

Twilight found them in one of Pennsylvania's many mountain glades. The tree cover dissipated the humidity and decreased the temperature but surely not enough that Rogue felt cold. Still, as they sat at the base of a knotty old maple, she settled between his legs and leaned back on his chest.

"Do you have a girlfriend? Back in 1993?" she wanted to know.

Remy picked up a fallen leaf. "You could call Bella that."

"Bella. That's a pretty name."

"Belladonna Bordeaux. It's her stage name."

"You would hook up with an actress," she chided.

"Actually," said Remy, "she's an exotic dancer."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Shocked that I'm shaking up with a stripper?"

"I think you want me to be shocked. What's she like?"

Shamefully, he could barely call up her face. "Blonde, legs to heaven. Her daddy's the enforcer in the city's major ganglord so she don't really need to dance. She just likes to piss him off. Wish I'd known that before I started sleeping with her, let me tell you. I think I got scared into falling for her."

Rogue laughed. "You're awful! If it was that bad, you wouldn't be so nuts about going back."

He never told her about the dying side-effect. He kind of hoped it wouldn't matter. "She's all right, really. We're a couple of crazy kids in love."

"You're not in love with her," said Rogue.

"How do you know that?"

"I've seen people in love. Mr Summers and Dr. Grey. I know how Logan felt about Dr. Grey and about his ex-fiancée in Japan. How Pete feels about Kitty. Even... even the traces of Magneto left in me, it feels something stronger than what you're describing. I'm going to fall in love like that."

"With Drake." The leaf in his hand hissed with kinetic energy.

"Bobby's practice."

"You sound like you're trying to convince yourself. It's Logan, ain't it? Every other woman with an X is throwing themselves at him. You realise he could be a thousand years old."

But she wrinkled her nose. "Ew. No. Logan's... he's crushable but he's got more baggage than even me. And I'm the person who absorbs people's baggage. I think I want to fall for someone normal for a change."

"Good luck finding that pot of gold."

"I'll just point my bike west and see what happens," she continued.

"Is that gonna be before or after you take the Cure?"

She jerked away from him, her lips all pursed and hands in fists. After glaring at him for a full minute, she got up to her feet. "Why are you so nice one minute and a complete and utter ass the next?"

Because I'm getting to comfortable here, he wanted to tell her. Because sometimes, in my head, I cal the school home. Because I'm not going to stay and I don't want to want to stay. Instead, he changed the subject. "So you head west. Then what?"

"It's not like I haven't tried to control it!" she blurted out. "I have! But it was all with Dr. Grey and she's dead now. I can't do this with the Professor; he's too... I have Charles'-- Magneto's memories of him and it sticks out too much when I practice and I can't... I'm going to be stuck in that school, in one place, forever!"

"Why do you want to leave so bad?"

She didn't answer right away. That was all right, Remy was god with patience. "I leave before they kick me out."

He knew exactly what she meant.


September, October and November rolled around. Trish Tilby's investigative team released an exposé on The Cure. Apparently, it hadn't passed even the most minimal of FDA approval; Worthington Pharmaceuticals greased some hands to bypass the testing. Rogue locked herself up in her room all day, letting only Summers in for more than a minute. Remy tried not to be hurt. Those two had a lot in common. The same month, Richards and Storm returned with something useful. Nothing practical, just useful.

"What we know of special relativity and gravitational time dilation indicates travel to the future is possible, not the past," said Richards. "However, you also mentioned a wormhole, a long-touted phenomenon in time travel theory. Using a temporal wave scanner, we made measurements on the random frequencies in space. The scanner works by--"

"For the sake of brevity, let's stick to the findings," said Xavier, much to Remy's relief. "Is travel through a wormhole possible?"

Richards beamed. "Not only possible but highly probable. If our calculations are correct, the so-called wormhole used for your travel isn't merely a hole at all. It's a multi-tiered gateway to specific intervals on the space-time continuum. It only ever opens at that location on a specific date and time. We had postulated, of course, that wormhole travel would be precise but I had not--" Someone coughed off screen, snapping Richards out of his nerd trance. "Right. Anyhow, we now know that Remy can indeed travel back and forth through time using that particular wormhole."

"So how do I do it?" asked Remy.

Here, Richards' face fell. "We... don't know. Yet."

"Don't know yet? You just said it was possible!"

"Yes but without a guidance system of some sort, who knows when you'll end up. We don't know even know how to access the wormhole; we've merely confirmed its existence. The negative energy ring you spoke of in our other meetings has quite a broad definition. As well, we don't understand the power needed to create that energy."

"Great," Remy said. "At this rate, I'm gonna be a grampa before we figure that out. If I even have that long."

"Are you feeling all right?" Sue intruded. "Do you feel any tingling at the tips of your fingers or toes? Have you been clumsier than usual lately, tripping or dropping things?"

He was about to drop a charged card at the monitor. "No."

"Your bloodwork hasn't changed. I'd like to come again and take new samples for comparison though." Sue's expression softened. "We're doing all we can, Remy. If it's in our power, we'll get you home safe."

"Fine. Whatever." Just then, a thought clicked in Remy's head. Reed Richards. Hank McCoy. He dove to the phone. "Network said the time-travel technology they used was based research by Richards and McCoy but there was a civil war of some sort. Most of their research-- your research-- got destroyed. That's why they couldn't control the travelling as well."

"I'll make multiple copies and ensure at least two of them are secure," Richards said. "If this technology is needed again, I want to ensure it won't cause harm, directly or indirectly."

"Maybe we shouldn't keep notes at all," said Sue. "It could keep anyone from abusing the power, like they did when they picked Remy up."

That sounded like a mighty fine idea to Remy but Richards looked like Sue just kicked the berries right out of his puppy. He hoped she could talk her boyfriend into her ways. He didn't trust Doomsday Logan not to pick up another sucker who'd mess up the timeline even more.


Snow fell. Rogue gathered her old self back together. She taught self-defence class for the younger kids and worked on her mental blocks with Xavier. Jubilee returned, tanned and broke. Pete left on an art scholarship to England. Logan went in and out, each visit no more than two weeks before he continued on his quest to pay for his past lives. Politicians used mutants as a tagline, good and bad. Students came, students went, the youngest still gravitated around him not that he complained. Xavier's School for the Gifted carved a niche in itself for him, so slowly and subtly that Remy, who teased meaning from every twitch, didn't notice until it was too late. He already cared.

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