Call Back Yesterday

Four Thousand, Seven Hundred Forty-Eight Days

The radio failed to fill the silence of the van as Rogue, Scott, Ororo and Hank returned to the school.

"Do you think he made it?" asked Scott.

"We can ask the professor to search with Cerebro," Ororo suggested.

Scott winced. "Y'know what? I'd rather not. If he doesn't find him, I'm going to get really depressed."

Rogue stared out of the window, playing with her bracelet.

The last of the snow finally melted. Cherry and apple trees bloomed in full. The petals fell, leaving tiny globes of would-be fruit. Scott boxed up Jean's things into three categories: charity, her parents, and the school. Ororo brought home a date, Jacob Forge, one of Tony Stark's top engineers. Before they knew it, summer rolled around again. Bobby and Kitty finished first semester, flush with the success of independence and new ideas for mutant-human relations on the basic level. The morning after they arrived, Rogue took an empty beer bottle, unfurled a giant map of the world and spun the bottle around. It pointed south and a touch west.

All right then.

Students crashed around her in a wave of excited flurry as she made her way from the second floor to the computer lab. She needed to make plans. She'd take her bike, of course, but she couldn't remember exactly how much money was in her back account. Budgeting the trip would make it last longer. Maybe she'd stick close to the beaches and collect more glass.

The doorbell rang. One of the students answered. "Yeah, sure, he's just in class. I can get you all something to drink while you wait in the study."

"Mais sho'. Thank you."

There. Right there. Rogue's heart froze even as her body sent her running down the hall and back out into the open foyer. A tall, lanky man in a long coat herded two children into a study. His hair was a little shorter and his face a little craggier but there was no mistaking his identity.

"Remy!" She leapt into his arms, laughing, oh Lord, she didn't think she'd ever laugh like this again! And he caught her, because he always did, a bemused smile playing on his lips. "You're okay. I was so afraid-- we all were so afraid something had gone wrong."

Gently, he let her down, an indecipherable expression on his face. Rogue's heart, which had gone from zero to pounding, dropped back down. One of the children he arrived with, the boy who looked around middle-school age, slunk into her line of sight.

"Who's that, Dad? Another ex-girlfriend?"

Dad? Ex-girlfriend? The boy looked enough like Remy but his hair tipped towards blond with a bit more of a wave. The other child was a girl, no more than seven, with a riot of chestnut ringlets and candy smudges around her mouth.

"Remy?" Rogue said again, tremulously.

"That's my name," he said. His eyes narrowed. "I'm sorry; have we met?"

This is how Remy forgot.

The sphere spat him out into a greenbelt which would, in a dozen years, become an alley between townhouses. He couldn't remove the helmet in time. He vomited down his shirt front. Smelling sour and looking worse, he had a harder time than usual charming his way into a shelter for a new set of clothes.

He knew Scott would be at Xavier's or in college right now. So close to his age. They could hang out. Maybe having a fellow orphan and former street rat would prevent a few of the growing pains Summers suffered through. A slighty pricier ticket would take him to Mississippi and Rogue and the son of a bitch uncle that touched her when her momma wasn't home. Or maybe, more desperately, he could win a few more hands and buy a ticket to Egypt where he could help Ororo out of the streets until Xavier found her. He got as far as hailing a taxi but once seated, he couldn't think.

"Hey, I said where to?" the cabbie clicked his tongue at him. "You drunk?"

"No," said Remy slowly, as wormhole theory and alternate timelines tangled in his head. "No. Take me to the airport."

"Which airport?"

"Whichever one is closest."

The calendars at the airport proclaimed the date to be May 6, 1993. Everyone wore their hair too stiff, their jeans too shapeless. The music was better but only by a small degree. Remy handed over a stolen credit card for a ticket to New Orleans, the soonest one that day. He closed his eyes as New York fell away under his plane.

A body got to thinking too much during plane trips. Remy thought of twenty long years, waiting for his friends to grow up and the smell of chicory coffee at midnight blending with lemon-oil on cherry banisters. He felt the cold ache in his arms and the tickle under his chin where Rogue would lay her head. He thought of the students-- his students-- toddlers, babies, twinkles in their parents' eyes right now, beloved until their powers catalysed in about ten years. He thought of strings made of mercury, space-time and the son of a bitch Doomsday Logan who made it possible for him to be thinking those thoughts at all. He'd go nuts thinking.

He stopped in New Orleans long enough to pack. All his life in a suitcase and a sports bag. He didn't even think of taking home a photo, not that any computers in 1993 would have an SD card slot or a USB port. He should have printed out at least one photo.

The next ticket was out to Paris, France. He couldn't do harm to the timeline there, wouldn't have the money with his gangland bridges in New Orleans burned and his cash taking its sweet time in transit. He'd miss online banking.

His memory of time travelling fast turned to Swiss cheese. The next day, he had no idea what online banking was. The next, he barely recalled the route from Salem to the school. This had to be one of the side effects Reed and Hank postulated; he'd rather be throwing up blood. In a week, desperately, he tried to write names for the faces whipping through his memories but in another seven days, he had no idea why he had a list of strangers in his wallet. He was lonely without knowing why.

Bella found him there a couple months later, drunk on insomnia and forced cheer, winning almost every poker game in every casino the City of Lights threw at him. They indulged in a truly explosive session of sex-with-the-ex helped by a magnum or three of champagne brut. Under the influence, marriage seemed like an excellent idea.

His first child came screaming into the world nine months later. Remy held him, trembling, not knowing why he recalled a classroom in a huge atrium, the feel of roofing tiles under his back and the roar of a jet engine. The boy looked up at him with eyes that glowed in sunlight.

"He's perfect," Remy whispered. He held him close to his heart, where the mysterious empty coolness lay.

"He better be after nine months of indigestion and ten hours of labour," said Bella. She tickled his pointed ear. "Isn't that funny? We've got an elf baby. A changeling. I was thinking Leon."

Remy shook his head. "Jean-Marie."

His wife wrinkled her nose. "That's so old fashioned even for France! If we move back to the States, he'll be teased for having a girl's name. At least make it, Jean-Paul or Jean-Claude. Jean-Leon."

But Remy was adamant. "His name's Jean-Marie."

"Are you naming him after someone?"

Cinnamon and roses mingled in his mind with lemon oil and chicory coffee but he couldn't quite grasp the memory. "No. I just... I just really like the name."

They stayed together for all of four years but separate lives got in the way and a divorce was expensive so it didn't become official for another three. By that time, Bella got pregnant again; what was it about fertility and sex-with-the-ex? He begged and pleaded and threatened and bribed her to keep the baby but it wasn't until he held that a sweet little girl that his tension dissolved. As soon as Bella signed the divorce and custody papers, Remy took seven year-old Jean-Marie and baby Aurora Summer back home to the USA.

They settled in Seattle. Remy trained under the best hackers in the business. Computers owned the whole damn planet and he might as well have a piece of it. He still did plenty of B&E's; there really was nothing like a good con. One those business trips, his kids stayed with a neighbour, an old woman they called Tante Mattie. He dated, even contemplated living with one girlfriend, but a bone-deep certainty had settled in him: he'd never find happily ever after in this life. Not with his lifestyle. Meantime, he had a tonne of fun with the ones who wouldn't make it.

Remy was content, rolling along like the proverbial rolling stone until a couple weeks after Jay's birthday when the whole world suffered a telepathic attack. Soon after waking, the boy slammed a fist on the table. Blinding white light flashed under his hand. Remy covered his eyes. Aurora wailed at the unfairness of a world that gave her daddy and big brother a mutant power and not her.

"Let me see your hands," Remy said immediately. When his powers first catalysed, he kept a hold of the pencil and it burned his fingertips. But Jay's hands were unhurt, thank God, and the boy was more shocked than scared.

"Why isn't it purple?" Jay asked. "You charge things purple."

"You still gotta learn style." Remy winked and laughed when his son rolled his eyes. Still, worry turned his stomach over. His kids were his world; he had to find a way to protect them from something like that. He sent feelers out.

A year later, he heard tell of a mutant school in New York. It was called Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. The image on the brochure of an ivy-covered manor pulled at his gut. His fingers honest-go-God trembled and he almost recalled... something. The something that occurred before the loneliness of Paris. But like Seattle's morning fogs, it disappeared without solidifying, leaving nothing but a sense of security. They'd fly out that weekend. The school looked like a good home.