April 10th
After Changes in Latitudes

---

This couldn't be right, it simply couldn't. There was no way that the test was right, but it had to be right, it had always been accurate. Maybe the power outage messed with it? No that couldn't be it, his computers had a back up power source in the form of an energy storage unit that he designed to go with the upgrades he and Madison Jeffries made last month. He had these battery units running all key facilities in the short term until he could finish fixing the sabotaged power system. That was utter mayhem when the dinosaurs attacked... but that wasn't the problem at the moment though it did put things in perspective.

Staring at the computer screen for several minutes, just looking for something to be wrong. However after much contemplation he took a step back to breath before using the intercom set up he called out. "Phoenix please come to the lab." He called out not wanting to raise any alarms in case something slipped in his own mind with the strange results. He figured talking with Jean about it first, having a second set of eyes look things over even if it were not her expertise, the results did concern her after all...

So he waited, began brewing tea on one of his Bunsen burners as he did at times for the expected company and cleared his thoughts. Sounds began approaching as did scents as he waited, however they did not belong to the mutant he was looking for. He turned the computer monitor off to temporarily hide it, knowing now he'd have a much larger reveal than expected. Perhaps it was for the best though.

"Scott, Rachel." Hank regarded both as they entered. "I just put a pot of tea on if either of you are interested. However may I ask what brings the surprise visit?" He asked with a typical smile. "I was actually expecting Jean, just had some things I wanted to have her look over. I imagine she'll be here shortly."

That had been good. After all that had only just happened, a walk to clear the air, as well as their heads, of whatever intrusive force(and at this point she knew it was an intrusive one, even she knew that she didn't fly off the handle like that without extensive provocation)that had been punching it's way into the minds of everyone in that dining hall, she felt that, for the moment, she had her head on relatively straight.

But an impending sense of dread leveled itself over her mind when Scott set his hand on the door leading into Hank McCoy's laboratory. Rushing thoughts, worried ones. He'd just called Jean.

Was she in trouble? Had they lured her here to get her away so something could be done about her? She shook that stupid thought out of her head. If she'd been lied to she'd have picked it up already. Blatant, ugly lies were big ugly thoughts that stood out like sore thumbs. Scott and Jean were honest people, and in the back of her head she cursed herself for thinking that way.

As they stepped into that room however, that impending sense of dread became heavier, far more oppressive. The lab was in a state of activity, and she looked around, as if unfamiliar with the place she'd been staying and sleeping most of the past week away in. What was it? Why was Beast so flabbergasted?

"Jean's coming? What about Franklin... you have something to tell us, Franklin should be here too." She hadn't exactly been trying to read McCoy, but her abilities were still wild, still in need of retraining, and after what had just happened, well, she was more than a little tired.

"Something happened, in the cafeteria... a lot of us just suddenly-" She stopped mid sentence. That one stray thought hit her like a brick, stopping her stupid in her tracks, a surprised and confused look on her face. She looked at Scott shaking her head.

That couldn't be it... that wasn't...

"You have to run it again, Doc." She blurted out, disbelief heavy in her words. "Run it again, take more blood or spit or whatever and run it a gain."

It couldn't be true, it made no sort of logical sense. Deep inside her head, beyond that foggy veil of forget, though, she knew it was what it was. The truth and nothing but it. The irony of Scott's commentary on his blunt nature suddenly beamed into stark contrast with everything that had happened to her so far. This was about as blunt as things could get.

Scott and Rachel entered the infirmary to be greeted by Hank who was uncharacteristically flustered... well, maybe not uncharacteristically, but perhaps overly flustered. He was definitely hiding something, or maybe just not ready to reveal something. "What did you call Jean for?"

As Hank offered to make them some tea, Rachel immediately began to ask about Franklin, jumping to the worst conclusions possible, clearly, just as Scott himself would have if he hadn't had the reassurance of his wife's rapport in his mind. She began to explain that something had happened in the cafeteria, before suddenly stopping and turning a palpable shade of pale that even Scott with his limited color vision could see. She looked at him and shook her head, denying something, something? She began to babble and Scott frowned at Hank.

"What did she read from you?" he asked, coming to what was the most logical conclusion. "Hank, what were you calling Jean down here for?"

Reaching over and patting the girl on the shoulder, he said, awkwardly, "Whatever it is, Rachel, we'll figure out what to do about it together. I told you you were safe here and I met it."

He assumed that Hank's tests had revealed she was something perhaps unnatural. Could the girl be a clone like Jon Harper or Laura Kinney? A created being like the clone of Arthur Centino, the vaguely sinister Black Knight of the Hellfire Club, Longshot? That's what seemed the most logical explanation for her reaction. But what did he have to call Jean down here for? Ways to break the news gently to the girl?

"Hank?" Scott frowned, "What exactly did she read from you?" he asked again.

It was him.

No, it was her.

Why is she looking at me like that?

That seems odd.

Why...

Why...

Why...


A fug of questions and suspicions hung in the corridors of the old temple. Tempers were frayed and eyes suspiciously watched people who, only a few months ago, they'd seen as friends. For the mutants of Utopia, trust was becoming the most scarce resource of all.

Jean made her way through the minefield of guarded looks and headed for Hank's lab.

"She read what?" Jean innocently echoed her husband's question as she entered the lab and something already seemed to be brewing in here as well. Hank was clearly nervous, or perhaps confused, but it was Rachel that concerned Jean, heart-pounding anxiety poured out of the girl as though she'd gotten the shock of her life.

She sent a glance toward her husband but he seemed as clueless as she was. "What's wrong?"

Such a simple question, one that could open a floodgate of answers.


ooc - sorry it's so short guys

He was worried about that. He should have prepared himself more, but she was a powerful telepath still learning control, he should have prepared himself better for it. Alas, hindsight was 20/20, she knew what he was going to reveal, he just wished it wasn't her that found out first. Scott asked him what Rachel found out in the blue Beast's head, and Jean soon quickly joined them and asked as well. Hank took a breath and took off his glasses and looked at them.

"I was hoping to do this slowly for you to be braced for it Rachel, all of you actually, but I suppose this will have to be more like a band-aid." He muttered. "I called Jean down here specifically to talk about this... I ran Rachel's DNA through my systems for any known relatives as well as the standard tests I usually run for potential hereditary precursors for illnesses, the usual things." Hank stated. "I am still running the tests but the results for familial connections were finished and there were two results... a mother and father." Hank muttered before turning on the monitor screen which showed three names next to DNA markers with a small profile picture next to them. Rachel on top and below listed under paternal and maternal DNA match were Scott Summers and Jean Grey-Summers respectively.

"I'm not sure how this could have happened, I've never had a known error in my testing procedures before and it is possible when the power went out in the lab for a split moment that something may have happened, but I had generators set up to nearly instantly start back up to avoid any major losses." Hank explained looking at all three free of his glasses, beginning to see similarities beyond just Jean and Rachel's red hair and power set, more specifically seeing the similarities between the young girl and Scott which he had not noticed before until seeing them side by side.

"So unless you two met each other twenty two years ago and something happened that you've never told anyone before..." Hank knew that couldn't have been true as he had a front row seat to the married couple's growth as individuals and together. He felt like he knew them at times better than he knew himself. "We're not strangers to clones, far from it, and I imagine that a potentially high level of genetic engineering of a select few is advanced enough to be capable of it." Hank brought up that possibility.

Then he looked at Rachel alone. "But from the time I've spent with you... I'm not sure if that is truly the case here. I'm not...entirely sure what to think of it." He admitted to the young woman. "I really do wish I could give you answers Rachel, I'm sure all of us would like to be able to give them to you. What I am certain of, and I am sure both Scott and Jean will agree with me, we are all here to help you and care for you, no matter what these results say."

Jean happened in as Cyclops shot to Hank with demands for answers, and Rachel gulped hard. She shouldn't have jumped like that. She should have even been doing that to Hank but it had been so raw, his perplexion, and it had leapt out at her.

Though it had, when she walked in the room, become quite clear just what Hank was going to say, hearing it aloud was almost more than she could rightly handle. A lump rose in her throat followed by bile and with all the gumption she could muster she forced herself to bed that back down. Rachel shook her head, waved it off in her mind. An error, that's all it was, some weird freak mess up with his computers. Things were shaky at best around here, technologically speaking. She forced into her mind that there were two options here. One; this was some odd dream she was having, this whole entire fussing day, and she'd wake up howling in fear in just a few moments, or two; this wasn't happening at all, some cruel trick in her head, some foul play on her emotions by the Hound to keep her in check. She'd never been saved from it, this had all been one massive hallucination.

No, no. This wasn't true. It wasn't at all possible all of this was too lucid, too tangible to be any sort of construct, whether born of sleep or control. It was impossible, however, for it to be that straight-forward.

"Markers." She blurted out again. "Clones have marker, genetic tags. I've dealt with them before too. I know it." Where that knowledge came from she didn't know, but she darted forward, looking at the screen. "If I'm some sort of... thing like that then it'll show up."

She didn't know which farce she wanted to be true.

"It's not possible, that's just not possible." She looked at Henry. "I'm in my 20s, they'd have to have been like..."

Rachel turned back to Jean, to Scott, the expression on her face some indescribable mixture of confusion, horror, an uncountable measure of conflicting thoughts and emotions.

"I can't be your..."

Something pulsed in that fog of memory, something old, dredged up by the shock. She retreated, face going from that flush of confusion to something more blank as she let herself recede within.

Images flooded perception and she fought to keep up, if she was gaining something, finding some lost memory she had to pull at it, wrench it free. She couldn't risk losing it. Her head pounded and she chased it through some fascimile of a hazy forest, it was too fast, she couldn't catch it all around that wisp of memory sounds ushered forth, shouts, pained cries, roaring flames and rumbling explosions. Diving blindly for it, she wrapped her fingers around that oppresively bright sliver of recollection before being catapulted out of her own mind.

Moving quickly to the sink she bent over, heaving, wretching. Too much in one go. She sat there for a moment, eyes running, nose burning.

"You can't be my parents..." She murmured, still hunched over the basin, unable to look back at the others, pain tearing in her eyes. "My parents are dead."

The results... Scott realized as he looked at the report that he had figured it out a second before they were shown. Hank's nervousness, Rachel's reaction. Scott realized he suddenly knew, and he had known from the moment he blasted open the cage in her mind. The energy signatures had been similar, her appearance, her powers. She felt familiar to him, even though he did not know her from Adam.

"Essex," he said, simply, looking at Hank and then to Jean, "This has to be Essex's doing."

Essex, the man who had taken some sick shine to him and spent years manipulating and tormenting him, in the cause of trying to shape him into something that only he understood. It was Essex who had been his doctor when he was a brain damaged little boy relearning things he once knew, and discovering things he should not. It was Essex who had posed as Milbury, the director of the state home where he had lived for four long years, isolated and lonely, told repeatedly that he was unwanted because of his medical issues, his age. It was Essex who had fostered him out to Jack, abusive and criminal, attempting to turn him into something that he simply could not be and then it was Essex who took him from Jack, took away his memories when the experiment failed. Essex had been responsible for ShadowX, for his almost obsessive need for conflict, for who he was as a man.

Could it be possible that he had decided to see who he would be as a father? Some new twist in his nefarious and inscrutable plan? Scott vowed then and there that when he found that man, he would make him pay for everything he done. It was not enough to tamper with him. Now he had to involve an innocent girl in all this? A girl who had clearly had false memories or experiences planted in her head to make her... what? Suffer? Scared? Hurt? Someone that Scott would naturally want to protect? Someone that Scott would be incapable of refusing? What the hell did he want?

There was instant rage, but not the forced and unnatural anger of whatever had happened in the cafeteria, but one of a man sorely used and pushed close to his threshold. How dare someone create this girl for whatever sinister purpose it was. Scott was a man in constant search for a place to belong, for a family, and though it had taken Jean to point it out to him, he had built a tight and insular network, a protective ring around himself fortified by a very specific group of people, which had expanded over the years to a level he had never thought he could reach before. A daughter would have instant access to that inner circle. A daughter would have instant connection.

A daughter would have to be patient for love.

Scott had no idea how to really be a father. His experiences were limited, and his perceptions altered by the recent discovery of the false memories, and twists of consciousness that he had suffered, by the experiences with his alter dimensional doppelganger, the losses and fears of recent time. Scott should have resented this on his own behalf. The option of choosing when he started a family his own.

But, even in this, Scott was Scott and he was unaccustomed to putting himself before others who needed his protection. His rage at Essex was on behalf of his wife, who had been used just as much as he had, and it was on behalf of this girl who had been brought into this world as some sort of carrot on a string to lead him where?

Fucking with Scott was bad enough. Fucking with Jean? Fucking with his daughter no matter how she came to be?

Scott took issue to that...

... in a big...

... big...

... big way.

Rachel reacted with violent wretching, and tears, and the plaintive whisper that her parents were dead, and Scott, who had no idea how to comfort her, moved to her side anyway. He didn't even question that Hank's results might be wrong. Scott knew that Hank would not have made a mistake like this.

"Rachel," he said, quietly, "I don't know what this is, I don't know why it is, but whatever it is, you don't have to be upset. It's going to be alright. I promised you we'd help you find out what happened to you, and this changes nothing." He reached out and, tucking his hand under the girl's chin, he made her look up towards him, "This might make it more urgent, in fact."

He looked to his wife, reaching out to her through their rapport and said, ::Jean, I am out of my depth here. I don't know what to think... for the first time in a long time, I don't know what to do.::

When the shoe dropped with Hank's startling revelation, Jean took a staggering step backward as if the blow Hank had leveled them all with had been a real, physical punch to the gut. Light-headedly, Jean blinked and looked around as if desperately trying to get her bearings in an unfamiliar place. The med-lab and everyone in it seemed suddenly unreal. This was a dream and she'd wake-up any moment now. Wait, was that her thought or someone else's? She was too stunned to note that both her and Rachel's mental shields had slipped while they were struggling to come to grips with the awful knowledge seeping into their minds.


Scott was a burning furnace of rage, hot and blinding. Over the years, she'd seen all the shades of Scott Summers from the height of pleasure and happiness to the darkest reaches of despair, but this was a depth of rage and hurt that he had never felt and that feeling poured through their rapport that always linked them.

As the flames of anger in Scott's mind roared, other flames poured into Jean's mind from Rachel, a painful memory (real or false, it didn't matter) of explosions and flames... and the sudden feeling of her mother and father in their death-throes. It was her mind she felt and recognized in that brief flash, hers and Scott's dying in flames and a collapsing building. Jean's hands shook as she covered her mouth to keep in the scream of horror.

She felt herself move like a sleepwalker, her limps heavy and wooden as she made her way Scott and Rachel. The cosmic energy that poured from his eyes made it impossible for him to shed any tears, so she cried for them both. "I don't," she began but stopped as she fought down her emotions and years of X-Men experience came to her aide. "I don't know either," she admitted to Scott, "there's no manual for this." She reached out for him, wrapping her arms around him and taking strength from his reassuring presence.

Then she looked over at Rachel, "we... we aren't your parents; DNA tests don't make anyone parents. Your parents, whoever they were, were your parents because that's the place they have in your heart. Hank's tests can't your heart feel anything that's not really there. How you came into being and how you got here, I don't know," she admitted, as the words caught in her throat. "But the how doesn't matter as much right now as, what comes next."

This really could have gone better.

"I've looked for any known genetic markers that have been known to be in clones, however I have not come across any known markers, or anything that would show a cloning process." Hank responded to Rachel's suggestion at checking to see if she were a clone. It was one of the things he looked for initially after the results conclusion. However it was still possible if there was anything beyond his knowledge of cloning, or other genetic manipulation.

"If this were Essex, his technology, his ability to manipulate genetics is far beyond anything I've seen before, Scott." Hank added. "For all intents and purposes there are no signs of actual genetic manipulation within what I have seen so far. As far as the results show she's-..." Hank paused as something hit him.

The Savage Land was reached through wormholes in space it was reached through a fluctuation of time and space. Which has been shown to affect the memories of those who pass through them as with Scott's brother and his new bride. Between Rachel, Franklin, and possibly one more from what he's gathered from the two of them in their limited memories being in tact without knowing the source of it.

"That...can't be..." Hank thought out loud before turning to his computer and quickly running through various scans he's preformed through the Savage Land, searching for something specific as the Summers had their moment of shock over the revelation. "Ladies, for the next minute or so, I highly request you attempt to stay out of my mind because I really do not want anyone to jump to conclusions before I have some solid proof." He muttered trying to put a lock on his thoughts as he looked into things, the data he had on wormhole usage specifically. Looking back at the days before Rachel came upon them, which also had a few transports going back and forth between Utopia and the ones left in New York as well. Which did not exactly help, but it could have hid what he was building a theory upon.

"Damn..." He sighed. "I don't have the equipment here to specifically look into my theory, or any data from New York a month ago to even possibly support it anymore than just the theory I have, but it's...potentially possible." Hank began to explain.

"Scott, Alex and Lorna. When they first arrived in the Savage Land years ago, they had memory issues there as well, correct?" Hank asked knowing the answer already. "They slipped unprotected through time and space to reach here, produced a temporary state of amnesia." Beast added to his building theory. "All this time I have been theorizing that the memory issues between Rachel and Franklin have been because of their telepathic powers blocking out something traumatic that they experienced but...what if its because of the sudden exposure to the similar conditions that Havok went through? What if it is because of a trip through space...through time?"

He took a breath after his rather fast paced explanation, letting it sink in not just for the three of them, but himself as well. "I don't...enjoy the idea of jumping to conclusions and feel almost silly asking this but," He looked to Rachel alone. "Try and remember, Rachel...what year were you born? What year is this?"

She swung around, leaning back on the sink, blinking hard at the tears that streaked her face, whether from confusion, or repulsion. She dragged her arm across her mouth, shaking her head. Everyone, everyone here was confused, and she ground her hands into her face as if she could just rub it all waya, wipe clean lies her eyes were telling. It was silly, a childish hope and reaction, and she again shook her head, convincing herself that it wasn't true, that it really just couldn't be true.

Fire. Burning. Screams of friends and family.

"You can't be them, they're dead, I saw them die. I saw them and I mourned them and I cried over them and they're dead. That's gotta be some fuck up. some sort of- of mistake. I..."

She swallowed back a painful lump of words.

Beast began speaking, but she couldn't concentrate. Across from her Scott and Jean held eachother, and she wondered then if indeed that could be possible. It had been so long ago. And there was so much cloudy cover over it all. But she knew she'd seen it, knew that they were gone, her parents. Her real parents. But she couldn't even remember their faces. The Hound had taken all that for itself, a gluttonous, evil creature that sought to keep it in check even now after it had been wrenched from her mind.

She thought of Franklin. Of how this would change things. What if she were a clone, some thing with fake memories. Was she really sent to kill him? Was he one too? Why were they here? How? None of it made sense, none of it.

She was sick of it, sick to death of not knowing, and she knew that if it went on much longer, she'd do something she'd regret.

"What if it is because of a trip through space...through time?"

She balled her firsts in a growing fury at this situation. She hated being helpless. She hated coincidence, she hated all of this not being able to take the reigns. Traits inherited from her father. And then she went dormant, quiet. As if she wasn't there.

She moved through the fog in her mind, it was thick, as always, oppressive as always. It's odor wracked her astral form with chokes and coughs, but she wouldn't go back, she wouldn't let herself be kept from her own mind.

Outside, her body slumped, slid down the wall behind her.

She coughed through it, pushed through that blank mist in her memory, and then she reached it, a quiet place, that central chamber full of nothing. In the center a box, a small chest. She took a step forward. The creature stepped before her, that same monstrous thing from the maze.

She stirred.

They'd pulled it out. It couldn't be here. She'd been there, caged when it had been destroyed, blasted apart on the walls of it's own design. That meant one thing and one thing only.

::You're not real!::

The shout echoed through her mind. The thing seemed to roar in a rage and it moved to strike her, but it's arm passed through her, made no purchose on this mental facsimile. :Get out of my mind! Never come back!:

It began to glow, from its center at first until the sheen wrapped around it, began to crush it flat, break it down into nothing, and where it stood sat all that remained of it, a key.

Rachel picked it up, eyed it in her hand. She looked to that box in the center, inched towards it, what seemed like days passed in a matter of seconds, and when she cast open, that light bathed her mind, shot a ray of clarity through all that blasted fog.

She shot forwards, eyes wide, breathing heavy and ragged as if she'd been drowning.

"Twenty fifteen. Twenty fifteen."

She looked to all of them, sweat pouring off of her forehead.

"My name is Rachel Summers. And I'm from the future."

Jean wrapped her arms around him and told him in her own way that this was going to be all right. He believed her because he never lied to her and because Jean would never lie to him. He slipped his arms around her and did his part, standing strong and steady for her, because she needed him to be. She offered to Rachel a comfort of her own, and Scott loved her all the more for it. He wanted to apologize to her about getting her involved in all this simply because a madman wanted his own personal Summers Family Action Set, collect all of them for a build-a-figure of a daughter?

But then, Hank denied the clone route and hypothesized something that had not occurred to Scott, not in the slightest. Time travel? What? That was impossible...

Wasn't it?

Scott had once spent months in the ragged body of a foul mouthed jaded and miserable gangster who wore his face. He had seen a world that was irrevocably changed by the absence of one man, and witnessed first hand how such a thing had created an entirely new dimension, just like this one... but not...

Was time travel so strange? Especially when, as Hank pointed out, there were wormholes and distortions of space already present in this location. There was precedent and his own brother was proof that something like this had happened once before. Scott straightened from his comforting embrace with his wife and turned to the girl as Hank asked her what year she'd been born. He opened his mouth to speak, to ask her... well, he didn't really know what he was going to ask her, but it didn't matter because something was happening. The girl had slid down against the wall and was staring, eyes empty and fists clenched, fighting some battle within herself.

Then, she lunged forward, breath ragged like she had been in a fight, and she revealed... what they had already learned.

She wasn't even going to be born for another three years... but when she was, she would be born to Scott and Jean Summers. This was their daughter from a future where they were dead and she'd been taken to be turned into a hunter of mutants for some nefarious reason. :: Jean, is she telling the truth? :: he thought, though he really didn't need the answer. Rachel looked like Jean, even he could see it, and the shape of her eyes, the stern set to her lips... she looked like him too.

"Rachel," he said, and it took him a moment to make his mouth work, to make his words come out, "Rachel, tell us everything you know."

He reached out and caught Jean's hand, :: Help her, Honey, help her figure out her mind like you did when we freed her from the Hound."

And, though Rachel might not be able to see it, his eyes nonetheless never left her face.

"No! No! Rachel, stop talking!" Jean frantically screamed, holding up her hands at the girl to stop her words then turned on Scott. Ever since they were all teenagers they'd listened to Scott and followed his lead. But not now, not this time.

She grabbed his shoulders and squeezed. "If what she says is true, if what she is... is true, think about what that means! It means we're destined to have a child, a daughter in three years; no sooner, no later. It means in a few years after that, -we - will - fail! And we will die!" She backed away, unconsciously pacing, feeling the trap of fate closing around her and locking into place. "There will be no growing old in Alaska!" Adding in a hushed almost pleading tone aimed at Scott, "You promised."

She gestured to Rachel, the girl who looked so much like her and Scott, and as frightened and shaking as everyone else in the room. "Our fate is sealed," she said through gritted teeth. Unconsciously, Jean swept her hand over her eyes, wiping away the tears rolling down her cheeks. "And if we do change it, if we make our own fate and lives, if we change the future she knows, then what does that mean for her," Jean looked over to Rachel. "Hank," her red-teary eyes looked over to blue furred scientist, "no prevaricating this time," she warned. "If Rachel from a certain future and we change the events, what will happen to her? Will she die? Will she disappear? Fading away from life and our memories." She set her jaw as more horrifying possibilities flooded into her mind and in a stone cold voice asked, "If we try to save ourselves and our friends from this fate, will we be trading our daughter's existence to do it?"

Everything grew more tense as his theory that he pulled from a simple possibility that held about as much merit as a clone containing half the genes of two people he considered family, perhaps even less so. There it was though, an answer that shook the entire Summers Family, including the apparent daughter from a potential future. Bringing a child in the world should be an exciting, heart-felt, and wonderful experience. This however was not exactly typical, nor was it favorable for anyone involved. Where Rachel came from seemed like a horrible place... a horrible future for mutants and the world to turn such a sweet girl into a hunter of her own kind. Not to mention how Franklin factored into it, that was left a mystery and for the moment would remain so as Hank wanted to assist the Summers as best he could.


Hank looked at Jean as she asked him questions, she was shaken to the core about this, and he did not like seeing her, or anyone like this. However he would not delude anyone from the truth of the matter. "Simply put, my theory follows those with the mindset that there are multiple universes, more than just a parallel world. But a series of branching worlds where things change world to world for every action taken. Such as I've likely just branched off from a different universe by choosing to explain this to you where a different world I have not." Beast explained before continuing. "However there are worlds that are far more different from what we know, we've experienced bits of them in the past Jean, and Scott. However with this theory there are possibilities that some worlds are farther into the future than our own, with a different future than what we will have, like it seems Rachel has come from." Hank explained.

"Her coming here, and likely Franklin's as well has completely altered this world's future from likely becoming exactly like their own." The blue furred doctor began pouring a cup of water. "It is actually entirely possible that our universe would never even become their timeline in the first place, or perhaps rather than a daughter in three years you will have a son. With the multiverse theory there can be an exceeding amount of variables that each being in existence in this universe is changing every second to an endless amount of changes big or small." He seemed to finish but then Hank reflected upon what he all said.

"The abridged version, whether a Rachel Summers is going to be born in this timeline, this universe is not yet known, and likely up to both of you having children in the first place. This girl, this Rachel Summers from a possible future however is real and here. And she needs our help and support." He knelt down closer to the girl offering her the water he had just poured. "I know this is a lot for one person to take in, but you're a strong girl, Rachel, I can see that much in you."

She sat there as Cyclops, her dead father, asked her to speak what she knew. Her eyes were glassy for the moment, she was in a sort of trance, picking through the shambles of her memory. That strange fog was gone from her mind's eye, it was now the task of putting it all back in order, getting it all straight.

Death

Rebirth

X-Men

Hound

Death

Rebirth

X-Men

It was all some strange cycle. She picked about old memories scattered like fireflies.

Rachel sat there as Phoenix, her dead mother, lamented and dreaded the ramifications of everything happening. To fix a future, if indeed there was a future to be fixed, could wipe her from existence. But was that the case?

The Mansion, burning in a hail of federal gunfire...

She remembered the resistance, how proud she'd been of herself.

Her first real kiss, in that sole moment of uncertainty.

The Sentinels, she saw the Sentinels, patrolling the dessicated city, the camps, the death-houses. She remembered the Hounds. The labs. Wiring, tubes, video stimulation, aural brainwashing. Kill All Mutants.

She shocked herself out of the sensory overload and scrambled to her feet, lurching over the sink again, afraid to be sick again while Hank bantered on about alternate timelines and parallel worlds and the ever optimistic 'don't lose hope' that she'd remembered in his voice even in her own time. She shook her head, standing back up, moving across the room, to Jean, taking her mother, her mother whom she'd lost all those years ago, back to life, she didn't care how.

"If we can change things we have to change them, it's not an option." She spoke quickly, with panic in her voice, "It doesn't matter what happens to me so long as we change it. You don't understand what sort of place I come from. Fields of mass graves where there used to be parks, Robots patrolling the streets like beat cops, the few mutants they leave alive are there for experiments or worse, hunting their own down. And it's all on mutants, we bring it on ourselves. You can't let that happen."

She kept holding Jean, kept clinging to her as if to let go was to say good bye forever to this woman who'd spoken to her, who'd sang to her in her mind, who'd whispered gentle thoughts before she'd been born. Rachel had known her parents voices before she'd even left the womb. To have that connection severed once had nearly broken her. She'd never let it happene again, even if it cost her everything. She looked at Cyclops, her eyes concerned. She wanted to hug him too, this man who'd helped teach her right and wrong, who'd shown her that picking yourself up was the point of falling down. "I was sent here to kill Franklin, he took something, I don't know what, but he took something from someone in charge and it was worth it to them, sending someone back through time itself to stop him..."

She stood there, clinging to Jean. "Oh God, this is... so important..." She moved her mother away from her, hands on her shoulder. "You're my mother..." she said. "You're the strongest person I ever knew, you can't break like this, you can't."

Her thoughts, her memories, still so jumbled. She knew then that she had to put them back together, it was imperative to know.

Forewarned was fore-armed.

"We have a responsibility here, I'm so sorry I've brought this to you, but we have to change it or everything is over."

Of all the reactions Jean could have had to this news, hysteria and grief was not the one that Scott would have expected. A lesser person and he might have called it weakness, but she was not lesser. She was something beyond anything he had ever known before, and he had seen that, in the mind of this girl who was their daughter from some horrific future. As his wife pleaded with him to fix this, which was what she was asking even though she did not say the words, Scott simply slipped his arms around her waist and pulled her close, allowing her to accuse him, to give into despair, to find her footing, whatever it was she needed to do right now, because once her shock and horror had worn of, she would look to him for a solution, and he would have to have one to give her.

Hank postulated his theory of multiple universes, and Scott was inclined to agree. Jean had not slipped from this world into the other one where she was a hardened Shield agent, hating the criminal he was, ashamed of her mutancy because that world outlawed it. Scott had. Scott had woken in a broken body with a broken heart, and he saw where the divergence had been made. He had ghost memories of the split of the world, Xavier never arriving to save him from becoming the criminal that Jack had so desperately wanted him to be. Scott didn't know that he entirely understood the quantum mechanics of time/space manipulations, but he knew enough to believe that there was no future written in stone.

Rachel, herself, began to offer her own reassurances, her own hopes, her belief that she and Franklin were here to change their future, and Scott looked at this girl that he had (would) raised to be the sort of person who was able to make this sacrifice. His anger suddenly became sorrow as he thought about how hard her life had been and how he would never be able to hold her as an infant, and to watch her grow into this young hero. Even if in three years Jean did become pregnant, it wouldn't be with Rachel, not this girl exactly. That childhood was lost forever no matter what came to pass, and Scott was surprised to realize that he mourned it, he who had always wanted children but who really never had the faith that he would be able to be a father.

"Of course, we'll change it," Scott said, quietly, "Not just change but stop it from happening. Whatever it is that Mr. Richards stole to fix that world, we'll find and protect. We'll make sure that even in the middle of all of our own trials and tribulations that we don't lose control of the world around us. You aren't bringing bad news to us, Rachel, you're bringing us hope."

Jean clung to Scott and Rachel as they both came to her, buoying her up out of the sea of grief that had crash down on them all. She buried her face against Scott's neck and felt the churning of the emotional hurricane inside of him, turning from rage to acceptance and sorrow. Jean turned her face to look at Rachel as the girl came toward them. Her face was still ashen and haunted but she'd stopped shaking and vomiting, she stopped being lost in her memories of fire and death.

She knew Summerses'; they were always at their best when they had someone to care for, someone to protect, someone to be strong for. And Jeannie could be that for them.

Rachel came to them with a fire and determination that was so very much like Scott's - we do the right thing, no matter the cost, because that's what heroes do, and Rachel certainly was that, Jean thought as Rachel called her mother and said she was the strongest person she knew. It was hard to believe, but Jean appreciated the sentiment. Love and pride, sorrow and regret, and countless other emotions inside Jean to the point that she didn't trust her voice, didn't the words that might burble from her mouth; so instead, she leaned forward and kissed Rachel's cheek.

She nodded along with Scott when he next spoke, calling Rachel hope, not the bringer of bad news.

"We will sort this out, Rachel. No matter what it turns out to be." She reached out cupping Rachel's cheek and letting her thumb glide over the curve of her cheek, the discolored markings on her face, and letting her fingers comb through Rachel's short red hair; in that moment, imagining living through Rachel's childhood, a childhood that neither of her parents could experience.