Disclaimer: Marvel's by law, mine by right of conquest.

Rating: Rated M for strong language, sex and violence.

Author's note: After a spurt of creativity, Arrow of Time is now done - though largely unedited. What the hell, I am posting it. I am posting it, goddammit! After nearly 9 years of my life the House of Cards cycle has come to a close - and while the Rogue and Gambit from this universe have declared their satisfaction that this is done, they'll always have more stories to tell. In the meantime, I'll let them walk off into their sunset. They've earned their due. :)

I'd just like to thank everyone who has shown an interest in this story over the years. Writing this has been the most beautiful torture, and I'm sure I can't do justice to the story my muses wanted me to write, but I hope you will all still enjoy it anyway. It has been a huge part of my life, and probably will continue to be so. When this is done, there will be other spin-offs I am hoping to post, an interactive site that will tie all the plot points to the 616 universe etc., and hopefully illustrated books, if anyone is interested. In the meantime, I hope you like this, nervous as I am to be posting. And since this is unedited, all constructive crit, suggestions and of course reviews are most humbly welcome.

Thanks to all my readers, past, present and future; and much love from,

-Ludi x

-oOo-

: ARROW OF TIME :

PART ONE : GAMBIT

(1) - Entrapment -

A hundred years ago – maybe more – a young girl had written about this.

It was a story, a story of three people whose lives would converge and diverge, weaving in and out like threads in a great tapestry, inextricably woven together, pulling apart only to intertwine once more.

The girl spent a lifetime and more unpicking at the lives of these three favourite characters. Picking, teasing, worrying at their paltry, puzzling existences. Her pencil would chase their every step, her brush would shape their every movement, her pen would guide their every word.

With time, she grew to love them.

She grew to believe that they were with her somehow, these characters with no names, these imaginary friends who seemed so vivid and true and yet she knew did not live.

Not yet, anyhow.

They coloured the darkness that shrouded her, their faces penetrated her blindness. She did not need to see to read them. The girls she had gone to school with had favoured fairytales and romances, but she… she read life. And it was far more scintillating than any fiction.

Her little triumvirate accompanied her through all the pain and the suffering and the loneliness. They grew up with her, and whilst they grew to lead their own lives, the girl never felt them to be far away.

The man and the woman became lovers, as she had always known they would, even before they did.

And the third one, the one that the young girl had come to think of as her especial friend, the one who was as lonely and scared as she was… Well, she grew from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. She became a phoenix.

It gave the little girl hope.

And there came a point where their stories all diverged. Where all hope seemed lost.

The man slipped back into shadows.

The woman ran off to chase ghosts.

And the phoenix-child, the starchild… Well, she disappeared. Completely. She disappeared and the little girl saw her no more.

The girl never understood why her friend had gone, but she recorded it all faithfully, as she had become accustomed to.

She opened up the thirteenth volume of her diaries, to the next blank double page spread. She took out her pencil and drew a triangle. In the left corner, she drew the man, with the nasty shadow still beside him. In the right corner she drew the woman, standing next to a ruined steel building. And at the apex she drew the starchild, standing amid the chaos and the destruction with the entire world upon her shoulders; and the little girl felt sad. She wanted to reach out into the future, to pluck them all up and hold them together in a warm embrace. She wanted to tell them that it was okay, that they would make the right decisions.

She took out her watercolours, her brushes. She painted the figures with the fastidious concentration of every artistic child. And when she was done, she looked down at her work with sightless eyes, her mouth twisted with grim pride.

She looked at the starchild, and for the first time since she'd started having these visions, these dreams of the future, a name came to her.

She whispered it out loud, held it close to her, cherished it as she would cherish the name of a beloved friend.

"Rachel."

-oOo-

Rachel Summers staggered blindly through wreckage and debris, step by painful step, hardly knowing that one foot followed the other.

The smoke all but choked her; tears stung her eyes and she blinked them away furiously. The smoke was an excuse. It was an excuse to weep for everything she had lost on this day, this one day that had paid with the lives of so many. All she owned now she held in her own two hands, cradled protectively in her arms. She wasn't going to let go of it now. She wasn't going to let go of the only thing she had left.

Kate Pryde weighed like a ton of bricks; and yet Rachel hardly felt the weight of the older woman who was the most precious thing in the world right now. To Rachel, it seemed that her own legs were heavier; that with every step she took, she was being pummelled another inch into the ground. But she could not afford to stop; not now. Everyone else was dead but her, and she was Kate's last defence. More than that, she was the last barrier between this hell and a future that was worth having. If she failed in this last duty to her fallen comrades, she would have failed utterly. She would have failed Time itself.

Somehow she managed to stumble into a small alcove that had been created by a fallen-in building and a crumpled-in mess of high security fencing. Concrete and metal tore at her clothes and her skin, but she barely heeded the sting of pain. She hunkered down in the niche, refusing to let go of Kate, wrapping her arms around her friend as though about a small child.

"It's gonna be okay," she murmured soothingly in the woman's ear, even though she knew that she could not hear her; perhaps the words were more for her own benefit than anyone else. "It's gonna be okay."

She buried her face in Kate's shorn locks, trembled in the darkness, dried the wetness of her eyes in her hair.

She had felt them die. Every single one. Magnus, Colossus, Storm. Franklin.

She'd felt them all in her mind, and the only thing stopping her from fully accepting the agony of it was the fact that – above everything else, above even her own life – she must preserve Kate's. She must preserve Kate's.

But here, in the darkness, with the world crumbling about her, with not a single soul left in the world to her, she was beginning to feel it. She was beginning to feel that her heart had been torn to shreds.

And that was the way it was.

Everyone she loved died on her.

Her mom, her dad, Xavier, her friends… Franklin.

Franklin.

He'd shown her what it was to love.

That meant something profound and she didn't know how to express it, nor the fact that he was now gone. His death rent at the very core of her and she clung to Kate because there was no one else to cling to, there was no one else to comfort her and tell her it was going to be okay, even if he was never going to come back.

A Sentinel lumbered past and she froze, instinctively trying to make herself as small as she could. The only thing preventing her from being caught was the small nullifier Logan had managed to give her, and she could only hope that Kate would not be noticed because she didn't have one.

And where was Logan? She wasn't sure.

All she knew was that somehow they had been betrayed, and that the Sentinels had been ready and waiting for them as soon as their plan got underway. Her mind whirled through all the many faces she knew had been in on their scheme, skittered over them with a manic confusion. She couldn't settle on any one person that could have done this – it was too much for her brain to comprehend. What was the use in thinking about it if she could die at any moment? For Kate's sake she had to focus on one thing – and that was staying alive.

She squeezed her eyes shut and went into that little place at the back of her mind where everything was safe and warm and far away from all the hurt in the world.

And somewhere inside that small sanctuary she curled away from it all, dozing fitfully in the place between wakefulness and sleep.

She was jolted back into her body an indeterminable amount of time later as Kate suddenly began to stir in her arms. Rachel pulled back slightly, her breath caught in her throat as she searched the face of the older woman, seeing her eyes flickering into wakefulness. Her thoughts scrabbled to comprehend what this meant. Kate Pryde was awakening – yet nothing had changed.

"Kate!" Rachel breathed in mixed confusion and relief as the older woman's eyes slowly began to focus. "Thank God you're still alive…!"

Kate's daze darted about her, this way and that; her forehead creased in consternation.

"Where are we?" she mumbled, the words coming with the texture of one unused to speaking for a long time. "Did it work?"

Rachel stared at her. Her heart caught like a leaden lump in her chest. She could barely speak herself.

"Nothing's changed," she explained breathlessly. "Everything's the same. Did you do it, Kate? Did you stop Senator Kelly from being killed?"

No response came from Kate's lips. Her eyes went wide, and, her wits now fully returned to her, she struggled to her feet, gazing about her like a cornered animal. As she did so, her expression slowly turned to dismay.

"It's not possible!" she gasped, her voice cracking with disbelief. Her eyes fixed wildly onto Rachel's face. "I – I prevented it! I stopped Senator Kelly from being killed! I phased through Destiny as she was about to attack – knocked her off balance… Kelly was alive when I left! Why? Why is nothing different?!"

Even as the words left her mouth a sick realisation seemed to fall upon her. She suddenly went very still, whispered; "Piotr…?"

There was a question in the name – a question that she could not bear to articulate in any other way. Rachel heard it; she couldn't face it. Her own loss seemed small in comparison to that of the woman before her. She hung her head, the weight of the answer hanging heavily upon her. It was an answer that could not be hidden; Kate read it in Rachel's face as though it had been writ large. The scream that came from her lips was the most awful sound Rachel had ever heard. It stripped her breath away, cast her down lower than Ahab's beatings, than Rogue's betrayal. She turned her head aside with tears in her eyes. Something had gone wrong, and she didn't understand it. More disturbing was the news Kate had brought her. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined that the killer of Senator Kelly was none other than Destiny. Rogue's foster mother. The one who could see the future, and presumably, make moves to avoid the pain and confusion that now surrounded them – that she herself appeared to have wrought.

She heard it then – the crunch of a clumsy footstep on rubble. Her Hound senses kicked in mechanically, and she drew the distraught Kate deeper into the niche, hoping against hope that the woman's scream had not been heard, yet knowing instinctively such a thing was unlikely.

"I know you're there!" a hushed, familiar voice sounded from nearby – it was unmistakably Tanya Trask. "So there's no point in hiding, Rachel!"

Rachel bit her lip, weighing it up carefully. Tanya obviously knew she was there; and when she cast out her mind, she saw that the girl was alone, and that her only intention was to talk. It was only for that reason that she slowly stepped out from the recess.

Sure enough Tanya was there, a little distance away, atop a small pile of debris, steadying herself against the corner of a building. There was a look of relief on her face as Rachel finally came into view.

"What are you doing here?" Rachel asked her heatedly. "You're supposed to be back at the Brotherhood headquarters…"

A dismissive sneer crossed Tanya's face, changing her features from pretty to ugly in a moment.

"That's what Logan told me to do," she replied acerbically. "But I'm not the little girl he thinks I am. Besides, I had to be here. I had to protect my investment."

She jumped down from the mound of broken fencing and concrete, and Rachel digested her words with a sinking feeling of foreboding.

"Investment?" she repeated incredulously. "What are you talking—"

"You, Rachel," Tanya cut in, regarding the other with unwavering eyes. "I took a chance in setting all this up. I told daddy not to harm you, but sometimes it can be difficult to keep those Sentinels under control…"

"What?!" Rachel blurted, almost choking on the shock. "You – you did this?!"

Tanya nodded without any trace of guilt; her expression was solemn.

"Of course. How else could I get your attention?"

If Rachel had been surprised before, nothing could have prepared her for the matter-of-fact calmness that Tanya now presented her with. She began to speak several times, her voice refusing to come out.

"My attention?" The words finally emerged, but they barely seemed to come from her. Tanya nodded.

"Yes. Why? Would you have listened to me if I had spoken to you, face to face? Not to mention, the others would all have been listening in on us, and I couldn't have that." Her countenance darkened. "I couldn't have anyone else interfering. Now that we're alone together, we can discuss things rationally – just the two of us. Don't worry – I'll keep you safe. Well, safer than you would have been back in the internment centre anyhow."

Rachel almost laughed in a giddy head-rush. The idea that any of this was rational, or could be rational, was patently ridiculous.

"All right," she conceded with what was false bravado. "You've got my attention, Tanya. But what about the others? They're going to the Sentinels' mainframe. They're going to destroy it and switch all the Sentinels off for good. So why don't you run and tell that to your precious 'daddy'?"

It was a bluff – she knew all the others were dead, apart from Logan, and she didn't even know where he was. She didn't think Tanya knew that though – which made her all the more surprised when the girl burst into laughter.

"Destroy the Sentinels?" she hooted derisively. "That's impossible! It's the Master Mold programme that controls them; and even if you destroyed the mainframe the programme would just keep running, daddy fixed it to replicate when it's attacked, just like a virus. He's got several mainframes up round the country, and if you downed one, Master Mold would just migrate through the net till it found a new home. That's why," she added bitterly, "the Sentinels can't die, not easily anyhow. Daddy modelled them on a smart swarm – Master Mold's the queen bee, the Sentinels are the drones. Even if Logan and the others got to the mainframe, the Master Mold program would just migrate – the drones would just warn her."

Rachel barely had a moment to digest this new and troubling information when a low growl from beside her caught her off guard. It was Kate, leaping out from her hiding place like a wounded lion from its den, springing at the unwitting Tanya with a shrill, savage shriek, clawing at the air with her nails.

Unawares Tanya may have been taken, but she recovered her wits faster than thought. The psychic bolt snapped out like a gunshot, clapping Kate, mid-air, between the eyes; the woman slapped to the floor in an ungainly heap.

"Stop that!"

Instinct drove Rachel forward into a lunge at the girl, who brought her arms up in self-defence; their tussle was brief – Rachel had been a Hound and this girl, this pretender… she knew nothing. It was only a matter of seconds before Tanya was locked in Rachel's uncompromising grip, struggling and spluttering for breath.

"Let me go!" she croaked hoarsely over the crook of Rachel's elbow. "I'm warning you! My dad's not far behind, he'll have you killed on sight!"

But the words only served to tighten Rachel's grip.

"Nice try," she hissed viciously. "But I'm worth more to Trask and his cronies alive than dead! And now that I have access to my powers, he should be more worried about the fact that I can kill him on sight. And you, all at the same time." Nevertheless somewhere at the back of her mind she knew that running into Trask was something best avoided; and so, gathering all the strength she had left into her underfed muscles, she dragged the flailing Tanya back into the niche. She knew she was leaving Kate dangerously exposed, but she didn't have a choice. Tanya was the priority, and she wasn't exactly in the best frame of mind to be making good decisions anyway.

"What are you going to do?" Tanya rasped; even now there was still the old brazen grit to her voice. "Kill me?"

"Why shouldn't I?" Rachel asked, her mind racing, the rational part of her trying to fight through the red mist that had descended over her, making her tremble with rage, seriously tempting her with the idea of snapping the other girl's neck like a twig. It was infinitely doable; infinitely easy. It was taking an inhuman effort just to stop herself doing it.

"Because," Tanya was replying, gasping for breath, "I need you to help me! Please!"

Rachel was stunned. She stuttered with anger and disbelief.

"Help you?" she finally managed to spit out, and, "Yes!" was the girl's desperate reply – desperate enough for there to be a strain of truth in it. Rachel heard it. She could easily have ignored it. All her years as a Hound had taught her to laugh in the face of weakness; and yet, as she heard it now in Tanya Trask, it touched the humanity in her that remained intact. With barely a thought she released Tanya from her headlock, and the girl dropped to the floor on her hands and knees, sputtering, retching into the rubble.

"Are you trying to tell me," Rachel began through gritted teeth, "that you did all this because you wanted my help? Are you fucking crazy?"

There was no response. Tanya continued to cough and splutter noisily, and Rachel took the opportunity to scan her mind briefly, so subtly that it barely left a ghost of a touch on the other girl's mind; and what she saw, in that short window of time, was that Tanya was telling the truth, in her own fashion. What she also saw was a fractured mind, like broken shards of glass clinging desperately to a mirror frame.

"Stop that!" Tanya suddenly barked at her with such venom that Rachel was taken aback; she stared as the girl looked up at her with thunder in her eyes. "Stop scanning my mind!"

There was a psychic backlash that was almost physical; Rachel took an involuntary step back, stunned that her opponent had even managed to detect the featherstroke of her psyche.

"How is that possible?" she whispered, frightened for the first time by this child-woman that now stood before her. Tanya grimaced bitterly.

"What? That I can sense every single thing you do?" Her voice was still hoarse, but was now cold and imperious. "I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with the fact that we share the same powers. That day, when I was practising the astral projections and we first met, I was so shit at it I couldn't see anything on the astral plane. But I saw you. And I didn't know why you stood out to me so much back then, but now… now I think I'm starting to get it…"

It was falling again. That red mist, clouding Rachel's vision, her judgement. She couldn't get any words out; and Tanya continued in that same driving tone.

"We can both go to that place. The Timestream, you called it. The only difference is, I can't control it. I'm weak and you're strong. You have to teach me how to control my powers. You have to teach me to be as good as you."

Rachel was trembling now, the world closing in about her head, tunnelling in around her.

"Why the hell should I teach you anything," she growled, "after everything you've done? Do you even know what you've done? The people your actions have killed?"

The list of names, the row of faces paraded one by one before her mind's eye, and when she got to Franklin – Franklin, who'd deserved life so much more than she had – she almost choked. But Tanya seemed not to have heard; either that, or the question was of no consequence to her.

"If you come back with me," she said instead, in a voice that was too peremptory to be wheedling, "back to my father's labs, we can work on it together. You can teach me how to control my powers, and then I can go back in time. I can stop my daddy from building the Sentinels, I can make him love me again. If I make him love me, he won't want to make machines that kill mutants. I can stop all of this from happening! But I need your help, Rachel. I don't know how to do this on my own."

Tanya was mad. Insane. Rachel could have reached out into her psyche – perhaps fitted back together the broken pieces of her mind. But she didn't dare to reach out and probe her again. Tanya, it seemed, was capable of matching her, even if she lacked control. And that somehow made her more dangerous.

"You're crazy," she returned in a low voice, trying reason where she knew force would fail. "Don't you get what happened? It didn't work. Kate went back in time, she prevented Senator Kelly's death and nothing's changed here. I don't know why it didn't work but it didn't. You'll never be able to change the future, Tanya. You'll never be able to make your dad love you."

She paused, seeing Kate stirring once more in the background. Tanya, however, was too incensed to notice.

"It will work!" Trask's daughter seethed. "It has to work! Kate must've done something wrong! What does she know about our time powers?! You shouldn't've trusted her to do things right! I know that if we do things together, Rachel, we'll achieve great things! We'll save mutants! Don't you want to be a part of that?"

Rachel tried not to look at Kate, who was now getting unsteadily to her feet over Tanya's shoulder. She willed herself into a tentative calm.

"You don't care about mutants," she observed coldly to the younger woman. "You only care about yourself. You only want your dad to love you. But I'll tell you something right now – you can't make anyone love you. You can go back in time and drive yourself crazy trying to make things perfect, trying to make him care. Preventing a murder is easy in comparison. Instilling love in another is just about the hardest thing in the world, and you will fail."

Kate was mere yards away from Tanya now. Rachel's words had had the desired effect – Tanya's eyes went wide, her face was bleached of all colour, her eyes blazed with the cold flame of madness. With an animal cry she lunged forward at Rachel; but, just at the same moment, Kate did the same, her arms grasping the girl from behind, grappling her back as Tanya shrieked like a beast.

"Go, Rachel!" Kate screamed as she fought to keep the girl down. "You're our only hope now! Go back into the Timestream, figure out why it didn't work and change it! Bring back Piotr! Bring back my babies! Go!"

A moment of hesitation froze Rachel on the spot, for the merest split second as she realised what Kate was asking her to do. And then, that fraction of a second over, she set her jaw and made her decision.

She thought of Franklin, she thought of her friends, of Xavier, of her mom and dad.

And in a moment she had blinked out. Disappeared, perhaps forever, into the Timestream.

Tanya screamed an inarticulate howl of pure rage, but Kate held on as though for dear life. Tanya was strong; but the older woman was far stronger.

"Let me go!" Tanya raged. "You have no idea what you've done!"

Kate Pryde ground her teeth with the effort. She had expected Tanya to give in sooner, but her fury showed no signs of abating. There was only one thing for it. Kate began to phase the two of them through the rubble at their feet, locking both herself and the flailing Tanya in a concrete embrace. It was the only sure way she knew of keeping Tanya in one place for good.

"Sorry," Kate grunted against the girl's wild struggles, "but I can't let you get away with this. Even if it means a Sentinel comes and gets you. You're staying right here."

And Tanya turned her furious gaze on the older woman, her eyes flashing with loathing and disdain.

"No one can hold me!" she screeched and, just like Rachel had done before her, she blinked out of existence, leaving Kate grasping thin air.

In the following stunned silence she barely heard Logan finally coming up behind her.

"What the fuck was that!" he exclaimed, having just seen the tail end of Tanya's disappearance. Kate turned to him, her ears ringing, her heart hammering in her chest, the adrenaline crashing violently through her veins.

"Tanya," she answered in a weak voice. "She has Rachel's powers. Her chronoskimming powers. She can travel through time too."

Logan gaped.

"What? She some kinda mimic?"

But Kate shook her head slowly.

"I… I don't know…"

It all came crashing down around her then. There was an audibility to it, a snap, that had her reeling. Her senses went into free fall; her knees almost buckled and Logan, alarmed, caught her.

"It didn't work," she moaned into his shoulder. "Logan, it didn't work!"

He said nothing, merely put his arms about her. She wasn't sure if he even knew how many of the others were dead. Layers of pain gripped her, swathed in a protective coating of numbness. She felt it all heaving beneath; a single touch, a single prod, and she knew it would all come flooding out and she would fold completely.

"Where's Rachel?" she heard him ask at last, and she looked up at him, tears standing in her eyes as she fought to hold them back.

"I told her to go back into the Timestream," she almost wailed. "I told her to try and make things right. And then that Trask girl… She must've gone after her! What've we done, Logan?! What if Tanya kills Rachel? What if we don't have any chances left?!"

She couldn't hold it back then. It all came cascading out of her in a torrent, all the many years of loss magnified in this single day where she seemed to have thrown away more than all those years put together.

"It's my fault," she sobbed into his chest. "I agreed to go ahead with this and now everyone's dead and it was all for nothing!"

And he shushed her gently, ran his fingers through her shorn locks, comforting her when he knew it was impossible to do so.

"It's not your fault, Kate," he assured her softly, and she had never heard such a depth of sadness in his voice before. "It's not your fault. It was what we all wanted. We tried. And we failed."

He touched her wet cheeks, lifted her face to look into his and with a certainty she didn't feel he said:

"Keep hopin', Kate. Rachel will come back. And if Destiny's predictions are anythin' t' go by, she'll make things right."

-oOo-