Disclaimer: You know the drill; if you recognise it, I don't own it.
Feedback: Always a pleasure
AN: I enjoyed Logan as a film, don't get me wrong, but if that's how the X-Men cinematic universe is 'destined' to end, it's far too depressing, so I wanted to do something to create the chance that Laura and her friends can still undo what went wrong and save the team again
An X to the Past
The moment she had moved the cross on her father's grave, she knew what she was going to do.
Charles might have been suffering from serious mental problems during their journey, but he had been clear enough to share some of the more significant stories from the X-Mens' history with her, and the time her father had possessed his past self to change the future was one he still looked back on with great affection. She had known from the moment the idea came to her that the odds of achieving it were slim to none, but she also knew that had been the same about so many things over the team's history; Professor X might be dead, but that didn't mean that the dream he stood for should be lost.
With Doctor Rice dead, the resulting loss of confidence in his company had caused enough of a stock market crash for the Alkali Corporation and its various subsidiaries to stop pumping the anti-mutant drugs into the world's water supply. With new mutants emerging, Laura had taken it on herself to carry on Logan and Charles' legacy, gathering and protecting new mutants, but she was always aware of her shortcomings in that area. With the aid of her friends, it wasn't too hard for her to protect any new mutants they found, but she simply didn't have the experience needed to do anything more than teach them how to survive. She could admire Xavier's dream as a concept, but she truly had no idea how to teach her 'students' to do anything more than fight those who wanted to kill them, rather than inspire others to do more.
Every step she had taken since that dark day when she buried her father had led towards the moment when she would do what her father had done and change the past, ever if she had started out with no clear idea how she would even achieve that goal.
Getting the idea had been simply enough, but even when she began, she knew that the hardest past would be finding another mutant with the necessary powers to do what she wanted to do. Tracking down any relatives of Katherine Pryde had been ruled out as an option quickly enough, but Laura had refused to abandon hope as long as there was a chance. Finally, they had hacked company records to find rumours of a mutant known only as Gateway, who had supposedly been capable of creating portals to various different places. After finding him, it had been confirmed that Gateway couldn't send anyone back into the past physically, as his temporal portals merely allowed people to see the past rather than take action in it, but that had been enough for Laura to convince one of her friends to telepathically project her mind through the portal into the body of her past self.
It was a grey area, considering that doing this would essentially 'kill' her past self as Laura possessed her own body, but when the alternative was to let the X-Men die, Laura was willing to do what her father had done; she would make the moral compromise so that others could be the true heroes. Her friends had tried to argue against it, but she had been adamant; as with her father, only she could cope with the psychological and physical strain of what she was about to attempt, which meant that only she could go back. Once they had been won over, she had exchanged final goodbyes with her friends, assuring her that she would find them as soon as she could be sure that Doctor Rice's past plans would fail, and then waited by the portal until the transfer could be completed.
Once she was in her past self, it was almost embarrassingly easy for Laura to escape; the guards were trained to keep an eye on difficult children, and she had suddenly been granted access to the training of a hardened warrior. She had sometimes fallen short because of her smaller size, but her foot claws swiftly allowed her to compensate for that, and she had been out of the compound and in a departing truck before anyone realised what was happening. From there, she had basically truck-hopped, going from one truck to the other so long as the next one seemed to be going towards Westchester, until she finally found herself standing outside Xavier's School for the Gifted, smiling in satisfaction at the sound of so many young, cheery mutants inside the mansion, before she knocked on the door.
"Yes?" the blue-furred man said as he opened the door, smiling politely at her. "Can I help you?"
"My name is Laura," she replied. "I'm Logan's daughter."
It was a small thing, but Laura had to smile as the blue man stared at her incredulously at that declaration.
"You… Logan is your father?" he said.
"Yes," Laura nodded. "And I need to talk to him and Professor Charles Xavier about the Alkali Corporation."
It was a small step, but once she was in the door, everything would change. She could alert the X-Men to what Alkali was doing to prevent mutant births, she would arrange for her friends to be rescued from the Transigen project, she could warn them to examine Professor Xavier for any sign of the seizures that would unwittingly destroy his own dream, she would form a true and lasting relationship with her father…
Her father had been the last of the X-Men in her world, but she would never permit the team to end as long as she could fight for the dream of the man who had been happy to consider his granddaughter for those few brief days they had spent together.