Disclaimer haiku: Burn the past, forget/ The future; the X cannot/ Be owned by me. Sigh.

Notes: "The Phoenix Saga" and "The Dark Phoenix Saga" rate as some of the greatest X-Men stories ever told, but so too does "Days of Future Past." If you have not read "DoFP," you really need to do so. I myself read it in a trade paperback - 'Greatest Battles of the X-Men' - which, I've just now noticed, placed "DoFP" after the 1960s story "The Sentinels Live!" and the Dark Phoenix swan song "The Fate of the Phoenix!". Thus does my subconscious write my stories for me.


His father called him "Lawrence" and he hated it.

He hated a lot of things about his father, but most of all the way the man was always too busy. Too busy to come to see him in California. Too busy to call. Too busy to come to the funeral. Too busy to make his requests in person.

"Larry," Judge Chalmers said, quiet and compassionate. The living room was silent and still otherwise. "We have to leave within the hour."

Larry's eyes flicked to the bastion of black-suited muscle standing behind Chalmers - and blocking the way to the front door. The man had no expression, just a slash of a mouth beneath pitch-black sunglasses. Larry had known the man worked for his father as soon as he saw him looming behind Judge Chalmers in the San Fransisco sunlight.

And if his father was sending thugs with his messenger, it meant only one thing. Larry shifted his attention back to Judge Chalmers. "I'm not coming back, am I, sir?"

Chalmers shook his graying head with something approaching regret. "Sorry, son."

Larry nodded slowly. Resignation settled over him like a blanket, along with a deep uncaring as to what happened next. "Okay. Just - I need five minutes to pack?"

The black-suited man said curtly, "Five minutes." He had a voice like rocks tumbling.

Larry nodded again, and made his way up the stairs of the house he'd lived in since he was two years old. Judge Chalmers had drawn up the will that had kept the rambling Victorian in Larry's hands after his mother's death, and managed the trust fund that ensured it didn't fall down around his ears. The wood floors creaked and the upstairs plumbing was still a risk but it was his house - home - and he felt a flare of hatred at his father for taking it away from him.

He had five minutes to pack a lifetime into a suitcase. He lost one minute just standing in his room, thinking of all the things he couldn't possibly take with him. The next three minutes were spent in a frenzy as he tore through all of his belongings, throwing things into the suitcase on his bed: clothes, a favorite childhood toy, his laptop, the disks with his projects on them, the hard copy of his thesis...

He stopped and looked at the suitcase, evaluating the capacity and what he had already filled. There was room, he decided, and carefully lifted the framed picture from its place on the nightstand beside his bed. His mother smiled from behind the glass, arms tight around his seven- year-old self and the science-fair trophy he was clutching. He'd taken first prize that day.

Larry touched his mother's face, smiling a little himself in wistful memory. The photo had been snapped before the chemo made her hair fall out, or smeared dark hollows around her eyes, or stretched the pale skin so tightly over her bones that she looked like a skeleton. Before the cancer ate a searing, sprawling path through her brain. Before the long days in the hospital or the black, bleak days circling the funeral.

Mme. Marie Curie, Nobel Prize laureate and revered pioneer of science, had spent her life chasing after the elusive dragon of radiation, only to have the object of her search turn and devour her from within. Larry's mother had likewise lived and died in the glow of atomic particles.

And he missed her. Five years later, the grief was still fresh.

Larry tucked the framed photo into the clothes, where it would be cushioned, then closed and locked the suitcase. Judge Chalmers appeared in the doorway, a black-suited bulwark filling the space behind him. "It's time, Larry," Chalmers said.

Larry took a breath and nodded. "I'm ready."

He picked up the suitcase and let Judge Chalmers usher him gently from the house his mother had given him on her deathbed. At the front door he stopped and fished the keys out of his pocket, locking the rest of the memories in. Or locking his father out.

The black suit took the suitcase and proceeded to the dark, sleek sedan idling at the curb, where another black suit was filling most of the front seat. The suitcase was placed in the trunk with the same curt efficiency, and then the man took up a station at the rear passenger door, standing impassively like an overgrown footman.

As they made their way down the sidewalk, Judge Chalmers reached out and patted Larry on the back. "Larry. Don't worry. Your father is trying to protect you, and so am I."

"Thank you, sir," Larry managed to say, although he felt not a whit thankful. He climbed into the car after Judge Chalmers and the black-suited man shut the door almost on his foot. The car settled noticeably lower as the man got into the front seat beside his square-jawed twin, and then they were off.

Larry did not look back. That would have been an admission of weakness; he was at war now with his father and there was no time for weakness. What he did instead was discreetly touch the medallion hanging around his neck, hidden by his shirt. The medallion his mother had given to him on her deathbed.

She had lifted it from a plain black cardboard jewelry box and slipped it over his neck as he bent over her thin frame, buried under scratchy linen hospital blankets.

"Never take it off," she'd said, grasping his hands in hers with a fierceness that belied her fragile condition. A fire had burned in her eyes that had never been there before. "Never. Promise me."

He had nodded blindly, holding tight to her cold, bony fingers. The medallion then had been an unfamiliar weight, its unusual contours alien to his body. "I promise."

"Good," she had said, letting go of his hands and wilting back against the hospital-bed pillows. A weak smile had grazed her face. "I love you."

Larry clung to that memory, taking strength from it. Who cared what his father did? He had the proof of his mother's love with him constantly.

"Where are we going?" he thought to ask, but only Judge Chalmers tried to answer, and that was with a helpless shrug and sigh. The black suit in the passenger's seat turned his thick neck slightly, getting Larry in his field of vision. Larry stared at where he thought the man's eyes were, determined not to show weakness. After a moment the man turned back.

"Your father neglected to tell me," Chalmers said to him in a low voice, leaning across the leather seat.

Larry was not surprised. Bolivar Trask had always held his secrets close.

It was one of things his son hated about him.