Notes:

Something of an Alternate Universe retelling of Marvel's and Fox's Days of Future Past. I'll be sticking a little closer to the comic book in some ways, less so in others. I'll also be focusing more on the kids, and who they are in the future, than the film did. For the purposes of FFN, I'm indexing this under the X-Men Movies instead of the comic books, even though one of the main characters is from the comics. This will essentially be my take on how Rachel Grey/Summers could exist in the movie universe.

All arc titles are ripped shamelessly from the comic books. This first one ("Here Comes Tomorrow") is from New X-Men vol. 1 #151 – 154, by Grant Morrison and Marc Silvestri.

Main Characters: Rogue, Jubilee, Rachel Grey, Wolverine
Supporting Characters: Blink, Iceman, Xavier, Magneto, Gambit, Mystique, Amiko Yashida, Yukio, Kitty Pryde
Other: Northstar, Warpath, Nightcrawler, Sunspot, Bishop, Colossus, Cecilia Reyes, Mindee Cuckoo, Quicksilver

An Old Echo Fades Away

An "X-Men: Days of Future Past" alternate universe story

J.M. Andersen

Uncanny X-Force #1 (Here Comes Tomorrow part 1 of 6)

The three mutants were standing beyond the access tunnel to the old Cold War bunker. The skies above them were slate overcast, and the air was typical of the Urals in December. They had been in the field the better part of the last three days, working three man shifts of eight hours each—three on guard out in the cold, and three more inside, whether resting or working.

The current look-out shift had fallen to Warpath, Blink, and Sunspot. Warpath stood like the mountain they guarded, eyes closed and ears opened, listening for the sound of their enemy's approach, and sensitive even to the most minor trembling in the earth or rustling of the wind from even kilometers away. Blink was the squad runner, one of only two members of the team who could easily move through the intentionally collapsed access tunnel—a quick security measure put in place by Colossus when he brought the mountain down to seal them safely inside. It would be her job to alert the others if and when (it was always "when") the Sentinels arrived.

Sunspot—Roberto—was notionally the backup, just the extra bit of muscle kept on hand for the just-in-cases. They were glad for his presence all the same, as even on an overcast day, with less sunlight to empower him, he could keep the ambient temperature raised enough to warm them. It was still bitterly cold, but only just cold enough for the chill to keep them alert, without the risk of freezing their sensations to the point of torpor.

For James Proudstar, he did not know how long he had been waiting. There was no danger of nodding off or becoming hypnotized by silence, as there were so many unique, and interesting sounds and vibrations to keep his attention on. Every scrap of dead wood, carried by an unexpected bellow of wind, scratching across the dusty surface of the mountain shelf, was one he had to puzzle out and positively identify as not-a-threat. At some point, Rogue would arrive to relive him. Until then, he would be still as he had been.

So, he didn't know how long it had been or how far he had to go, as time dilated and stretched out along with his perceptions, when he finally heard them coming.

Through the soles of his feet, he could feel the ground shaking beneath the pressure wake of the low flying airship. He could hear the wind sheering around the blockish, obelisk shaped, Sentinel Carrier; as well as the grinding locomotive cycling of superheated turbine blades keeping it aloft, and the rumbling of hanger bulkheads beginning to cycle, and the hum of pressurized superheated water being cycled out of the thermonuclear fusion tokamak that powered it.

Warpath snapped out of his trance, imagining that he could feel his joints creek from long misuse, knowing all the same that it was just the familiar pop of cartilage in the cold air.

"How many?" Sunspot asked, catching the subtle jerk as James' posture tensed.

"A full carrier," Warpath answered.

"Merda," he quickly bit out, but Warpath's attention was elsewhere.

He was about to call out, and could see the familiar magenta glow of Blink beginning to form one of her light daggers, when Rogue walked through the bunker's inaccessible entrance.

"What's the situation?"

James hadn't heard her coming, could never hear or feel her coming, and it still unsettled him after all of these years. It always put him into mind of another woman that his keen senses could never warn him about in time.

"See for yourself," Jimmy responded.

Rogue just closed her eyes and focused on her environment with Warpath's own duplicated senses at her call.

"What now?" Roberto asked. "Run or fight?"

"Tell the others to pack up," Rogue told Blink, while allowing her body to sample and replicate Sunspot and Blink's mutations. "We have most of what we came for."

Blink just nodded and threw her dagger at the wall, waiting a few short fractions of a second for it to finish sheering through the space that separated her from the rest of her teammates.

She ran through her portal as soon as it had completely torn its way into the heart of the bunker.

"Sentinels. We're leaving," she said, as she exited her portal to find Piotr and Lucas in the process of disassembling munitions.

"Understood," was all Bishop said, as he set down the piece he had been working on, and joined Piotr in breaking down his component. Colossus had been further along in his task, and they could better use their time finishing one last unit than in futilely racing against the clock for nothing.

"There are still more—" Piotr began, when Bishop stopped him.

"Its not worth it. We still have enough."

Blink waited for them, rolling a newly formed dagger between her fingers as she prepared for their egress, while Colossus and Bishop packed up. They quickly finished salvaging their last unit and loading the last useful component into a heavy steel case, which was affixed to a carrying frame and a thick nylon harness. Piotr finished securing it while Lucas prepared himself for the violence to come, strapping himself in to the capacitor vest that focused his mutant abilities, and in turn plugging it into his plasma rifle.

The metal case and its lining alone must have weighed more than a hundred kilograms, but in his armored organic steel form, Colossus was able to heft it easily. He nodded his readiness, and reached up to catch the weapon that Lucas had thrown him. It was a similar rifle to the one Bishop carried, but without the external capacitor, and one that relied only on its own limited energy cell to function. It was not usually his preference to wield firearms, being far more effective in battle using his fists, but today it would be his duty to stay out of direct combat if possible. His weapon's plasma discharges would be sufficient for that purpose.

Regardless of his relegation to indirect combatant, he was still all but invulnerable in his armored form, and ran shoulder-to-shoulder with Lucas, ahead of Blink, as the three ran through one of her portals to rejoin the others.

Colossus found himself immediately stricken by a Sentinel's plasma beam, where it proved unable to cope with Warpath's speed and veered wide to the left of him. It would have been a potentially crippling blow had it struck its intended target but Colossus merely grunted, staggering slightly, before squaring his shoulders and accepting it as it rolled harmlessly off of his armored bulk.

To his right, Lucas stepped out in front of him, relying on his own mutation to absorb the Sentinel's energetic plasma discharge. His eyes and veins throbbed with a red energy field that soon flowed through his capacitor vest and surged in turn into his rifle's power cells.

Colossus had crossed back behind Bishop, obtaining a clear line of fire and shot the Sentinel twice in its knee joint, causing it to stumble as the destructive beam weapon discharging from its cavernous face veered uselessly into the sky. Bishop then fired a blast of burning, unstable, plasma directly into the firing chamber within the Sentinel's face, buckling and cauterizing off the critical portions of its focusing mechanism. It was Blink who finished it off, flicking one of her magenta daggers right through its core, sheering off its primary energy conduits and teleporting them away. The Sentinel went down, but it was not destroyed.

They knew from long experience that even now it would just transform its body to reroute its critical systems through redundancies, and that once it had, it would be able to keep fighting as it finished repairing itself. They had bought themselves very little, only a few extra moments of time, and not even a single step towards an actual victory.

Of their remaining three teammates, Bobby was the one who immediately drew Blink's attention. He stood aglow with so much heat and energy, a blackened body shrouded in a corona of solar fire, that he really did look like a sunspot beneath it all.

She caught a brief glance of James running so quickly that he was a blur striking out towards a Sentinel. It saw him coming from too far away, and its hand begun to shift into a long blade, but Blink had long experience at fighting around James Proudstar. Even as Lucas and Piotr fired away at the other nearby threats, she was able to lead one of her throws far enough in front of James that it caught him before the Sentinel could. He ran into it before he could react, and vanished behind a falling curtain of magenta light as the Sentinel struck at empty air. He adjusted as Blink's power caught him, only to race out of a new portal from behind the Sentinel, and slice through the machine's lower back with one of his adamantium bowie knifes.

It was made sluggish by the damage and James easily leapt away. He went up through a new portal, that sheered its way into the space above him, emerging from behind a completely different Sentinel. He threw his knives, catching it in a three-man pincer with the gunfire provided by Bishop and Colossus, before dashing to them and tearing them back out with a slashing heave.

Blink turned her attention to Roberto, who was struggling to hold a Sentinel at bay, caught in a grapple with the powerful machine, his hands pinning its massive wrists. His sun-fueled strength, on this cloudy day, was proving to be of little use before the mechanical monster but he had redoubled his efforts and managed to partially melt its forearms and hands before they were able to shift form.

Another Sentinel dove for him, prepared to take advantage of his prone form, but Blink was able to rip the space ahead of its trajectory. She teleported it as it struck, and into new position for to involuntarily stab the machine Sunspot was engaged with. The one Sentinel's arm pierced the other through its side, and Roberto gave a heave and threw them both away, and into another one of Blink's daggers. The two machines plummeted from the sky, kilometers in the distance.

Elsewhere Rogue was, as usual, the only one of them who could really hold her own against even Sentinel, let alone two at once. With Warpath's speed, reflexes, and sensory awareness added to her own ability, it wasn't difficult for her to perpetually evade them, weaving in and around their blows, and just turning intangible when she couldn't evade anymore. She just danced around them, occasionally tossing a magenta dagger to aid the others, and sometimes while opportunistically allowing her fist to blacken with solar intensity. It was on those occasions that she would lash out to smash a Sentinel into the ground.

It was a stalemate even at that, until Blink and the others rejoined them, and she felt both Lucas and Piotr 'click' in the back of her head as she templated their mutations. After that, Rogue felt her strategy simplified greatly.

She immediately armored up with Piotr's power, and let one of the Sentinels blast away at her as she rushed in to engage the other, absorbing its energy with Bishop's mutation and using it in turn to fuel what she had taken from Roberto's. She maneuvered around the second Sentinel's spear-bladed limb, phased her hand into its chest, and took hold of the indistinct, rapidly shifting, mass of unstable matter within it. Go ahead, she thought, shift your molecules all you want—I've still got you. She lifted it off the ground, spun it to build extra momentum, and slammed it down into the earth powerfully enough to shake the area and visibly indent the ground. She flashed it away with Blink's mutation while it was still stunned.

"Marie!" Piotr called out, as he, James, and Lucas finished subduing their target. "We're ready!"

Rogue nodded before moving to deal with the last of the Sentinels' small advance force. She used her borrowed speed to jump on its head and pushed down with her feet as she phased it, through to its waist, into the earth. Before it could reroute its systems, she formed and stabbed a pair of glowing magenta daggers into each of its shoulder joints to prevent it from moving; she flipped herself around, landing on its back, using a handhold on the course material of its shoulder area to keep herself steady. She phased her other hand down through the top of its head and neck, and channeled the remnants of the energy she had absorbed through Bishop's power, to spew highly energized fire through its defenseless interior until its entire midsection had begun to glow and buckle.

She dropped it to the ground and jumped off its ruined body. That was finally one down for good—the first and only one they would actually manage to destroy that day.

"Rogue," Jimmy reminded her, gesturing towards the Sentinel Carrier. They could both feel the hanger bulkheads winding back open, in preparation for another, larger, wave of the machines to emerge. It wouldn't be long before it descended upon them. Already the Sentinels had begun recalculating the six mutants' precarious tactical position.

"Alright, lets get out of here," Rogue decided, armoring down and allowing the power she copied from Roberto to drain away.

She held out her arms, and one by one felt them each taking a hold of her. James and Bobby each taking one of her hands in theirs, and Lucas and Piotr wrapping one of their large hands around her upper arms. Blink was the last, touching her on the back while quickly forming a cluster of daggers in her free hand.

Rogue phased all six of them into one of the deeper states of intangibility that she still (even after years) had trouble maintaining, before Blink released her daggers and plunged them all through a hole in space that ran all the way through the world.

Only hours later, they were camped down along the northern coasts of Peru.

Lucas was at work trying to contact Jubilee. With any luck they would be able to arrange a rendezvous soon, and make their delivery to the X-Men.

Rogue herself wandered exhausted, sleepy, through their temporary camp. It was supposed to be—and normally would have been—her turn on watch, but using her mutation like that always had this effect on her. She just came to a halt once the adrenaline had time to wear down. Overusing either Bobby's or Lucas' ability to store and project energy was always like this, especially if she misjudged it and spent too much of what she had at once—easy to do when using both their mutations simultaneously.

Even when she copied their mutations with skin contact (the way her mutation wanted to be used), gaining their memories and the ability to use their abilities as well as they could, neither Bobby nor Lucas knew anything about using their abilities in synergy with each other. Not in the same body. And without skin contact, without their memories, there was a lot more trial and error in the mastery of borrowed powers. She wouldn't trade it for anything, being actually functional, capable of human touch, and being able to help her friends without needing to drain the life from them to do it. But still, there were times when it was just so tiring, even when she was younger.

And then there was this damned intangibility...

She sat down, for just a second. She couldn't stop thinking of how tempting it would be to just close her eyes, only for a moment...

"You shouldn't just nod off like that, y'know. Do you really think you're safe? Anything can happen, at any time, even when its all aches and pains. They count on you to take care of them even when it's inconvenient to you," said the voice of the only mutant Rogue had ever absorbed permanently. Maybe it was her voice running jittery shivers through Rogue's spine, or maybe she was just playing around and it actually was her little ghostly fingers poking into her nerves.

She only noticed her eyes were closed when she opened them, and saw the smaller woman crouched in front of her, feet sunk into the sand, and her arms braced weightlessly against Rogue's knees. Kitty—no, her name is Widget, she reminded herself—just smiled up at her, like it was still old times.

"I still think you're not real," Rogue said.

"I'm hurt. I thought we had something special."

"No one else can see you but me. Sounds like a hallucination." Or maybe you're just a spirit and you're haunting me.

"Who says? I can talk to whoever I want."

"Then how come I'm the only one who can see you?" Why don't you go haunt someone else, for once, she doesn't say.

"You're the only one that's interesting," Kitty shrugged. "And I want to show you something. You know, since you're not busy?"

Rogue leaned back, automatically moving out of the way, as Kitty's left hand extended towards her face. Her eyes drew down to focus, not on the sarcastic grin that she expected to see, but on the three rings that she had kept wearing even now.

"You do trust me, right Rogue?" she asked.

She bit back the obvious instinctive reply, but never had a chance to find out what she actually would have said, when Kitty just pressed her intangible hand to her forehead without waiting for permission. No matter how much experience she once had with it, she couldn't help but scream at the explosive pain igniting her trigeminal nerve, as Kitty connected to her and Projected the razor glass shards of her power right through her face.

"There," Kitty said, when they stood together on the shores of Alkali Lake—or rather the river and flood planes that had replaced it when the old dam was destroyed. "Could a hallucination do that?"

"Actually, I think, yes," Rogue said, when she had settled down enough to no longer hear the obvious attempts of her racing heart to escape her body by punching through her lungs and swimming up her throat. No, wait, the sound in her ears and the pain in her chest were just a coincidence.

That pulsing, throbbing, sensation that she felt... pulling every hair on her body on end even through her uniform... pulling the water in her body towards it, and then pushing back, so quickly that she was sure she was going to vomit any second now... that was something else.

"I just wanted to introduce you to your future teammate," Kitty said, as she walked towards It. "It wont be very long now."

Towards the giant ball of liquid fire that was floating in the shallow near bank of the river. It was almost as tall as Rogue herself and if she tried just hard enough, she could almost see the patch of shadows that hinted at the shape inside. The Egg pulsed, flaring with a momentary luminescence, and Rogue felt her hair and the loose edges of her uniform—the collar of her top, her belt buckle, her zipper—tugging against gravity. The loose rocks and soil scattered around them floated in the air along with drops of loose moisture and dew that for an instant looked like a summer rainfall caught in time.

And then the pulse ended, and it all fell to the ground, including the pit forming in Rogue's stomach.

"I've been keeping her company," Kitty said, strolling over to brush a hand casually against the Egg—and letting Rogue play audience to the brief crackle of energy as something within that thin shell of constrained fire pulled against the clear white threads of Kitty's mutation. "Just until she wakes up."

Next: Uncanny X-Men #1 – Jubilee helps an old classmate out of a bind. The X-Men are reunited. Rogue talks herself out of a PET-MRI.