Chapter 12: Blackbird
Two-thirds of the way back to the mansion, Bobby wasn't happy with his roommate. John, cheerfully flicking his lighter cap open and shut, open and shut, couldn't care less.
"You think it's funny," Bobby fumed. "Let's go set fire to your house next time!"
"Too late," John said cheerily.
"You almost killed those cops, John," Rogue told him.
"So?" John turned toward Rogue. He spoke with exaggerated patience. "Logan would have"—he gave a pointed look at the man across the aisle—"if he hadn't gotten shot in the head. And what about Buffy, Rogue? She looked ready to go on a rampage."
Buffy sighed. "I do not kill humans."
Jean gave Logan a high sign from the flight deck, and he clambered up the aisle to join her and Ororo. "They'll be all right," she assured him.
"So," Logan said, "any word from the professor? Or Scott?"
"Nothing," Jean told him looking back at Buffy.
"How far are we?" he asked.
"We're coming up on the mansion now. Once Storm whistles up some cover—"
"I've got two signals," Ororo interrupted, "coming in fast."
Accompanying her announcement, a proximity alarm sounded. Warning lights flashed on the main console, and the main display shifted channels to a radar field. Two blips, rising and approaching from behind, identified by the plane's onboard computer as F-16s.
They were armed and trying to paint the Blackbird with their target acquisition systems.
The Blackbird shuddered in wake turbulence as the Falcons shot past to announce their presence, then throttled back to pace the bigger aircraft, taking up flanking positions on either side. Each of the pilots was making a downward gesture, telling them to land at once.
They made the same point over the radio: "Unidentified aircraft, this is Air Force two-one-zero on guard. You are ordered to descend to twenty thousand feet and return with our escort to Hanscom Air Force Base. Failure to comply at once will result in the use of extreme force. Do you acknowledge?"
When there was no reply, the fighter pilot repeated his instructions.
"Somebody's angry," Storm commented.
"I wonder why," was Logan's pointed response, with a glare over his shoulder at John.
"We're marked!" Ororo cried as the Blackbird's systems confirmed the worst. "They're going to fire!" she looked back at the kids, and noticed Buffy's eyes. "Seat belts! Buffy tell us what you see."
She slapped the throttles to their firewalls and pointed the big black aircraft toward the stars.
"They're giving chase," Buffy said. "You are about to break the sound barrier and they will try and keep up."
They felt another minor shudder as the Blackbird broke the sound barrier just as Buffy said. In their wake, the F-16s went immediately to afterburner and rocketed after them.
"Apparently it looks like ones of those rare occasions where I am seeing things in almost real time. So my warnings not doing you much good."
"Keep going though," Jean said. "You might see something we miss and five seconds could make a world of difference."
"Okay. They're launching rockets." Buffy said as the alarms and displays on the main panel revealed two minor blips separating themselves from the pursuing fighters and beginning to close the gap at a significantly greater speed.
"What's the threat?" Logan demanded.
Jean pointed at the display: "Sidewinders. They're heat seekers. We give them minimal profile with our exhaust, we can lose 'em."
"Everybody hang on!" Ororo yelled, and she and Jean together swung the wheel hard over.
The Blackbird peeled off to the left, pitching up and over into a barrel roll that allowed them to reverse direction without needing a wide turn. The missiles, closing on where the plane had been, triggered their own proximity sensors and detonated, creating a minor fireball too far behind the Blackbird to do any damage.
"They're splitting off," Buffy said. "Coming in from either side."
Again just as Buffy said both pursuing fighters split in opposite directions to come in on them from either side.
Ororo jinked them the other direction, turning headlong in the direction of one of the fighters and forcing both of them to maneuver to prevent a collision. "They're not backing off," she said. "And they're not giving me a decent opening to outrun them."
"Don't we have any damn weapons in this heap?" Logan demanded.
Jean shot a glance at Ororo, who released hold of her controls. Jean had the aircraft now.
Storm's eyes clouded over as the air around her became supercharged with electricity, and Jean flicked a line of switches to disengage the systems on her side of the panel. Even so, performance on the main displays began degrading markedly, the screens becoming more and more crowded with static.
Outside clouds were darkening the sky ahead as puffy cumulus crashed together and built themselves into towering series of thunderheads. Lightning announced the storm.
"Brace yourselves," said Buffy with a glance at Bobby and Rogue. "We're going straight into the storm."
The Falcon pilots couldn't know what to make of the freak weather. They didn't care. They followed.
Wisps of cloud began to swirl, faster and faster as Ororo manipulated pressure gradients and temperature to create air effects within these clouds more common to the great plains than the northeast. Great rams of high-pressure cold bludgeoned hot low-pressure air, generating maelstroms of tremendous force that found expression as airborne tornados.
Wind smashed at the hull; one minute they were in clear air, the next the canopy was covered with sheets of rain, the next, completely occluded by ice. The only constant was that visibility sucked and maneuverability was worse.
"We're marked," Jean cried out . . . and Ororo responded by sandwiching the nearer fighter between a pair of tornados.
Buffy watched helplessly as the two planes were torn apart and their pilots sent plummeting towards the earth. She let out a sigh of relief as both pilot's parachutes opened and they descended to a smooth landing. Then she saw it two missiles the second pilot had managed to fire before his plane got torn to shred were on an heading straight for them. Her eyes cleared and she looked at Rogue, "Brace yourself."
Without a word, Jean using a slap to the arm to get Ororo's attention, she handed the controls back to her. They were leaving her storm well behind, although the air, and the ride, remained bumpy. The missiles were too small, too close, too fast for Ororo's power to do any good. Their survival was Jean's to decide.
One small blessing: As Ororo scaled back her power, the radar cleared up. Jean had a clear electronic view of their tormentors. All she had to do now was slide her consciousness down that invisible line connecting the Blackbird to the missiles . . .
Ororo cleaned up the Blackbird's flight profile, exchanging maneuverability for raw speed as the variable-geometry wings folded close to the hull, creating an airfoil ideal for high-mach hypersonic flight. Given a small fraction of a minute, they could outrun the damn missiles, stretching out the pursuit until the missiles ran out of fuel. But the missiles were already going hell for leather, far faster than the planes that launched them, and the time the Blackbird needed to accelerate was time they didn't have.
As the missiles struck the unseen barrier that she threw up in their flight path, Jean's body reacted to an invisible impact and she gritted her teeth, hurling another telekinetic boulder at them. Again and again they plowed through her obstacles, the impacts psychically translating themselves into physical terms so that each one felt like a heavyweight punch. But this succession of hammer blows only made Jean that much more determined to prevail. She wasn't trying to finesse the intercept by manipulating the missiles' flight-control surfaces or even just grabbing hold of them and throwing them away; there was too much risk of losing her telekinetic grip, and no time to recover if she did.
"Jean," Ororo called. "How are you—"
The last shot did the trick, sending the missile straight up so that its proximity fuse, mistaking its fellow missile for the target, detonated. She was aiming for a twofer, a double kill.
And in the back neither John or Bobby felt very well. John had gone through several barf bags and Bobby didn't look like he was handling it much better.
Rogue, was in real trouble. The Blackbird didn't use standard seat belts; all the seats were fitted with four-point military style restraints. Procedure mandated that passengers lock themselves in at takeoff, but she'd been talking with Bobby, who was really rocked by how wrong things had gone back at his house.
In addition, she'd been so upset with John for the stunts he'd pulled during the fight that she never got around to buckling herself in. Once the dogfight started, she found to her increasing dismay that she couldn't.
All the Blackbird's wild and unpredictable moves forced her to spend most of the time just hanging on, to keep from making like a hockey puck against the walls and ceiling. Every time she got hold of a damn buckle, it wouldn't lock into the mechanism. She'd think one was anchored, but then when she tried to close another, the first would pop out. It happened so often—making her so frustrated she was ready to cry—that she believed the plane was doing this to her on purpose.
She knew she was getting upset, so she followed Jean's training. She forced herself to take big, slow, calming breaths. She was still scared but tried not to let that matter so much as, one by one, she gathered the buckles and slugged them into place.
This was going to work. She was going to be okay.
Then the panel beeped an alarm, and the second missile raced free of the debris field, locked and closing.
They had seconds to save themselves.
Jean threw everything she had into its path. She closed her eyes, tasting the harsh gunmetal of blood from her nose. The proximity beeps of the radar were coming closer together as the missile closed the range. She took a final roundhouse swing—and missed.
The missile's course never wavered.
"Oh, God," she breathed.
Inside the hull, it felt as though the Blackbird had just had its back broken by a baseball bat. The big plane bucked downward under the impact of the pressure wave. Shrieking metal matched shrieking voices as shrapnel punched a score of holes in the roof.
Decompression did the rest, blowing out a major section, the plane's own velocity wrenching the piece away. Instantly the cabin was swept by winds far greater than any hurricane. Rogue's harness held for all of a heartbeat, and then, to her absolute horror and disbelief, her buckles disengaged and she was swept screaming up and out the hole, into the sky.
"Marie!" Buffy shouted as everyone saw what happened; but only one of them was able to act on it.
Nightcrawler vanished in a distinctive bamf of imploding air and the faint stench of sulfur.
Rogue didn't know what to do or think. She'd never fallen out of a plane before; this was the kind of thing that only happened in movies. She remembered what she'd seen about skydiving and spread her arms and legs to try to stabilize herself. At the same time, she was laughing hysterically inside, demanding to know what the hell good that would do because she didn't have a parachute and sooner rather than later gravity was going to reintroduce her to the ground, the hard way. She doubted after that happy moment if even Logan or Buffy's healing power would make much difference.
That's when Nightcrawler caught her, indigo skin making him hard to see against the darkening sky that was left over from the storm. He rocketed out of nowhere with a grace and skill that told her he knew all about skydiving and wrapped himself around her, arms, legs, and tail. And teleported.
She didn't know where they went for the split instant they were in transit, and for as long as she planned to live she never wanted to find out. And then they dropped the last couple of feet to the wind-ripped deck of the Blackbird's main cabin. Which, in Rogue's estimation, was not an improvement, because the plane was falling just as out of control as she had been.
Buffy looked at Rogue her eyes doing what her hands could not do at that moment. Making sure her friend was okay.
Ororo yelled their altitude, diminishing rapidly, as she and Jean fought to pull the plane out of a flat spin. The explosion had crippled the flight controls, they had minimal hydraulics, which made the act of turning the wheel or pulling on the yoke or pressing the rudder pedals akin to bench-pressing a fully loaded semitrailer. They had a flameout on one engine, possible shrapnel damage and a firewarning light from the other, which they ignored as they rammed its throttle past the firewall in an attempt to stabilize their descent.
Ororo's eyes went white again as she fought to bring a wind into their path, to use it to check their headlong fall. But for all the passion of her indomitable will, she was still constrained by natural forces. She could generate a wind to cushion their landing, but not in the space they had left.
"You can fly," Jean told her. "Grab the kids, get them clear!"
Storm cleared her harness and shoved herself past Logan, calling to the kids.
Strangely, it was Nightcrawler, holding tight to Rogue, who responded.
"Uh . . . Storm?" He was pointing to the roof.
Buffy followed Nightcrawler's gaze and then nodded. Only one person could do that she knew. She unbuckled herself and made her way over to Nightcrawler and Rogue. "If you don't mind?"
Storm too had followed Nightcrawler's gaze and didn't bother hiding her astonishment as the fabric of the hull came alive before her eyes. Dark threads of metal alloy polymer laced their way across the hull spars as though they were being spun from a loom. The spars themselves that had been twisted and broken politely straightened themselves. The roar of wind through the hull gradually lessened to a whisper, then to silence.
Nightcrawler looked at Buffy and then nodded stepping away from Rogue. Buffy hugged her closely. It was then that everyone saw what Buffy was doing. She was holding Rogue, her skin was touching Rogue's with no adverse effect. They didn't have time to question the two teens over this as around them, the hull righted itself, returning to level flight.
They were a couple of hundred feet in the air, but their velocity had dropped to less than a hundred knots. With each ten feet or so they lost another ten knots until, ten feet off the ground, they stopped.
They sat there, floating just above the ground, for maybe a minute before anyone had the presence of mind to mention the landing gear. A quiet whine and a dull thunk told them what the status lights confirmed: gear down and locked.
The next sensation was an equally understated thump that told them they were once more on the ground.
Then Bobby and John let out a cheer. Rogue and Buffy simply looked at each other smiling.
On the flight deck, the first flush of relief had been cast aside by the sight of what was waiting for them. They had descended into a forest clearing not much bigger than the Blackbird itself. On the edge of the clearing, parked under the sheltering evergreens, was a black limousine, not the sort of wheels normally used for a camping trip. But then, the couple using it wasn't the sort you'd expect to find out here roughing it, either.
Mystique gave Jean and Logan a wave from where they stood midway between the nose of the Blackbird and their car.
Magneto held out his hand in welcome. "If I set you down gently," he offered in a pleasantly companionable voice, "will you hear me out?"
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
It was a good place to hide, even without the stealth netting that Ororo and Logan quickly spread across the hull. Magneto had set the Blackbird down hard against a nice-sized escarpment, part of a line of large hills—baby mountains, really—that formed a valley with a mainly north-south orientation.
The cliff formed a wall at their back. Every other direction, they saw only trees. Old-growth forest, timber that had never been cut, thick stands of fir that towered thirty meters and more in height. This was rugged country that made no concession to modern man or the amenities of modern society, as the kids learned when they decided to go exploring and almost immediately got themselves lost.
The four teens and Nightcrawler watched as Jean, Logan, Ororo, Magneto and Mystique walked away to talk in private.
After gathering some wood for a fire Bobby made repeated attempts to use John's lighter to torch the kindling, but was only getting more and more frustrated. He tried paper, he tried twigs, he tried dry leaves, but nothing would catch.
"You could help, you know," Rogue snapped to John. There was no expression on the boy's face as he looked up at her. His eyes were cold and unreadable.
"Forget him," Buffy said, but only Rogue heard her. And for a moment Rogue could have sworn Buffy's lips had not even moved when she spoke.
Bobby followed a couple of sparks as they landed on a leaf, pursing his lips and giving them a gentle puff of air to excite them into a true flame as they burned through the leaf and left a glowing boundary that quickly expanded outward in their wake. The more Bobby breathed, the brighter the embers glowed, until he saw the ghost of a flame. Stifling a cheer, he grabbed for some more tinder to feed the baby fire.
With a speed that surprised Rogue, she grabbed Bobby by the scruff of the neck and yanked him clear as the tiny flicker of flame exploded into a pillar of raw fire, that reared up better than ten meters before fading to a happy little campfire.
John held out his hand, gesturing for the borrowed lighter. Bobby dropped the lighter into his open palm. After the fire came dinner. Nothing fancy, nothing that needed cooking. The campfire was mainly for psychological comfort, to give the scene an air of companionability that was lacking on the faces of most everyone present.
"Can you two hear anything?" Bobby asked Rogue and Buffy.
Rogue looked briefly at Buffy she could hear the adults, yes. And like with the speed she had just demonstrated it was a surprise to her. She was sure both were a sign that she was indeed a Slayer now. A sign she did not want. "Excuse me?" she asked him back, with a look that said she thought he was nuts.
"I dunno, I thought, y'know, since you imprinted Wolverine—" Bobby said.
"His name's Logan," Buffy retorted in a fierce whisper.
"I can't, okay?" Rogue responded to Bobby.
"Okay," he said hurriedly in a placating tone. "Sorry I asked."
John, busy staring at their campfire, snorted.
"I beg your pardon," said Nightcrawler, "but I can get a closer look."
Bobby and Rogue nodded in tandem as he vanished, leaving behind a faint bamf of imploding air and his distinctive scent of smoke and brimstone.
"Nice," Bobby said in admiration.
John waved his hand in front of his face. "Oh, yeah. Mutant teleport farts. Real nice."
They hadn't noticed that while their attention had been on Nightcrawler that Buffy had disappeared into the night as she skirted the edge of the other campfire to get a little bit closer. She didn't trust Magneto after what he had done to her and Rogue.
Ororo was speaking to Magneto with an almost prosecutorial manner as Buffy approached: "How would Stryker know what Cerebro is—or where to find it?"
Magneto didn't answer right away. "I told him," he said at last. "I helped design the one Charles built in the mansion, remember? Stryker has undeniable methods of ... persuasion. Effective against me. Effective even against a mutant as strong as Charles. Believe this, if Stryker has Charles, he will find a way to break him. And suborn him to his purposes. If he weren't absolutely certain of that fact, he wouldn't have acted."
"Who the hell is this Stryker?" Jean asked.
"He's a military scientist with considerable ties to the clandestine intelligence community. He has spent his professional life looking for a solution to what he considers the mutant problem. But if you require a more . . . intimate perspective, why don't you ask the Wolverine?"
"His name is Logan," Jean said.
"Of course it is," Magneto said. "But what's in a name? William Stryker is the only other man I know who can manipulate adamantium. The metal laced through the Wolverine's bones, it bears his signature. Are you sure you don't remember—Logan?" In return, he got a blank look. "What a pity."
"The professor—"
"The professor trusted you were smart enough to discover this on your own. He gives you more credit than I do."
"So Charley knew," Logan said.
"Charles has always known."
"Please understand," Ororo spoke calmly from the fireside, "if we don't take this all purely on good faith. You went to some trouble to save us—for which we're all quite appropriately grateful. The question is, why? What do you want, Magneto? Why do you need us?"
"Mystique discovered plans of a base where Stryker's had his operations for decades. Unfortunately," he shrugged, "we don't know where it is.
"However, I suspect one of you might."
"The professor already tried," said Logan.
Magneto sighed. "Once again, you think it's all about you."
Then his eyes lifted to the branches above.
Ororo followed Magneto's gaze and smiled at Nightcrawler and waved for her to join them. He came down as a circus acrobat, swinging lithely from branch to branch, ending with a triple somersault that landed him right where Ororo had indicated. "I didn't mean to snoop," he apologized.
Ororo gave him a squeeze that told him it was all right as Jean said, "Relax. You can come out too, Buffy."
Jean rose to her feet, with a smooth grace that almost matched Mystique, and took position in front of Nightcrawler as Buffy joined her.
"Stryker's at Alkali Lake," Jean told the others after probing Nightcrawler's mind.
"I've been there," Logan said. "That's where Charley sent me. Nothing's left."
"There's nothing left on the surface, Logan. The base is underground."
They talked a while longer, with Magneto leading the debriefing, delicately mining Jean's memory for every possible nugget of information before turning his attention to Logan.
Buffy watched as moments later Jean broke from the campfire and took refuge in the Blackbird followed shortly by Logan. Buffy got up and turned and followed them both.
"That isn't what I meant," Buffy heard Logan say as she approached the Blackbird.
"I know what you meant, Logan. This is how I choose to answer. Okay?"
"Then answer me, Jean." Buffy said startling the both of them. "Out of everyone here I'm the one person that knows how you feel. For I feel the same for Scotty."
"I'm worried," she confessed. "About the professor. About . . . Scott."
"I know," Buffy and Logan said.
Buffy stepped under the shadow of the aircraft and reached out her arm to her cousin's girlfriend. At her touch, Jean folded against Buffy holding the young woman as Buffy held her.
"I'm worried about you," Logan said from beside them softly. "That was some display of power up there."
Jean snorted dismissively. "It obviously wasn't enough."
Buffy let out a sigh and nodded. She knew how Jean felt.
"I love him," Jean said, mostly to herself.
"I know." Buffy said. "And if it means anything. I give you my blessings."
Jean looked at Buffy and then smiled. Out of everyone she had thought Buffy would have been the last one to approve of her and Scott's relationship. She had thought Buffy would have fought her tooth and nail before she was satisfied that Jean was right for Scott. "I want to show you something, Buffy."
Buffy nodded, "Go ahead."
Jean smiled and then Buffy saw… Jean playing in a yard, a fragment of her thoughts providing the date and setting: her parents' home at Bard College, an hour upstate from Xavier's, where her dad taught. Jean was eight and hanging with her best friend, Annie Malcolm. Annie tossed a Frisbee for her dog, but a wayward puff of breeze hooked the plastic saucer off over the fence. The dog bolted through the gate, Annie chasing after, heedless of the danger posed by this stretch of River Road.
Jean saw what Annie hadn't, a car speeding around the blind curve. There wasn't even a screech of brakes, before or after, just a sickening thud and the sound of tires skidding on asphalt as the driver struggled to regain control before he sped away.
She found Annie against the stone wall by the gate, her body folded at impossible angles, blood—so much blood, too much blood—splashed everywhere. Jean wanted to scream, to shriek, to howl, but some part of her that refused to relinquish control forced her lips to form proper words, forced her lungs to provide air for sufficient volume to make this a proper shout as she called for her mother.
Annie couldn't speak, the only thing moving about her was her chest, desperately striving—broken as it was—to draw another breath.
As well there were her eyes, bright with confusion as her brain struggled to make sense of what had just happened. Jean couldn't stop her own tears. They poured silently from her eyes as she knelt beside Annie and wrapped her arms around her friend.
She found herself in a vast space of light, filled with sparkling clusters of energy. She touched the closest and was filled with an awareness of a specific time and place, together with a torrent of associated emotions, and in a sudden burst of insight realized that each of these clusters represented one of Annie's memories. With a directness only a child can muster, she concluded at once that she was inside Annie's head.
But her delight at this new adventure was short-lived. Even as she watched, she became aware that the brilliance of the individual clusters was fading, along with their background radiance, which suffused this apparently infinite space. It was like looking at the daylight sky, only in this case it was chockablock with stars of every conceivable color and magnitude, and realizing the gradually encroaching presence of night.
To her horror, Jean saw that the clusters closest to the darkness exploded apart in a fireworks shower of sparkles, and just like fireworks, these flaring embers vanished before they reached what she thought of as the ground. But unlike sunset, where the night came from a single horizon, this darkness closed on her from every side, not simply along a horizontal plane but lowering from above and rising from below. She tried to catch hold of the memory clusters, to carry them to some place of safety, but couldn't find one. With each that vanished, she found that less and less of a cohesive sense of Annie herself remained.
She called her friend's name, but the word echoed through a space where it had no more meaning. Annie was going, and there was no way Jean could call her back.
Jean embraced the final cluster, her own heart so full of grief she thought it would explode while her noncorporeal cheeks burned with tears. She thought if she could push her own strength, the essence of her own will and soul, into this last fleeting scrap of her friend, she'd still be able to save her.
The last of the light went out. All around her, save this last scrap of Annie's self, was darkness.
But paradoxically, as this final night fell, the cluster that Jean embraced blazed more brightly than before, more brightly than any radiance Jean had ever seen, so bright it put the sun to shame. She beheld colors she had no name for, that reached out to all her senses, manifesting themselves as tastes and scents and textures. It was a warm and welcoming light, pure in a way that poets strive for and only lovers attain, and that, rarely.
The last cluster, the last scraps of Annie, broke apart in Jean's grasp and slipped through her fingers, rushing away into the core of this new light. There was such peace and such beauty that Jean's first impulse was to follow so that her friend would not face this new place by herself.
That would be so easy. No more pain, no more fear. She could avoid the crushing weight of grief that awaited her the moment she opened her eyes for real, the memory of her friend, the awareness of the bloody rag doll she'd become.
Someone was yelling, in a voice raw with horror and with fear, and Jean was a little bit shocked to realize that she wasn't simply hearing the words her mother spoke as she cradle-crushed Jean in her own arms as Jean had done Annie, as heedlessly as her daughter had been of the blood that soaked them both. She could feel her mother's emotions as well, and her thoughts, relief that it was Annie lying there and not Jean, shame at that acknowledgment, fury that either girl had been so careless, a terrible and welling rage at the driver for not stopping.
It's okay, Mommy, she remembered saying, sure for years afterward that she'd spoken aloud, which was why she was so startled when her mother fell backward in stark and visible shock. There's no need to cry, I'm okay. Only much later did the understanding come that she hadn't said a word with her voice but had spoken directly, mind to mind.
And much later after that, the comprehension that she'd been quite wrong in what she'd told her mom: Nothing for Jean after that fateful moment when her psi catalyzed into being, years before it was supposed to, would ever be truly "okay" again.
"It's okay, Jean," Buffy said softly, brushing tears from Jean's cheek. "There's no need to cry. You're okay." Jean nodded and sighed. "We are similar in different ways."
"Yes," Jean said, remembering that Scott had told her of his sister Celia. How Buffy and Celia had been close. And how hard Buffy had taken Celia's death. "Yes we've both lost someone that was close to us." She kissed Buffy on the cheeks.
Logan looked at the two and nodded. He didn't need to know what Buffy had seen to know that nothing further needed to be said. He knew that her love for Scott was just as strong as maybe her love for him and could not be denied. Logan turned and walked back to the campfire. Leaving Jean and Buffy alone to comfort each other.
Author's Note: I decided to post this chapter a little early so as to update you all on a couple things.
I have been trying to figure out how how to add BTVS to the story. I knew it would be after X3. The problem I had was the Master, one scenario had the Harvest happening at the beginning of season two instead of season one. Another scenario had it where Buffy and Rogue arrive in Sunnydale at the beginning of season two and it be the Wishverse, where the Master had already risen. Both had their own headaches.
The first because canon showed that the Harvest was in season one and came about only once every what was it hundred years or was it longer? So either I change canon majorly (while that is the goal to at least some degree. Somethings still have to happen as the dates of them happening don't allow them to be moved) or ...
The Wishverse again had its problems, namely the Mayor. From what I understand, it was established that the Mayor and the Master were sworn enemies. A reviewer pointed out that the Wishverse was created by Anya as she twisted reality. In the alternate reality there may not have been a Mayor. Because the Mayor being an enemy of the Master likely would have sent someone to kill him the moment he arose.
What I decided was this. X3 is being moved back four months. It will happen towards November or December of 1996 instead of in April 1997 (I was following the movie timeline that said each movie was about a half year after the previous one). That way Buffy and Rogue will arrive in Sunnydale in January 1997.
Now the ending of this story, Days of Future's Past will be a combination of the movie and the comic. This will solve how far to send Buffy back. Instead of sending her back to the 1970's as in the movie. She will be sent back to 1996 shortly after X1. It's within her own lifetime this way instead of trying to find a way to leap her out of it. And this way also will allow me to combine movie elements with those of the comic.