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The city streams in through the open door in Rachel’s mind, fills her head until she’s certain it’ll burst, until she collapses, huddled in on herself, hands pressed against her ears, wrestling for control.
She can’t focus enough to shut out the voices: she’s too tired, too hungry, too scared. She can feel the world spinning under her feet, frantic and wobbling and out of sync. What’s the last thing she remembers? Franklin dying; Kate dying; Erik dying; everyone dying. No. Not Kate. Kate, alive--barely--talking. Dark Phoenix, and the vertiginous kaleidoscope of time fracturing around her, until--
“What did you do to me?” Rachel says into her hands. She doesn’t recognize the cracked whisper that echoes back.
When she opens her eyes a lifetime later, there’s a newspaper on the ground next to her, and she runs her fingers over the text, willing the marks to resolve into words, trying to force her eyes to make order from chaos. A date at the top, and this can’t be real, it’s a trick, it’s a trap. She’s dead, and this is Hell. It’s a hallucination, neurons firing at random as Sentinels cut into her brain. The paper is wet, and it shreds and rolls under her fingertips, but the year stays the same.
She looks up again at the street: fashion twenty years out of date, like it’s pulled from a faded memory. New York--only there’s no New York anymore. Is there? The thoughts in her head are a dull roar, too much to make sense of. When she glances back to the paper, the numbers are still there, four digits that should be--
This is real, Rachel thinks. And then: They’re still alive.
Her legs don’t want to hold her at first, and she has to scrabble at the brickwork to stand. And then she sees it, as if in answer to the effort, a prize at the end of the fight: the glint of sun off red glasses, so familiar her heart stops and stutters in her chest.
She’s not sure how she manages to run, but she does, clumsily, pushing through the crowd, against the tidal wave of thoughts and wants and hurts, following the red, because there’s only one person who--he’s wearing a suit, and she wonders what he’s doing here, whether he came because she somehow summoned him, heard her calling somewhere in the back of his mind the way he used to a lifetime ago, the way he always knew if she had a nightmare, back when--
He’s not quite as tall as she remembers, but of course Rachel is taller now, too. She keeps following, turns twice. Tries again to reign in her telepathy, to focus, and even through the blur, she’d swear she can feel the familiar edges of laser-sharp focus, a mind spinning continually through tactics. She’s still trying as she follows him into the alley, so intent that she doesn’t even notice that he’s doubled back until he grabs her wrist.
“Why are you following me?” Is this his voice? she wonders. She tries to remember, but it's long gone, drowned out by decades of screams.
“Da--” she starts, but catches herself halfway through, because now she can see his face. It’s not him. Of course it’s not him. Rachel’s dad lives in Westchester. Rachel’s dad is taller. Rachel’s dad is dead.
She bursts into tears.
“Are you okay?” the stranger asks. Her legs are putty again, and she’s curled on the ground, face pressed into the wall. The stranger sits next to her, puts a hand on her shoulder, careful not to crowd, and she’d swear--it’s not just the glasses, but the way he moves, like a fighter; and she’d swear, she’d swear--but it’s not.
“I thought you were my--” she starts, but she can’t finish. Stupid, as if wishing could make it true. She should have known. The hair she’d let herself mistake for brown in the sunlight is red in the shade. She wishes she could remember more of his face so she could stop clinging to the last thread of hope she can’t quite let go.
“Hey,” he says, gently. “Let’s get you somewhere safe, okay? My partner and I run a crisis center and legal clinic a few blocks up. We can get you some help, find your--your dad?” His voice is so kind, and he looks so worried, and--
Rachel knows she’s staring: at the face that could be his, at the red glasses that are more her father’s eyes than her father’s eyes. (She’s never even seen her father’s eyes, but she remembers sitting on his lap and asking what color they were, and he laughed and said he didn't remember, and Rachel can remember how his voice felt in his chest but not the sound of the words or what she imagines must have been a flat Midwestern accent.) But this isn’t-- “I can’t. I’m sorry, I--I can’t.”
The man who can't possibly be her father nods. “Okay. If you change your mind--” he fumbles in one pocket and hands her a paper rectangle--business card, she fills in from some half-disintegrated memory of a world where those words meant something. There’s a white cane in his other hand, and Rachel wonders dully how she missed it before. Still, the way he moves as he walks away--
The name on the business card is familiar, something tugging on the back of buried memories, but she can’t remember why. The same letter twice, like her dad’s, and Rachel imagines invisible hands turning each S onto its side, smoothing and twisting it into an M.
Maybe Kate got it wrong, Rachel thinks. Maybe it’s a different world, not just a different time. Maybe in this universe, Scott Summers’ name isn’t Scott Summers, and he has red hair, and-- Rachel stands and makes her way to the edge of the alley, but he's long gone, lost in the crowd.
Crazy, Rachel thinks. I’ve gone crazy. It’s enough to make her laugh, the idea that after everything, this is what finally cracks her in two, a stranger with red glasses. Her head is starting to clear, a little--enough to quiet some of the cacophony of thoughts around her. She can still feel the edges of the card biting into the palm of her hand, and she squeezes, feels it buckle and crumple before she lets it drop onto the asphalt. She’s already spent more hope than she can afford.