Kitty had spent almost nine whole hours contemplating her decision. That was all the time the other's could promise for. Isolated as the mountain temple was, it was only a matter of time before the Sentinels found them. They always did, and when they came, fire and death rained from above.

Her allotted time had been spent curled up on the low bunk she shared with Bobby, knees up to her chest, eyes staring blankly into the distance as her brain struggled to process the magnitude of the situation. Most nights, she ended up phasing, glitching through Bobby like a low poly model in an ancient video game. That made her immune to his naturally cold skin, but she disliked the lack of contact.

She missed video games. Saturday nights had been full of them when the team had still called the mansion in Westchester home

That was a long time ago. Games didn't matter anymore. Whether they be pixilated battles between cartoon plumbers and giant turtle monsters or danger room simulations preparing young mutants for combat. It was all irrelevant.

Funny how giant shapeshifting robots hunting your race to the brink of extinction changed your perspective on life. Danger room sessions had done little to train them for constant running, crisscrossing across the globe in search of any safe haven not yet reduced to a pile of ash, charred bones and luminescent concentration camps filled with branded prisoners.

It hadn't prepared them to watch friend after friend die while they watched helplessly, only to flee when their inability to challenge the scaly monstrosities became clear.

Kitty's perspective was unique from the others. It had been ever since her secondary mutation had kicked in, coming as simultaneously a godsend to their ongoing cause, and a meat grinder for her psyche. Her initial power had been to phase through solid matter, resulting in her going to sleep one night only to wake up as she slammed her back on the living room floor downstairs.

Her second power had been to phase the mind through time. And all the borderline nonsensical baggage that came with it.

That was something she hadn't spoken of to the others in detail. Not even the Professor, though he had to know of course, being the king of all telepaths and all.

Each time someone made a jump back in time, usually Bishop, she retained bits and pieces from the old timeline. They would come rushing back to her at random times, pulses of blue light and shadowy forms of dying friends as they were decimated. Muffled screams and the bright flashes of Sentinel face beams. Bobby's icy form being shattered by a molten hand.

Sometimes she even remembered entire conversations. The few moments of levity and laughter that took place before the slaughter.

Each time she sent someone back, she felt the muscle that was her power stretch. Like a blue double helix floating in a hazy white void of converging timelines and possibilities colliding together. Even as she felt that muscle strain with each use, she knew she could take it further. All the way.

She could fling herself downward into the abyss of time, that swirling double helix of blue, like cells undergoing mitosis, and manifest her form physically back in time.

Thus came her decision.

What part would she play in Magneto and the Professor's batshit plan?

She'd have to be a part of it either way. No one else had her power. But could she go all the way? Should she?

Logan had for her to be the one for her to send. The Professor's mind, powerful as it was, couldn't physically withstand the strain of the jump. So their resident regenerative quasi-immortal would have to due. He was alive back in the seventies, with a body ready for his mind to take control of.

Were she to go with him, she'd make a body of her own in the process.

Once the connection to the past was made, history would be changed unless she was killed in the process. A new timeline would be born with the only surviving memories of the old one residing with the time traveler, and with the woman who sent them.

So far the changes had been minutes. A few days or weeks.

This time, if the plan went off without a hitch, it would be fifty years of time rewritten. The plane had to go right. It had to, or they were all doomed to this cycle forever. Or until they were all dead, and mutants were finally extinct. Trask's work done in only a half century.

Yet, somehow, all of that would change if they could stop Mystique from becoming a murderer. Despite all Kitty had seen in the time she'd spent with the X-men, since she was thirteen to now at the age of twenty-four, it was still bafflingly hard to imagine, the cold, brutal sociopath that was Mystique as Charles Xavier's adoptive sister. Believe it or not, watching someone cartwheel from one elegant kill to the next in a bloody piece of performance art made it had to picture them as anything else.

But Kitty trusted the Professor, even though he'd proven he could be a jerk on more than one occasion.

She trusted the Professor, so she trusted his judgment when she said what she could do for this mission.

"Logan will need all the help he can get, Kitty," he'd told her earlier that same morning, before she'd cloistered herself away to decide. "If anbyone could get the job done alone, it's him. The lone wolf is a part he's played many a time. But you understand the flow of time better than most. You could guide him. Make the changes as their needed." His ancient, wrinkled face fell to the floor beneath his chair's wheels. "I know that I am asking more of you than I ever have, but please, Kitty, consider it. We need you."

The wizened old master of magnetism nodded from his friends side. There was nothing he could have added.

'More of you than I ever have'? That was an understatement.

They were asking everything of her.

Before, when she simply served as the time machine rather than the traveler, she got new memories. A new history her mind adapted to with just a sprinkling of alternatives thrown in.

In this case, she'd be left behind. A new players in history who'd age and grow old even as a new Kitty Pryde was born to the same parents with the same DNA. She'd be leaving behind her friends, her past….Bobby.

But then again, what choice was there?

Stay here and adapt to a new time with the others, and let Logan fail without her, or go, and perhaps ensure his success?

The answer was obvious.

Turning, she walked through three walls, and wrapped her slim arms around the figure she knew was waiting her.

Her lips pressed against a pair cool and icy.

"I'm going," she whispered.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy what's to come.

Please, review. It's my motivation. Follows do nothing for me. I need my fix.