A/N: This story revolves around the idea that, once time catches up to itself, Kitty starts to remember the Dark Future. Something in the way her time-phasing powers work gives her a connection to the time that was erased, and it's restored in her memory via dreams. Or nightmares.
Happy-ish reading.

Everyone forgets, and she never tells them that she remembers.

Thursday night, it started: mumbling voices, blurry images. Fear. Pain. She knows they're in a new future, a happier future, because the darkness comes when she closes her eyes, fills her head with death and her ears with screams. A permanent shadow she can't escape, and she hopes no one can hear her cry out at night.

Until someone does.

She's tossing and turning in tangled sheets, words a whimper and breathing hyperventilated as she struggles against an invisible enemy, when he slips into the room and he shakes her awake; his hands are cold, her name a sweet whisper on his lips. Her subconscious fights her will to respond, but his voice brings her back. She sits up with a start and tries to place where she is, to calm her breathing, to rub the darkness from her vision: this is the happier future, the good future, and no one is trying to kill them here. They're safe in the school and he's still alive.

He asks again if she's okay and she realizes she's crying, but her hands are shaking too violently to wipe the tears from her cheeks; he does so instead, in a way that says he cares, and the action is both familiar yet foreign- in another life that never existed, there was a cavern and blood and pain and the cold touch of his fingers on her skin, and she can't tell him that every morning the whispered words she never wants to forget are replaced by his anguished screams.

Instead of nodding in response, lying that of course she's alright and he can go back to Rogue and peace and back to never knowing everything they've never lost, fresh sobs rack her body. His forehead creases in worry, his eyes filled with concern and nothing more than friendship, and he wraps an arm around her, then another, and whispers in her ear that everything is going to be okay: which it is, but she can't tell him that every night, while the fear tears her to shreds, she watches him die to save her.

She's drowning in her mind and no one will understand why.

He holds her closer, tighter, in the way a best friend would, and she cries into his shoulder even though everything is going to be just fine. This is the good future, the new future; they're safe in the school and he's not hers anymore because he never was.

Everyone forgets, and she wishes she was as lucky.