I had to wonder just what would have happened if Kitty had actually been the one sent back in time, as she was in the comics. That led to a plot bunny wherein all the ladies were chucked into 1973, because let's face it, the movie was seriously short on estrogen. Also Rogue, because I love Rogue, and missed her presence.

While this might not be unadulterated crack, it's still in no way meant to be taken seriously.

Logan was the one who was supposed to be sent back. Clarification, Logan's mind was meant to be in 1973, and Kitty was the one who was theoretically putting him there. She certainly was not supposed to be flailing through the air, the roof of a large building growing swiftly - and lethally - large in her view.

"Fuuuuu-!"

Clarice staggered, totally disoriented, until she slammed into a wall and nearly cracked her head open. This was not how her portals worked, dammit. One moment she'd been outside the temple-turned-hideout in China at night; the next she was under a clear blue sky, the sun warm on her shoulders. It smelled like city - car exhaust, hot pavement, with a touch of fresh-cut grass from some nearby lawn.

She looked around wildly, her first instinct wondering if the Sentinels were somehow behind this - oh God, was she dead? Was this some fucked-up version of the afterlife?

A mosquito landed on the back of her hand and chowed down, which was probably a good sign she wasn't dead. But if she was alive, where the hell was she?

Anybody who bothered to pay attention would have been surprised at the appearance of a very small, very brief, very localized thunderstorm. They would have been even more surprised to see a woman come sailing out of it, landing unsteadily in the middle of an alley.

Ororo blinked, automatically crouching in anticipation of an attack. The closest thing she received came in the form of a small black-and-white cat, who gave her knee a disinterested sniff and moved on. Somewhere on the street beyond, a car backfired, and she jumped, the air around her crackling with electricity. The cat yelped, and shot her a dirty look.

What. The. Hell.

Rogue had not been having a good day. She hadn't had a good day in what felt like eternity. The scientists had literally kept her in a cage, drugged more often than not, taking her out only to steal more samples of her DNA.

So she was incredibly startled to suddenly find herself upside-down in a tree. Her grey T-shirt, which was unfortunately filthy, was bunched up under her armpits, and one leg of her equally dirty sweatpants was caught on a branch. The suppression collar around her neck was partially stuck behind one ear.

What.

The drugs sometimes made her hallucinate, but this was much too vivid. There was no way she was imagine such a hot summer day, in a world that hadn't existed in years. Something had happened, and she'd damn well better find out what, before somebody assumed she was an escaped lunatic and called the cops on her.

Getting down from the tree was easier said than done, and it wasn't helped by the fact that she was weak with hunger. She needed food and clean clothes, and preferably a shower. For the first time since before the war, she actually felt hope.

Logan was also not having a good day.

The Professor had said he was a very different man in 1973, but he'd neglected to mention how different. Seeing him this way, a bitter, strung-out junkie, was just wrong. And Hank...Logan didn't even know where to start with Hank. Even the school was so far from the place he'd known, and he was growing steadily crankier.

Peter really wasn't helping. If it weren't for the fact that they really did need the kid's help, Logan would have happily slapped him upside the head, and he got the distinct impression the Professor would, too. Which was also weird as hell.

He was so annoyed that, for once in his life, he wasn't paying nearly as much attention as he ought. Which was how he almost ran right over Rogue.

She shrieked, slamming her hands down on the hood and jumping, as though she somehow thought it would help. Everyone in the car screamed, too - except for Logan. He just swore, stomping on the brakes and slapping the car into park. He was out the door before it had even stopped moving.

"Marie? Marie?!"

She gave him a tired, slightly vacant grin. She looked like hell, her clothing filthy and hair matted, with one of those damn suppression collars around her neck like a weight. "Hi Logan. Small world."

"Jesus." He brushed the hair back from her face, checking her over for injuries. She was dirty and malnourished, but didn't appear to be otherwise harmed. How the hell was she here? Even if there was someone else with Kitty's powers, someone who could send another person's consciousness back in time, Marie hadn't been born in 1973. And this was Marie - you could fake appearance, but you couldn't fake scent, and she still smelled like Marie under all the grime.

"Change of plan," he said. "Peter, you've got a twin sister, right? She's what, at college?"

The boy nodded, slightly bewildered but mostly uneasy. The kid might be an asshole, but he wasn't a monster, and he'd probably never seen anything like the sight Marie now presented.

"Come on, Marie," Logan said, as gently as he was capable of (which, admittedly, wasn't much). "Let's get you cleaned up."

Marie blinked at him, but said nothing, and didn't protest when he helped her into the car. It was a squeeze to get her between him and Charles, but she'd always been small, and now she was criminally underweight.

"Marie, you might not believe this, but this is the Professor," he said, tires squealing as he pulled a hard U-turn. "Professor, this is Marie. She's one of your students in the future, and I have no idea how the hell she got back here."

"I don't, either," Marie offered. She was sitting hunched in on herself, almost curled into a ball, and Logan rested a hand on her head. "Better here than there."

He believed her. He didn't want to ask where she'd been, because he thought he could guess easily enough. How she'd gotten here didn't matter at the moment - the point was that she was here, and he had to make damn sure nothing more happened to her.

Which probably meant they had to bring her with them. Shit. Somehow, the thought of her meeting Magneto - even a younger Magneto - did not seem like a good idea. They had to get that damn suppression collar off her, but if she were to see him now, in her current mental state...well, Logan wasn't sure she wouldn't snap and try to kill him.

Motherfucker. As if this wasn't complicated enough.

Clarice, though she now had more information, was no less confused than she'd been.

She'd done a little poking around, creeping down the sidewalk, trying to blend in and utterly failing. With her uniform, hair, and eyes, there was nowhere she could have blended in, but in this slice of suburbia, she didn't have a chance.

The cars and clothes were very...Seventies. She'd thought That 70's Show had exaggerated, but no, it really was that bad. The only logical - well, sort of logical - conclusion she could draw was that she'd somehow followed Logan.

Except Logan was only mentally here. There was no way, so far as she knew, that she could have physically traveled in time along with him. She was in a world she didn't understand, with no money, no contacts, and no way home. Would they be okay back there, without her? God knew they needed all the help they could get, and suffered every time they lost even one of their fighters.

She had to figure out where she was, and then find a way to the school. The Professor might, as he said, be a very different man from the one she knew, but she doubted he'd turn her away. It was the only safe haven she could think of.

Unknown to either Clarice or Ororo, they weren't actually very far from one another. The latter had found a phone book, and discovered it was only a few hours' drive to Westchester. Since she had no money for either bus or cab, she figured it would be best to wait until dark, and fly her way there.

She'd spent so long in the ruined future that she'd forgotten what the world had been like, before. Having ditched her cape and the more obvious portions of her uniform, she sat now in a park, in the shade of a massive oak tree. Here, people just...went about their daily business. There was no terror, no danger but that which ordinary human beings faced from one another, and it was beyond jarring. The children who played on the jungle gym were happy and clean and well-nourished, laughing with a careless joy she'd long forgotten. Logan might have been the one sent back to ensure their eventual fate wouldn't happen, but Ororo would be damned if she wouldn't help as much as she was able.

She just had to get to the school.

Kitty was not a happy camper.

She'd phased right through the roof and straight down into the floor - far enough that she had a fair chore getting back out. Fortunately, nobody seemed to have seen her, though that was probably because she came back up into a bathroom. Hooray.

She straightened her hair and clothes before she went out the door, trying to shake her disorientation. It didn't take long for her to discover she'd landed in the goddamn Pentagon, which momentarily made her panic - she didn't have a visitor's pass, and she was pretty sure that they'd been strict about that kind of thing even in the Seventies.

Magneto was somewhere in here, but like hell was she going to get him out on her own. The Magneto she knew might be on their side, but with everything she'd heard about his younger self, she didn't trust him as far as she could throw him - and she certainly didn't want to try to manage him on her own. If he decided to run off and do something stupid, she had no way of stopping him short of killing him, which would screw the whole thing up.

No, she'd wait for Logan and whoever else he brought. She probably had a lot of downtime ahead of her, so she might as well do a little digging into what the Pentagon of this time knew about mutants.

It was easy enough to phase through a wall just long enough to steal someone's pass, but she was hardly going to pass unnoticed while wearing all this black leather. She'd have to find someone roughly her size, and mug them for their suit.

Who knew. This might even be fun.

Rogue had forgotten just how wonderful a hot shower felt.

She stayed in a good twenty minutes, sluicing the filth and sweat from her skin, scrubbing her hair three times before she was satisfied it felt clean. The boy, Peter, had given her his sister's bathrobe and some of her clothes - including a pair of leather gloves. The first thing Logan had done, when they reached the house, was rip her suppression collar in half, and stomp on it for good measure. He'd been far more adamant about its removal than she had, since she was well aware just how deadly her skin was without it.

Even so, it was nice not having it hanging around her neck like a lead weight. Wrapped up in the softness of the bathrobe, she toweled off her hair, and set about the rather annoying task of trying to brush it out. Her reflection showed a face that was far too thin, her cheekbones standing out like razors, but she was alive, and she was free.

Someone rapped on the door. "You about done in there, Marie? We gotta head out soon."

She sighed, squeezing the last of the water from her hair. She could brush it in the car, she supposed, while they drove...wherever they were going.

"Where exactly are we headed?" she asked, grabbing the clothes Peter had given her. His sister was taller than her, and not an emaciated waif, so they were a bit big, but they'd do. She cinched a belt around the waist of the jeans (very wide bell-bottoms, she noted), cuffing the hems. The button-down shirt, which was a rather loud paisley print, hung on her like a tent, but it covered her poison skin, and the gloves at least fit very well.

"The Pentagon."

Marie opened the door, giving him a dubious look. She debated asking why, but decided there wasn't much point. She'd find out soon enough, and she'd bet the explanation was something insane anyway.

"All right, then. I'm good to go."

Logan shoved a very thick sandwich into her hands. "Try not to get crumbs all over the upholstery. And eat that whole thing, you're too damn skinny."

He stalked out before she could say anything. She cast the young man who was apparently the Professor a helpless look, but he just shrugged. With Logan, there really wasn't much else you could do.

She tore into the sandwich even as she followed them out, trying not trip in her slightly too-large shoes. At this point, she really didn't care what they were doing. She was clean, free, and she had food - nothing else particularly mattered.

Even though this was the Seventies, Clarice still didn't think trying to hitchhike was a great idea. Wasn't there some serial killer out there right now, who preyed on hitchhiking young women? Granted, anyone who tried to kill her would be in for a world of hurt, but still. She'd rather not risk it.

She also didn't want to wait until dark, so once she'd figured out where she was, she portaled her way through a succession of back alleys and empty warehouses. It might not be much faster than walking, but it gave her something to do. Using her powers reminded her that, no matter how weird her surroundings, or how they'd come to be her surroundings, she was still Blink, dammit. She was a mutant, and a warrior by necessity if not by choice, and she was not totally at the mercy of the world around her.

Occasionally she did pause, just to smell the air. Yes, it stank like air pollution, but it was still much cleaner than it had been in the time she'd left. There was no greasy, nauseating stench of decay, no stink of burning rubber or smoke from the ever-present fires in the camps.

Unfortunately, paying attention to the air meant she wasn't paying attention to the rest of her surroundings, and she accidentally portaled herself right in front of a delivery van.

Oops.

In the Pentagon, a small woman was currently banging on the door of a storage cupboard very far down. Another, even smaller woman, who now wore her clothes and ID badge, was rifling through records in a dusty office.

Kitty had picked this room because it was behind a lot of security: anything guarded that closely had to be worth investigating. There were no cameras in here - thank God for this technological Dark Age - so she was free to make as much of a mess as she wanted.

She sat on the floor, her uncomfortable high heels beside her. To her surprise, there was very little about mutants in any of the files - there were conjectures about what had happened in Cuba in 1962, but it seemed that most people didn't believe mutants as a species even existed.

There was plenty on Magneto, though. It figured nobody had thought to mention that he was in prison for shooting JFK, for Christ's sake. Most of his history was listed in these files, and Kitty found herself feeling sorry for him, until she remembered that this was the fuckstick who almost sacrificed Rogue like some kind of divine offering. His early life might have been hell, but that didn't change the fact that he'd tried to murder her friend. The more she read, the less she wanted to break him out, but his older self and the Professor wouldn't have said they needed him if they didn't.

The youngest picture they had of him was as a ten-year-old boy in a concentration camp, his head shaved, his eyes hollow and almost dead. If his life had been different - if his parents had survived, and he'd never gone to the camp - would he still have grown up to be such an asshole? She didn't think that kind of superiority and arrogance were all learned behaviors. If the Professor had gone through the same thing, Kitty doubted he would have turned out like Magneto. There was an innate goodness in the Professor that she didn't think could be kept down for long.

She checked her stolen watch. It was mid-afternoon now; if Logan and the young Professor didn't turn up soon, they wouldn't be getting anybody out today. It might be a good idea for her to take another look around.

Logan was terse and silent as he drove, but he doubted Peter was capable of shutting up for more than a minute at a time. The kid certainly didn't seem to be able to sit still, but that was probably just part of his mutation. He was jabbering at Marie, who was looking increasingly uncomfortable.

"So you're from the future, like he is? How'd you get here? Where did you come from?"

She glared at him so fiercely that he actually leaned away. "I came from hell, and I dunno how I got here. Don't you ever shut up?"

Logan snorted before he could help it. "No, he doesn't. Give her a break, will you? If I told you everything about our future, you'd shoot yourself."

He caught Peter's doubtful expression in the mirror, but amazingly, the boy said nothing more.

"Is it really that bad?" Hank asked.

"Worse," Marie said, before Logan could respond. "Worse than you can imagine. Just what are we doin' now, anyway?"

Logan fought a grimace. How to tell her this? "We're breakin' someone outta prison," he said. "Professor - our Professor, the old one - said I have to, and Marie, you're not gonna like this. We're bustin' out Magneto."

"What?!" The word was more snarl than shriek, but it still made him wince. "Why?"

Charles shifted, uncomfortable but obviously curious as well. "You have a history with him, in the future?" he asked, looking like he fully realized how weird that sounded.

"He tried to kill me," she growled, unconsciously fingering the white streak in her hair. "Why in hell do we need him?"

"To stop Mystique. Marie, I know you don't wanna hear this, but you can't just go killing him, all right?" The Marie he had known wasn't a killer, but she'd been through hell, and he didn't know just what it might have done to her.

"Who said anything about killing him?" she muttered, glaring at nothing.

In spite of himself, Logan almost smiled. She was still a fighter, but not a murderer. She was still Marie. "Slug him if you have to, but don't suck all the life out of him. Doubt you want him in your head again."

"That's for damn sure," she said, and winced. "Once was enough."

Charles glanced from one to the other. "Are you sure Erik and I are friends in the future?" he asked, disbelief etched across his face.

"Believe it or not, he's not an asshole when he gets old. Being hunted like dogs makes a pretty big shift in priorities, and it makes some strange friends."

Marie shuddered, and he wished he hadn't said anything. Whatever was ahead of them probably wouldn't be easy for her, but she'd weather it.

Kitty tried to look like she belonged there as she moved through the hallways, her high heels clacking on the tile. She fervently wished the Pentagon came with one of those 'you are here' maps you found at the mall, because she didn't want to appear as lost as she actually was. Since she didn't know what the young Professor looked like, she could only keep her eyes out for Logan, and meanwhile try not to get stepped on. Even in heels, she was shorter than most of the people around her, and she knew her borrowed suit had to look comically large on her.

A tour group was approaching, the usual mix of tourists and schoolkids, and she stood aside to let them pass. She'd seen four such groups since she left her office hideaway, and searched each carefully without result. This one, though...yep, there was Logan. He was kind of hard to miss. With him were three young men and - Rogue? Holy shit, had she been thrown back here, too?

She was here, and they were going to go break out Magneto. Oh, this was not going to end well.