Title: Waking in the Future
Fandom: X-Men Days of Future Past
Length: 250 words
Content notes: no warnings apply.
Characters: Logan, Hank McCoy, Jean Grey, Scott Summers, Charles Xavier
Summary: It feels like he's gone back in time again.





It feels like he’s gone back in time again. Same song playing on the radio: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. But the timelines have snarled and tangled till first time and ever don’t mean anything any more.

The ruined temple is gone; Kitty with her hands to his head, gone; the Professor and Magneto, facing death side by side, gone. Wherever he is, it’s not in the world of the Sentinels.

Not in the 1970s either, he realizes as the room comes into focus around him.

He opens the bedroom door onto a corridor full of life, mutant kids laughing and chattering on their way to class. A place he’d never thought to see again, full of sights and figures so familiar they seem strange. Or maybe it’s his vision that has changed, dredged up from the metal-pierced depths of his nightmare... The Potomac. Alkali Lake.

What he had lost returns to him, as if by miracle. To wake from the pain of drowning to this feels like a dream, and he blinks at Hank’s greeting, “Morning, Logan. Late start?”

And there is Jean in the doorway, as if she’d never been gone, saying “Where else would I be?”

He’s even glad to see Scott, which he would have said was impossible.

They look at him as if nothing has happened. In this future, nothing has. But the Professor, he knows. Whatever he sees in Logan’s eyes, his own are suspiciously bright.

“Welcome back, Logan. Welcome back.”