Call Me [Back,] Maybe? (Solo)

Of course she would. Those thoughts were crazy, right? The events from the Age of Sebastian dream were making it hard to believe in things she trusted implicitly the night before. The dream was, from what she could guess, a possible future. (It was the only way any of it made sense in her head.) Agnes seemed to think that Sebastian was trustworthy. Now that she lived through her nightmare, would she still put her faith in the man? Admittedly she was defending him in the room, but things were still tense and confusing then. Rebecca just severed ties with the woman she loved, after all, which was also seemingly quite outside of her character. If Rebecca had not turned the firing squad on Agnes, maybe things would have calmed down and Agnes would have started second guessing Sebastian’s intentions?

Rebecca could feel the creeping sensation in her stomach now. The more she thought about how things went down, the more she could see the possibility that she was in the wrong. It was not a definite change of heart: she could still see valid reasons for being upset at Agnes. The more she allowed herself to analyze those painful minutes of argument and years of embitterment, she was starting to worry that she was making Agnes the outlet of anger and blame when she could not figure out who they were meant for.

Was she blaming Agnes for things that were Sebastian’s fault? He was the one that lured her in and gained her trust. As she combed through the bits and pieces of her memories from the dream, the one thing she could not find was whether or not Agnes ever knew what Sebastian’s intentions were. Did she know her kind savior was a would-be god who sought to remake the world in his image? The dream Rebecca, from what she could gather, was just as quick to rush to judgment of Agnes without hearing out the winged-woman’s side of the story.

Maybe she was so ready to get mad at Agnes because Rebecca thought Agnes did not believe in her. Her girlfriend took immortality so no one could take Agnes away from her. Did it offend Rebecca that Agnes trusted Sebastian to protect her more than she could put her faith in Rebecca? Agnes was one of the first reasons Rebecca sought a spot with the X-Men. Did it feel like failure to know that Agnes would basically cheat nature to lighten Rebecca’s load?

What if Rebecca was scared? She had no intention of “ascending” like Agnes. Rebecca would end up aging—she certainly became more weathered over three apocalyptic years. At what point would her unaging goddess lose interest in the small, incredibly temporary woman she once loved?

Rebecca jumped on her bed, reaching for her phone on the nightstand. It was still late, and if Agnes was asleep, the last thing Rebecca needed to do was wake her with a call. It made more sense to open communication through a well thought-out text before moving on to the weighty phone conversation.

She did her best to type carefully, but she was shaking and making constant typos that she had to go back and fix. It was three minutes until she managed to get a full coherent text written out.



Rebecca read the message four times. Was she being too apologetic? Looking back at the scissors, Agnes knew full well that she could take the wound without risk, and was that not part of the point? If they were a normal couple, stabbing herself to prove a point would have been the unhealthiest sign of instability in relationship history. Agnes stabbed herself because she was now beyond normal. If Agnes remained immortal, how far would Agnes end up from the Agnes she fell in love with? Rebecca was not going to assume Agnes would become the Hive Queen without the apocalypse nudging her along… but if Rebecca was not firm with Agnes, she knew how far her lover had the potential to go.

Rebecca took an editorial knife to her text message.



The message was easier to type the second time, but Rebecca spent twice as long reviewing it. Was she being firm or was she being unfair? She might have taken too much of an accusatory tone with Agnes—she wanted to stand her ground, not scare Agnes away from communication.

She originally took out the last sentence because she worried it softened her point, but maybe it was the point. They fought and it got ugly, but Rebecca loved Agnes, and she knew Agnes loved her. Maybe Rebecca needed to make sure Agnes knew that that had not changed on her end.

It was time for take three.



It was probably not the perfect text message, but Rebecca was operating without a manual. As far as she could tell, it was not yielding to Agnes, but it was also not taking the moral high-ground. Most importantly, it was clear as day now that Rebecca wanted to talk things out.

Now all Rebecca could do was hope for the best and try to catch some sleep. She hit the send button and curled up under her covers, still shaking and still crying, leaving her phone on the Agnes’s pillow next to her head in case she heard a text jingle in the night.

It was late in the afternoon when Rebecca left her room, dressed in short pajama shorts and a white tanktop, carrying a bin of dirty laundry down to the very room she was crying in hours earlier. She considered leaving the phone in the room, certain that if she walked away from it, a text would appear. Unfortunately, realizing that, she did not want to miss said text message, so the phone was sitting atop her pile of laundry on the way down. It rested on a dryer while the laundry was tumbling, so Rebecca would hear the vibration against the metal machine when it arrived.

The phone rested on the pile of folded clean laundry on the way back to the room.

It was past four in the afternoon when doubts finally started creeping in Rebecca’s mind. Was it really realistic to think that Agnes had been away from her phone for over half the day? What if Agnes read the message and had no desire to deal with Rebecca? Could the redhead’s behavior the night before have labeled her as an unreasonable, cold b**** that Agnes had no reason to trust anymore?

Was that really fair? Rebecca was not going to pretend that she was not rude and unreasonable toward Agnes, but it was her first offense! She flew off the handle because she had no clue how else to react. Was it fair to expect Rebecca to make the perfect decisions with every new situation she was faced with? She was doing really well figuring out the whole love and dating thing up to that point! Eventually she was going to slip up! Rebecca was only mortal, and human or mutant, mortals screwed things up sometimes.

…Maybe that was why Agnes was ignoring her text? Rebecca worried the night before that Agnes was going to end up looking at her differently because of the divide between immortality and humanity. There was no way Agnes was already past the point of dealing with Rebecca and her human imperfections.

Right?