Chapter Text
The issue isn’t that Rogue looks particularly angry, or upset, or violent with all that thinly-veiled southern hostility, but that she doesn’t look any particular way at all. She suspends the device from the ends of her fingers like holding a dead rat by the tail, expression wrinkled with disgust; except Gambit knows, the same way Storm knows when it’s about to rain, that it’s a dishonest emotion. It doesn’t quite reach Rogue’s eyes. That’s the only attribute he can’t withstand about her, nor about himself: her unreadability.
“Why on God’s green earth do ya have an anti-mutant collar under your pillow, Cajun?”
Gambit raises his hands in surrender. “Would you believe Remy if he said it a weddin’ gift?”
“Course Ah wouldn’t!”
Gambit blinks and realizes Rogue has closed the distance between them when he wasn’t paying attention, her other palm splaying over his heart as if assuring it still functions. She might feel it threatening to beat out of his chest just to get closer to her. Close enough to touch.
Her pretty nose wrinkles up at him. “Start talkin’ or Ah’m confiscatin’ it.”
The cursed thing was borrowed, contrary to anyone’s knowledge, from Professor Xavier’s vault of precarious items assembled along the walls like war medals. Science projects. Doo-dads. Gadgets weaponized against the mutant menaces, or something to that headache-inducing extent. Gambit had been raised and honed a thief, and the vault hadn’t been particularly reinforced to prevent a nightly excursion or two.
“It not like anyone else were usin’ it,” he says. “Gambit wanted to see if it help him sleep.”
Rogue’s eyebrow quirks. “You’re a terrible liar for such a petty thief.”
Perhaps he’s just bad at lying to her (and Storm, because that woman possesses an uncanny third eye for punching straight through his nonsense). She only caught him at all because he was bad at hiding secrets from her, too, and noticed the collar peering out from under his pillow in the middle of an otherwise casual pass to bid him goodnight.
“Maybe you just got a good eye,” he replies.
“Why do ya have it, really? Can't keep avoidin’ my questions, Swamp Rat, or Ah’ll just keep houndin’ ya like a fly to a horse’s rear.”
“Dat sounds promisin’. I quite like havin’ you around, chere.”
Her expression shifts, all at once too sad for him to endure, and to his horror, the honesty reaches her eyes. Bella Donna looked the same way the night he left her behind.
His gut fills with concrete and he catches her hand in his. “Anna—”
“Please, Remy. For once could ya be honest with me?”
The truth: he wears it as needed like a cool hand to a fever, such a temporary relief from the reality of the agony gradually building inside of him, a soda bottle shaken to the edge of expulsion. He’s been enduring too many days lately with his nail under the cap of disaster. A single night with the collar has been enough of a momentary relief to realign his power for a week or two, at least, though sleeping in it has given him such an awful crick behind his shoulder he can’t reach.
The truth: such information will regularly intercept his routine with long days under Ol’ One Eye’s watch and more concerned glances than he knows how to deflect. He neither wants to worry Rogue nor hurt anyone who isn’t himself when the situation inevitably goes tit*-up, so the collar has been his long term short-term contingency plan.
The truth: he’s scared of hurting Rogue.
The truth: he’s scared.
He conjures up a way of conveying his feelings without inflicting her with some new headache to get gray over, and eventually says, “Sometimes Gambit build up too much energy, makes it hard to focus—makes him more likely to discharge wit’out meanin’ to. It helps take dat edge off.”
There’s a long moment of Rogue assessing his face. Looking to his hands, to his tantalizingly exposed skin—to her own hand, wedged beneath her uniform’s glove.
“Should Ah be worried about you?” she says.
“Non.” That’s exactly what he doesn’t want. He forces himself to smile, stroking the back of her hand with her thumb. The leather material between them scuffles with friction. “Oh, but you’re worryin’ bout lil’ ol’ Remy? Perhaps you should keep an eye on me for da evenin’. Bed’s got enough room if we spoon.”
It’s even more untoward than usual, but he’s already kissed her once—three times, if technicalities hold any weight beyond all his past bad deals—so that when his fingertips trace the jut of her hip, the motion takes on a different meaning.
“You’re a hopeless flirt,” she snaps, harmlessly slapping away his hand—it could have hurt so easily, if she wanted it to. He wants it to.—then, “and a no-good, connivin’ scoundrel!”
“Can’t fault a man for bein’ in love, Chere.”
Her reaction is mild, for a woman of her caliber. She smacks the collar against his chest, turns on her heel, and storms out, and he thinks of: the pop pop of fists punching craters into steel with such resounding force he trembles, a sonic boom of takeoff rippling through the yard, so close to the earth it slams the breath from behind his ribs—and the glimpse of her auburn curls spiraling through the breeze, silhouetted by the sun. How can he be expected to withstand such a fierce kind of beauty?
Gambit spins the device on his forefinger, uncertain how to handle all this lingering silence with only himself left to fill it.
“Maybe, she’ll come back.”
Chapter 1
The woman he loved in another lifetime jettisons across the sky. He knows her instinctively, as if his very essence is tethered to hers by the laws of every waking world—and is it a curse, he wonders, or a blessing, to fall in love with the same person forever? To want them on reflex and to crave them by design, even if only once the pieces of a greater whole have aligned on the same corner of the universe?
She might see him from this distance, if she turns her head at the right angle, at the right moment. It’s better she doesn’t. It’ll make what he’s about to do much easier if he doesn’t have to endure her horrified expression all over again. If she says his name, he might not possess the capacity to withstand it.
He turns in the direction she’s flying, and senses more beyond the horizon she chases: a well of energy so familiar to him he almost buckles over nauseous. It’s happening already. The grisly prelude to a momentous obliteration, to the death of all things left unspared by the earth’s quiet rapture:
The birth of a new sun.
“Remy? Can ya hear me, sugah?”
Gambit sucks in a deep breath. His…everything, hurts. A haze of dark fog intersperses with his last few memories: snapshots of flames lapping up the walls, and smoke swelling into his nose, into his mouth, into his lungs. A shout. More, a cacophony of unfamiliarly familiar voices shotgunning from every direction.
Gambit! Get out of there and regroup!
Everybody get down!
Gambit?!
REMY!
Remy…?
“Monsieur LeBeau? Your neurological activity has spiked, so I do hope you are ready to return to the world of the living, and not merely experiencing a new rem cycle.”
Gambit sucks in another deep breath and opens his eyes.
A ceiling of stark white tile unblurs. His pained everything has subsided into a focal point of dense, sharp heat parenthesized by the bandages constricting his chest. Gradually—his eyelids heavy with sleep and limbs weighted with rocks, and still he moves on reflex alone, having never once been employed in the services of any safe occupation—he rolls his head to the left.
“Welcome back my friend,” Beast says, flipping over a page in his book. “I am elated beyond measure that you pulled through, in spite of the severity of your pneumothorax—er, collapsed lung, if you will—sustained during the chaos.”
Gambit swallows hard and notes the taste of copper coins behind his teeth. The pain in his chest worsens. He wants to choke it back up, or cut it out of him, fingers inching subconsciously towards the polished silvery knife on the edge of the table sitting near Beast; it’s only then he notices the tangle of IVs, the cold slide into his arm from the fluid drip, the low rumble of a telenovella from the elevated TV across the room.
“Go slowly,” Beast says, setting aside his book. He pats the back of Gambit’s hand. “There is no need to move so hastily. Allow yourself a moment to digest your surroundings first and foremost.”
“Quoi?” is all Gambit manages. He swallows again, biting down the lingering remnants of blood. “What happen?”
“You stirred up quite the spectacle, from what I understand of Storm’s report.”
Pressure bears down into his right hand. Gambit rotates his attention—still so slowly, guilds be damned does his neck ache something fierce—and there’s Rogue, the only woman who ever punched his heart through his chest from first glance when every other relationship had been much slower, less hungrier, with her head in his lap. She’s still fitted into her ash-streaked uniform and the scent of fire emanates like an X-Men branded perfume. His attention snaps to a swipe of soot defining the arch of her cheek.
And oh, merde, he remembers everything.
“Ah, quiet as mice we must be,” Beast utters. “Our dear Rogue refused to leave your bedside until you stabilized, though we almost lost you to medicinal misfortune a few times throughout the night.”
Gambit inhales a sharp breath and is greeted with a sharper stab of pain. In his memories: a leaning old building, an assortment of soldiers in FOH uniform, a young mutant girl in shackles, the resounding skirmish. Something within him building, building. A black sky opens its maw, its stomach rumbling with thunder. A kettle of boiling water screeches from a stove. He falls—
“I will alert the doctor that his patient is awake,” Beast says suddenly. Once he leaves, thankfully shutting the door behind him for sake of privacy, Gambit releases a low, pained expulsion of air, not a scream but not a groan, some unnamed noise rattled by inescapable agony.
Rogue stirs. All at once her head shoots up, wild hair sloshing backwards into a wilder cascade of motion. Every detail about her is rooted in ardent disregard for his heart’s safety; his monitor stutters.
“Remy!”
“Bonjour,” he tries. He has to peel his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Perhaps Gambit get injured more often if he gon wake up to you, chere.”
She’s made a habit of looking at him, through him, with a glacial calmness in the moments of shellshocked silence. Once more with that unreadability, applied to her expression like anesthesia, but her traitorous hand, still clasping his, shakes.
“Ah thought,” she says, inhales sharply, and lowers her head as tears swell in her eyes. “Ah thought Ah lost you. That was stupid, ya no good swamp rat—so stupid, you almost—”
—he falls. Soldiers have boxed him into a long, dark hallway because he fails to find a window when Cyclops relays the retreat. A sharp pain punches through his chest. He’s been shot, he realizes, catching a palmful of blood. His fingertips press to the floor, into the very grains of the wood, finding the leylines of the energy that moves this world along its axis. A pulse rushes through him. A secondary heartbeat of power, coursing into his body and away from it. He doesn’t think, he falls and he feels, and he charges. The floor, the walls, the ceiling beams, himself? A blinding light spills into his vision. (Himself?)
Everything goes—
Gambit guides Rogue’s palm to his bruised sternum and holds her there, even as she fists his bandages for lack of a shirt. Her strength is propelled by rage but restrained by her understated fondness. It’s reflexive. It doesn’t hurt as much as he wants it to, as much as he deserves it to. He easily seizes her other hand, and kisses the underside of her wrist through the cuff.
“Rogue…”
A terrible sob rips from her chest, mimicking his pain. His bloodied bandages catch her tears. He pulls himself upright and guides her to him, the danger of her flesh separated from his by a thin veil of gauze.
“I’m sorry, chere,” he says. He holds her and she lets him as she stifles another sob, a kind of sadness he’s only heard from her once before: at the brink of having lost something important. The pain in himself rips open. “Don’t cry, Gambit’s sorry.”
—he hears her voice over the radio screaming his name, then in his ear, a near-rhythmic plea indistinguishable from other jostling fragments of his memories he has no dignity to reconcile with anymore. All those long ago times in long ago places filled with a history never big enough to hold him. And all their endings, he finds, perhaps foreshadowing even the end of him, have come to sound the same.
Don’t leave me, Remy. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave.
A soft, gloved hand covers his mouth, stirring him from his sleep. The pressure bends against his lips, the mattress dips to accommodate a new weight, but Gambit keeps his eyes shut to focus on a scant scent of sunflowers, so close he can taste it, yet faint as a dream. He sinks into it. Rogue speaks incoherently as if talking under water, either to him or someone nearby—it doesn’t matter, he thinks, registering a comforting embrace around his hand. He holds on. He slips into the growing darkness.
When he awakens again it’s because someone new is at his bedside, replacing the aroma of sunlight with sweet bubblegum. Gambit cracks an eye open and sees Jubilee with her feet propped up on the doctor’s stool, watching Gargoyles at a polite volume.
“Petite?” he utters.
“Gambit!” she exclaims, then quieter, “Sorry, totally didn’t mean to yell.” She hugs him, but his body still moves as if knifing through jello, so he only manages to rest his exhausted arm over her back. “Welcome to reality.”
“How bad Gambit look?”
“Pretty terrible”—she reaches over his head and soothes down a section of his hair—“but totally not as bad as that Losers of Humanity base. I’m just mad those goons you took out are recovering better than you are!”
Gambit extends his fingers. Jubilee’s mouth turns into a downward moue as she takes his hand and gives him a firm, reassuring squeeze. Her grip has gotten stronger. She’ll be 18 soon, and she no longer bears the responsibility of a child, only the fortitude of one. He wonders at what point, when he wasn’t looking, she became someone he can depend on.
She says, “You’re worried you could have seriously hurt someone. Or worse. But, hey, you didn’t! That’s got to count for something, right?”
He doesn’t care if it does, and wants to tell her that—but they’re both different people than the ones whose lives collided in the mall that day. Different from the people he grew up with, the ones he’d thought would make it without him in the end. He wanted to tell her, with her trembling in his arms after nearly frying him like andouille sausage: well, that’s no fair. You’re only half as scared as Gambit, petite, but then one day they awoke, and she was no longer afraid, and he was still.
(How many times must a thief prove himself a hero before he believes it himself?)
Jubilee offers him a smile. “So. Want the good news? Storm’s filling out your release forms. You’re clear to come home so long as you stay off your feet for a few weeks.”
“Few weeks?” Gambit echoes in disbelief. “Suis-je maudit? Gambit can’t get no breaks!”
Except he does get one, later: splayed out in his bed with all the charm of a corpse prepared for final rites and enveloped in a blush of heat from too many blankets he lacks the stamina to move, he’s allowed to slip in and out of sleep without interruption for an imperceivable interval of time, his concept of existence muddied into a thick, toilet-bowl swirl of soup by propofol.
It's only fair he never notices the face peering in through his window. Change he doesn’t notice. The end of his luck.
“Remy?” someone says to him. “Sugah, it’s just me. Ah brought ya somethin’ to eat.”
Gambit cracks his eyes open. His exhaustion has caused him to hallucinate a very beautiful Rogue in an oversized Sublime shirt he swears he misplaced months ago, and all that southern charm cocooned in leggings. He supposes it’s an inapt moment to admit he’d like her better in just his shirt.
“You’re a dream,” he says.
“Ah’ll take the compliment,” she replies easily, in direct opposition to how upset she’d been before. Maybe what he wants is for her to scold him again in some kind of self-inflicted repentance. “The doc said you’re gonna be drowsy for a bit, but Ah didn’t think he meant this drowsy. You slept better than a snake in the sun.”
Gambit becomes aware of the late morning light spilling in through the crack between the curtains. He doesn’t remember what day of the week it is. His chest still aches where the blast ruptured his lung.
Rogue says, “You feelin’ okay?”
“Wit’ you here, chere? Of course.”
She smiles dishonestly. It’s concern, or some degree of sadness, which reaches her eyes this time; she relocates the tray to his lap.
“Eat,” she says, then, “Sorry about the presentation, Jubilee insisted on makin’ it. Ah’ll be right back.”
Petite has supplied him an assortment of handcrafted delicacies: microwaved oatmeal, a fruit cup, instant coffee, and an unevenly burnt waffle with too little jam. He weighs the discomfort of indigestion against Jubilee’s deflated look should the tray return untouched, and tries not to taste what he eats.
When Rogue returns, he expects her to look impressed by his endurance, but her focus is distractedly sorting through a basket of medical supplies. She perches at his right side, careful to balance her weight away from him, and sets the curated collection of tubes curled up like dead insect legs and fresh cotton rolls on the edge of his tray.
“Do ya trust me with your bandage?” she asks.
“Gambit always trust you, mon amour.”
“Even though Ah could hurt you?”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Makin’ promises?”
She laughs, and he wonders what he must trade, how much he must sacrifice, to hear it again.
It’s only a single dressing of gauze and tape on his side, where the nurse had threaded a tube into his chest to help his lung reinflate. Rogue peels the bandage off with practiced precision, careful of the bracket of stitches keeping him tethered, her breath warm against his shoulder as she works. It’s the only noise in the room for nearly a minute.
“Where you gone, chere?” Gambit asks.
“Ah’m here,” she says. Her thumb gently brushes ointment onto his incision, and then, after some quick shuffling to reposition in bed and deposit the tray of dissatisfaction somewhere else, she applies a more generous heap over the new scar burned into his back.
Without warning: “Are you losin’ control of your powers, Remy?”
He swallows the thick clot of mud in his throat.
Rogue doesn’t look at him because at this angle she doesn’t have to conjure up the excuse to. There's a sour queasiness in his stomach that Gambit can’t attribute to anything in particular except for himself, uncertain if the frequent silences between them lately are a symptom of a neglected emotional rift or the lack of self-sustainability. It’s unfair, he thinks again, recalling the acute terror that fell through him the day he first met Jubilee—it’s unfair to feel ashamed of what you do to survive.
“Rem—”
“Non,” he says quickly. “Non, non chere! Gambit just make a mistake. He got a little worked up and did what he had to, tu vois ce que je veux dire?”
Her gloved hand strokes the back of his shoulder, guiding him to his original position propped against the headboard. She tapes down the last of the replacement gauze. Slow, careful. For the first time he considers whether he might have memorized her pattern of thinking by the pressure of her touch. He learned that in the Thieves Guild: people’s tongues can lie, but their actions can’t.
He says, unhelpfully, “Gambit still got the collar.”
“But that’s not a fix.”
“No, but it is an option. What else Gambit supposed to do? The professor ain’t here no more to help.”
Rogue goes quiet. He kisses the top of her head in appreciation and doesn’t push her further as she collects the basket, the straggling supplies, the breakfast tray of various war crimes, and a momentary glance over her shoulder at him.
“We’ll figure it out,” she says. Her attempt at a reassuring smile doesn’t reach her eyes.
Gambit fakes the smile right back.
“Your place is here,” Pierre says, only once. “Out t’ere your luck only gunna get you so far! Dis family all you got, dis family all you ever gunna need!”
Remy wonders how much his brother knows, or if the Thieves Guild has simply fabricated a new Cajun tradition of assuming the worst from each other. He leaves that night anyway and no one is predisposed to stop him.
Gambit stands now beside the threshold of the doorway to the common room, applying pressure to where his chest still aches. Everyone is arguing—not in-fighting, but betting—over the logistics of baseball, of all things, so animated with color against the dark backdrop of the hallway that he feels as if he’s held apart from a separate realm entirely. Bishop is updating a scoreboard beside the TV. Jubilee lobs popcorn at Wolverine across the adjacent couch. Scott wrestles the remote from Morph, elbowing a tray of lemonades off the table that Jean telekinetically catches and easily reassembles, like reversing time. Storm crosses the room with an exuberant display of fruit.
Rogue catches Gambit’s eye, a tray of finger foods balanced on one hand, and waves him over.
My place is here, he wants to tell Pierre, moving to join them in the commotion. My family is the X-Men. That’s all the luck I need.
(If only he could have known how it would all end.)
