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Chapters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
 
 
 

This Exquisite Dance - REVIEW THIS STORY

Written by CrystalWren
Last updated: 01/02/2007 02:01:11 AM

Chapter 4

It was Cats’ habit to stop by his parents’ house every day in the afternoon, when he just finished work. They would share a drink and talk, savouring a short period of time without the usually constant presence of little Angelique. After that, Angeliques’ school bus would stop at the corner of her grandparents’ block, where her father or one of her grandparents would be waiting for her. Then she would either eat dinner with Cat at her grandparents’ house, or go home with her father. All four of them were very close, and more often than not, they ate with Bernard and Angele.

Cat had had a good day. At this particular point in time he worked at the local post office. A boring, little, pointless job, one that Cat found absurdly easy. The attraction for Cat was the various people who strolled in and out. The mistake that most people made when dealing with Cat was assuming that he didn’t like people, which was untrue. Cat found honest talking and getting to know people properly both boring and frightening; he had always found it difficult to understand their motivations and thoughts. But he did enjoy being around people, and in their company. He enjoyed listening to little slices of their lives, and, providing that there wasn’t any emotional involvement expected on his part, he made a reasonable confident. There were only three people in his life that really mattered to him: his mother, his father, and little Angelique. For his ex-wife he had felt an absent-minded affection, but he hadn’t really missed her when she had left him, (which was probably why she left). So, all in all, desk clerk at the post office was more than an adequate job. People walked in, he said hello and listened to their complaints about the weather, children and their spouses, he served them in whatever capacity was required, and they walked out again. And that was all that was required of him. Perfect. As he drove to his parents’ house he indulged himself in a little tuneless whistle. He looked foreword to a pleasant talk and an equally pleasant tea with his parents, so it was with a flourish that he pulled his small car into the long, cracked concrete driveway. He got out and strolled past Angelique’s flower garden, planted with chrysanthemums, carnations, snowbells, Australian native violets, azaleas, geraniums, and a single, fragrant white frangipani tree. This garden was set up against the peeling white painted back of the house, and on the other side of the path he strolled was Bernard’s vegetable garden, predicably filled with garlic, tomatoes, beans, three different types of lettuce, zucchini, cucumbers, and a pair of passionfruit trees. Everything was normal, nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever, so Cat was extremely surprised when he walked in through the back flyscreen door- to be immediately confronted with a back view of a tall, auburn haired stranger.

His parents were sitting very, very still. His mother had obviously been crying, because the tracks were still wet on her face, and she clutched a handkerchief in her hands, unconsciously wringing it. His father sat with a ramrod straight back and a face as white as chalk, and a frozen expression that would have put Robert Drake the ‘Iceman’ to shame. The stranger stood up, stretching like a panther and just as gracefully. As he rose he slipped his sunglasses on so smoothly that Cat didn’t get a chance to see his eyes. He folded his arms and stood there, smirking faintly. Cat took one look at his terrified parents and then another at the smug looking stranger and immediately leapt to the right conclusion.

"If you," he growled, "have hurt my parents in any way, I’ll kill you." He stepped towards the stranger (who was wearing an absurd set of blue overalls) with his arms outstretched and his fingers making strangling motions at the stranger’s clean shaven neck. The stranger didn’t seem to be particularly impressed- in fact, he seemed to find Cat’s threat amusing, and the smirk broke into a full-fledged smile. A very sexy smile- but Cat was straight, so he didn’t notice that part.

Angele cleared her throat. "Sit- sit down, Cat."

"But-"

"Yes, Cat, sit down," drawled the stranger, in a tone of voice that was almost insulting. He sounded as if he was about to say ‘sit! Stay! Roll over!’ at any moment.

Cat clenched his jaw and remained stubbornly standing- or he would have, if his father hadn’t grabbed his elbow and yanked down. Cat was pulled of balance and immediately fell into the seat, and his father clamped his hand onto Cat’s shoulder to prevent him from rising again. Cat glared at the stranger and indulged in a brief, but very satisfying fantasy involving the stranger and a large lump of wood with a nail in it. The stranger sat back down in the sole remaining seat, a moving sculpture of perfect muscle. He lazily swiped at a lock of auburn hair that had fallen across his face. He kept smiling.

There was a long silence.

There was something niggling in the back of Cat’s mind, but he could not for the life of him set his finger on it.

"Who’re you?" growled Cat.

"Jerry the electrician, at your service sir!" chirped the stranger in an absurdly cheerful voice, overlayed in a perfect formal British accent.

"What’s your last name then?" Instead of getting an answer, Cat got a sharp elbow in his side from his father. He yelped, got the message, and shut up. There was a very thick aura of menace in the air, one that originated from ‘Jerry the electrician’. Cat glanced sidelong at his father, then at his mother. Neither took any notice of him; all of their attention was on the grinning bloke in blue lounging across the table from them. While he was still looking at his mother, he saw a movement in the corner of his eye. Bernard was leaning forward, positioning his shoulders in such a way that the side of his torso was between the electrician and Cat. He didn’t like that at all and moved his own shoulders in front of his fathers’, and ignored the covert and frantic attempts to get him to sit back again. The thing that was nagging in the back of his mind was beginning to scream at him in an extremely loud voice. Mentally, he told it to either come up with some solid results or shut up. On the main it ignored him, but it did say that my, doesn’t Jerry look familiar?

There was more silence, which was finally broken by Bernard shifting in his chair. "Well?" he said. "What are you going to do us now?"

Not liking the sound of that at all, Cat jumped out of his chair and jumped across the table making a grab for the mystery lad. He got as far as knocking Jerry’s sunglasses off before there was a flash of blinding speed and next thing he knew he was on his back on the floor wondering what hit him. At some level he was aware of Angele screaming and being hushed by Bernard, but mostly he concentrated on trying to force some breath into his aching lungs. Finally, he managed to draw a breath of sweet, sweet oxygen, and he sat up, wheezing. He grabbed the edge of the table, using it to pull himself up with one arm while the other was wrapped around his ribs. He managed to get back on his feet, and looked at the stranger-

-straight into his burning, red eyes.

Cat almost fell over again, as the thing that had been nagging at him for attention finally got sick of being ignored and resulted to sneaking up behind him and whacking him across the back of the skull with a metaphorical piece of wood. To his credit, Cat restrained from saying something ridiculous and done-to-death like "it’s you!" or even "oh my God!" Instead, he gazed straight at the man who was damn near identical to him, with the glaring exception of those eyes, and said: "Hello, little brother."

The one in question parted his lips in a faint smile as he inclined his head in graceful acknowledgment.

There was another long silence as Cat, still holding onto his ribs, carefully righted the chair that had been knocked over when he tried unsuccessfully to hit his younger brother. He sat, and looked at his parents. Angele was crying again, and Bernard was alternating between turning white and turning purple like a chameleon. It was obvious that none of them were prepared to deal, or even cope with the situation. Cat leaned forward on the table and laced his fingers together. He studied the twisted sculpture of bone, sinew and skin as way of avoiding meeting his brothers’ eyes.

"I have to say," he said carefully, "that we are- somewhat surprised to see you."

The other man did not answer, but the smirk that was lurking on his lips vanished. "Jerry? Is that your name?"

"No. I assumed that you’d be able to tell me what my name is."

Cat looked frantically at Angele, who looked back with an expression that was just as frantic. She shook head wildly and tried to speak, but her voice failed her. Cat licked his lips and faced his long lost brother.

"Uhm," he said, "actually, we can’t."

"You did not name me before you left me then?" the formal British accent almost totally masked the strain in the voice. Almost.

"No." This was Angele. Everybody looked at her in surprise. "No, we didn’t." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she stuffed her hand in her mouth to stop herself from crying.

"Then I have no name," said her prodigal son, in a voice of utter neutrality.

"You said that your name was ‘Jerry’," Bernard muttered sullenly.

"I lied."

Bernard snarled, and began to bluster. "Typical. Can’t tell the truth, can you? That’s about what I would have expec-"

The red eyes flicked from Cat to his father. "Shut up." Bernard’s mouth snapped shut of its own accord.

Cat took a deep, careful breath. "What can we call you then?"

"I imagine," said his brother, "that after I leave you will call me anything you like."

"So why don’t you hurry up and leave, then?"

"Father, shut the hell up! Please, for once in your life just sit still and listen." Cat breathed out and ran his fingers through his auburn hair. He met the burning gaze with his own. "Do you have any nicknames, aliases, that we may address you by?" The English formality that the other spoke with was catching.

"I am Gambit."

There was another long silence. Bernard broke it. "What sort of name is that?"

"A useful one."

Cat placed a restraining hand upon his fathers’ arm, and reached out with the other one to pat his mother on the shoulder, and finally asked the question that was on all of their lips.

"Why are you here?"

Gambit smiled. "I was curious. I wanted to see what you were like. Get to know you a bit."

"And now you have. So now-" Gambit leaned across the table and struck Bernard across the jaw. More of a love tap, a warning than a blow, but it was enough to shut Bernard up and make him a little more cautious in what he said. Cat restrained himself from hitting Gambit back with a great deal of effort.

He gritted his teeth and said, "what are you going to do now?"

Gambit leaned back and stretched, poetry in fluid motion. He grinned a killer grin. "I don’t think that fifteen minutes counts as really getting to know somebody, y’know? I think I’ll visit again."

"NO!" Bernard lost the shaky hold he had on his temper, and slammed his hands on the tabletop. "No, we do NOT want to see you again! We don’t want you! We never wanted you! You’re not made right, there’s something wrong with you! You’re not normal."

There was a stunned silence. Finally, Gambit said, in a totally reasonable voice: "Well, of course I’m not normal. I’m a mutant." He smirked. "And if I’m a mutant, that means there is something wrong with you. Now, I know that he’s ‘normal’," he gestured at Cat, "but he would still carry the potential. So. What about little Angelique? Is she ‘normal’?"

There was another stunned silence. Then there was a scraping sound as Cat very slowly pushed his chair back and stood up. He was shaking with rage and fear. "If you so much as go within a kilometre of my daughter I’ll-"

"You’ll what, Cat?" taunted Gambit. "Threaten me? I’ve had lots of threats thrown at me. Some people have even tried to carry them out. As you can see," he gestured at himself, "I am very much alive." He snickered. "And for another thing, how will you know that I was even there?" He leaned across the table. "I’ve been watching you all for months. Months. And you never even had a suspicion. You’re all stupid. Even a child would have known I was there. In fact, a child did know I was there."

Cat dropped back into his chair with a thump.

"What’s he talking about, Cat?" demanded Angele.

Cat tried to meet her eyes and failed. "Angelique- Angelique’s been telling me that something was watching her. I didn’t believe her. I thought it was just a ‘monster in the closet thing’. I thought it was just her imagination."

"What, you think a kid screams like the way she did on Christmas Day when it’s just her imagination?" Gambit sounded bitter. "I screamed like that a lot. But it was never just because of my ‘imagination’."

"That was you?"

Gambit gave Cat a Look. "Der, Einstein," he said.

Cat took the last option of the hopelessly out of their depth. He started babbling. "What do you want? Is it money? We’ve got money, it’s not very much, but it ort to be enough. We could sell up the houses, I’d pull Angelique out of her private school and send her to a public school I don’t think she would mind she makes friends easily and-"

"Shut up." Gambit looked thoroughly disgusted. "You are," he spat the words out "pathetic. I told you what I want- I want to get to know you. Offering me money won’t get you anywhere- I have more money now that you’ll ever have. I could buy not just this house, I could buy the whole bloody street." He leaned forward and looked them each in the eye in turn. All three of them dropped their gaze when theirs started to water. Gambit permitted himself a small nod of satisfaction. "The first ten years of my life were a living hell," he hissed. "And about the fifth week I spent on the streets I decided that I would find my parents and I would make then pay for leaving me."

Bernard, Angele and Cat were frozen in their seats with sheer terror. Gambit was a frightening sight; his eyes were blazing, literally. Dark red energy spread out over his face like a mask. Bio-kinetic energy danced on, under and around his fingertips and lines of the stuff caressed and writhed over his entire body like a lover. His lips parted in an angelic smile that was terrifying in its innocence, like a six-year-old playing cowboys with a loaded rife. Bernard past the stage of being too frightened to speak- now he was too frightened not to. "Are you going to kill us?"

The spell was broken. Gambit leaned back and threw his hands up in the air in disgust.

"No! No! A thousand times no! I told you, I want to get to know you! I can’t do that while you’re six feet under! Mon Dieu, you’re so stupid!" He stood up, so fast that his chair was knocked over. The last of the energy dissipated with a crack. He groaned and rubbed at his eyes with his hands. "I give you my fucking word that I will not do anything to physically hurt you." He grinned. "Emphasis on ‘physically’." Then, he leaned over the table and grabbed Angele’s hand before she could pull away, and planted a soft and very gentlemanly kiss upon it. "But," he whispered, "I will do anything else that I damn well want to." With an utterly charming smile he bowed and waved, and in a blur of speed was out the door. Bernard, Cat, and Angele were barely out of their seats before they heard the squeal of tyres from Gambits’ van as he pulled out from the curb and speed down the street.

As if she already knew that was there was something wrong, Angelique was not her usual exuberant self as she got off the bus. She took her fathers hand as he stood there, and he didn’t say anything, not even to greet her. Slowly, they walked down the block and into the driveway of her Grandparents house, taking each step with care as if they were to be their last. Almost as if they were walking towards a guillotine. When they walked through the backdoor into the kitchen Angelique’s grandparents were sitting at their table, silent as weeping statues. Angelique said nothing. She went to her grandmother and climbed into her lap, and stroked the soft, wrinkled cheek with a gentle hand, and then kissed it. She wiped the tears from Angeles’ eyes- and for no reason at all, Angele suddenly felt at peace. That in the end, everything would turn out fine. But underneath it all, she knew that it was a hopeless, doomed peace, and tried to fight against it, to think, to plan.

Angelique sighed.

 

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