If Ever - REVIEW THIS STORY

Written by Painted Eyes
Last updated: 01/02/2007 02:01:11 AM

Chapter 11

Nathanial Essex, eyes closed and ghostly face upturned as if in benediction, eagerly searched out the emotions being unleashed within the deceptively quiet mansion on the hill. Any second now Le Beau would come, flung or fleeing, and he guessed from the increasing levels of faint disturbance that the thief would be in no condition to offer any trouble. So satisfied was he, so engrossed in gloating over the savagery he had incited in Xavier's noble warriors, that he forgot again how unexpectedly formidable some X-Men had always been.

A bestial scream jolted him around in surprise, too late to save his machine from the slicing claws that ripped through the casing and came out the other side trailing a savage arc of wires and sparks.

"Not this time, bub, and not this way!" Logan snarled, all but slavering with fury.

"NOOOOOO!" Sinister's hands jerked into the air to destroy the beast as it came through the wreckage, fang-teeth slashing and claws reaching and so much faster than he should have been! Enough to out-run the crimson blasts, somehow bigger, stronger ... a flicker at the corner of Sinister's eye distracted him, small hands quicker than they had a right to be loosed a blinding series of surprisingly concussive pyrotechnics right in his face, sending him reeling backwards.

Impossible! The moment was at hand and he could not be driven from it by an animal and a child ... upon whom his damper seemed to have had a most unexpected effect. Logan's healing factor, some instinctive reticence to harm in the child being transiently subsumed by his machine? Why had they so unexpectedly come to LeBeau's aid? He needed to run permutations, needed time, needed LeBeau! He focused, slapped the girl down and out behind him and casually stitched a line of explosions after Logan until he finally caught him. He could not be so profligate with his power for long, however, the tesseract required a great deal and he knew now he would need it.

"The Acadian is mine, bought and paid for long ago, I will have him!"

"Not t'night, Bub ..."

Why was Wolverine displaying protective rather than destructive emotions? The whole purpose behind distracting him at the club was that his ferality might result in LeBeau's accidental death, but exactly the opposite had occurred. Why had Jubilee stayed? Lights burst again in front of him, bright enough to burn his eyes painfully, and claws raked the air in a razored snicker not an inch from his chest. The opportunity was gone; it would take only a few minutes for the effects to dissipate inside the mansion, he knew a moment of pure fury and shook his clawed fists, pointed teeth grinding behind updrawn lips.

"This is not over! LeBeau belongs to me and I will have him, and all of you through him! He has betrayed you more often than you know, fools, and he will serve you up to me cold and bloody!"

This time Logan's claws savaged only empty air as the tesseract whisked Sinister out of his reach, but he wasted no time indulging rage at his escape. He smelled something bad at the mansion, felt it prickle the coarse hairs all over his body and he was halfway across the lawn before Jubilee had even turned around.

"Yeah, take that home with ya, asshole!" Sending a popping display of pyrotechnics into the closing circle, "Didja see Wolv ... Wolvie? Oh man, everybody's trippin' tonight!"

Logan crashed through the front door, head up after the strange maddened scent of fury and fear, heard screaming deep and muffled - Jean's, desperate and raw enough to send spikes of panic like icicles into his seething brain. Nostrils flared, tasted blood in the air the closer he got to the Danger Room, cut viciously through the controls on the door and shoved them open with impossible strength ... stood in bludgeoned silence as his knuckles went dead white on the jamb.

Jean was on the floor, disheveled and terrorized but unhurt, and everyone else was frozen in a terrible tableau echoing a violent disturbance that still drew on his senses. Gambit's long ivory gold length crucified against the blood-spattered wall, and behind the frayed curtain of heavy auburn hair his eyes were fluttering closed and his bloody mouth turning a faint blue. Scott's hand jammed hard and tight under his jaw, Bobby and Warren held him wide-spread to the wall. Smelled sex clearly, and whose with a blinding surge of primal rage, smelled blood and pain and Jean's furious grief ... it was all that held him there.

Clearly this had been a savage scene, but no one was fighting now ... Warren's wings were drooping, joints dulled with blood, Bobby stared in dawning horror at the same on his icy hands as he held Remy's right arm onto the wall. Even unconscious, the Cajun seemed to feel the cold, shivering faintly. Psylocke's fingertips were rising, trembling, to her forehead as what had gripped them, moved and mastered them, gave way in the absence of influence from Sinister and LeBeau both. All looking as if they were waking from a terrible nightmare.

"What the hell is going on ..." Jubilee's breathless voice coming up behind him, the tired tremble of her body as she was blocked by Logan in the doorway, gaping over his shoulder,

"Gambit ... God, Logan, what've they done? You motherfuckers!" Only Logan's grip kept her from busting loose with the immediate sparks of a truly ferocious barrage, her delicate face washed white and then red as she tried to climb over Wolverine to get at them. She liked Gambit, he didn't take shit from anybody and flirted with her and didn't act like she was just a useless bothersome kid ... "What are they doing?!!"

"Looks like they're killin' Gumbo, Jubes ..." A grim feral growl heavy with accusation and he was surprised he could speak coherently the way he was feeling. Remy's bare toes were up off the floor dripping blood, he dangled lean as a dead cat with vicious wounds sending bloody streamers down his long hollowed body. Bones broken through skin in one arm gleamed white and red, one long thigh-bone kinked in the middle. If he wasn't dead, he had to be close to it.

"Let loose of 'im ..." Logan rumbled.

Scott's fingers sprang apart with guilty shock, all of them as if they hadn't realized they were even holding him and Jubilee jerked forward with a wincing cry as Remy dropped to the floor with a bruising thud. Logan's grip on her was fierce.

"Dammit Wolvie, let me, they got it comin!" Lunging as far as she could at them in fury, "All your high and mighty bullshit about -honor- and -maturity- and doing the -right fucking thing- and you're gang-banging a team-mate just barely out of a hospital bed!" She felt like she was going to explode through the top of her head she was so furious, but their eyes went to Logan in shocked bewilderment, as if he might explain to them what was beyond explanation.

*Je n'ai pas un choix ...* Only Jean heard the soft ghostly sigh and knew how little choice Remy'd had, indeed. Only she moved, tottering unsteadily, to him, not caring that her blouse was open, falling to her knees beside him reaching for him and then not touching him in horror of the damage. In the stricken silence faint rasping moans punctuated the Cajun's every breath. Jean finally finessed his limp weight half into her lap, supporting his shoulders, cradling his lolling head in the crook of her body and arm while they watched her, silent and unbreathing as stones. A shudder ran his length and his outflung hand twitched once, nothing more. Long auburn hair a bloody spill over her elbow dripping crimson from the ends, the stretch of his throat marred with livid bruises.

"How could anyone make us do this?" Jean whispered, soft with breathless tears, filling the air with quiet heartbreak as she rocked him gently, looking nowhere but at him with a reverent horror none of them knew what to make of. Battered and bloody and broken, pale and getting paler by the second, the team stared uncomprehendingly at the savagery they had inflicted.

Logan's big hand sent Jubilee back into the corridor, the other maintained his death grip on the door jamb, a fine trembling betraying how deeply preoccupied he was in restraining himself.

"Get the Professor back here, Jubes, we need Hank lickety-split."

She went, glad to be away from the sight if he wasn't going to let her do anything. Scott jarred to his knees beside his wife breathless with disbelief, his fists clenched and unclenched until he noticed them and brought them up before his stricken face as if the bloody knuckles belonged to someone else.

"Sinister?" A strangled croak.

"Yes, yes, I told you ..."

"And what Remy showed me ..." Burning with fear and shame, "you and him?" Obviously the more important of the two for him and Jean refused to gentle what she thrust into his mind of that truth, angry that he would value Remy's life less than his male pride at being cuckolded.

"Yes, that too ... " She gave him the truth, rendering it moot in the cause ... it had been a soul at risk, a life she valued, which they all valued no matter what private quarrels had been brought so savagely to the fore. Of the second time, however, she gave nothing; the second time with Remy was only for them and would go untold to the grave. Forcibly she fed her husband just enough of Remy's history with Sinister to make him understand Gambit's actions if not forgive them, and then she made him understand what Remy had just done to keep himself from that deadly master for their sakes.

It took only a few minutes, but by the time she was done, her anger had gone. She felt Scott's guilty understanding, his horror, and her touch softened.

** You know I love you with all my heart, husband, but this you will have to be at peace with.** Scott's head drooped, but he didn't try to hide the spill of tears. One trembling hand sought Jean's shoulder and gripped in mute apology. He had never believed he had the capacity for such ruthlessness and it shook him to his foundations.

*Perhaps none of us are as we want to be*

She let him go and looked at Psylocke, at Warren and Bobby, their faces rife with guilt, entering all the minds present as she had never done, and with contemptuous ease, until they all, too, understood. Only Logan welcomed the touch and the revelations.

"Anyone can be driven in all innocence, and against every noble intent, to deeds so foul they can't be justified. Anyone, even you." Furious tears scattered down her face and she held him harder than she meant to. "Now it's something you have in common with him, but he was a boy then and too lost to know."

"Jeannie, give 'im t'me, darlin'," Logan's voice in her ear startled her, "You gotta give 'im t'me, he's havin' trouble breathin'..." Confused until she looked down at Remy and realized the liquid wheeze was him.

"What ..." Paling ghastly white as Logan took hold of him, careful to grip him under the shoulders and not around the ribs. A loose drape of long bones and sinew like an anesthetized animal. Logan couldn't look at any of them without risking renewal of the anger that had nearly undone him at first sight of this room, they would never know what force of will it had taken to stand where he was, grinding his teeth til they cracked, to keep himself from giving them back what they'd given Remy. Gumbo wasn't perfect, but he nobody deserved this.

With incongruous tenderness. Logan's brutish hands skimmed over Remy's body, the knowing touch of a soldier used to assessing injuries in the field. A brief sweep of fingers across a terrible purple-crimson bruise interspersed with paler streaks where broken ribs, released from their normal curvature, pressed against the skin from the inside. The rest of those ribs, the splinters and sharp inward edges, had to be in his lungs. Gashes and bruises and so much blood he couldn't tell where it was all coming from, his chest looked caved on one side. His face was a mess.

"Is he ... is he dying?" Bobby stammered softly and Wolverine pinned him with a savage look.

"Fuckin' odd time t'give a shit, popsicle."

"Logan, I ... we ... I mean yeah, maybe I don't like 'im, but ..."

"Well he just might die of your not likin' 'im, bub, n' if that happens, it's gonna be -me- not likin' -you-. -Any- of you, n' not likin' you -real hard-." Including Warren and Psylocke, even Scott, in his scathing regard. "This don't happen in this house." A black mutter, "Not one of us done by his own teammates." Too wierd t'have the Cajun be so still, little shit ain't even still in his sleep, guy was positively twitchy ... thinking minor surface things to keep from having to consider that it might be too late. Must be two quarts of blood paintin' the place. There was a strangled gurgle, then silence.

"Shit ..." Short and sharp and suddenly Logan was in motion, laying Gambit flat on the floor and jerking Jean over beside him,

"Check for a pulse ..."

"God!" Turning Remy half over on his side to drain the blood out of his mouth, laying him flat again and arching the bruised neck back. His mouth went to the bloodied lips and breathed hard into him while Jean frantically checked his wrist for a pulse, answering his stabbing glance with a jerky shake of her head. Through the heel of his hand he felt the unnatural give of Gambit's sternum and backed off the vigor of his cardiac massage, again and again pushing air into Remy's chest struggling against the madness awakened by the smoky tang of the Cajun's blood in his mouth. In straining silence they watched him, no one breathed, moved, did anything but pray what they were not witnessing death.

"C'mon, Gumbo, I ain't enjoyin' this ..." Until a frothy burst of bubbles and a wet gasp said he breathed again, fingers and legs twitching. So shallow Logan knew it would be touch and go, obviously both lungs were filling with blood.

"Ok, Ok, we just gotta keep 'im alive 'til Hank gets here, we can do this ..." We can, because they were all crouched down beside them by then, and all touching him in some way with their bloody hands, their regret a power Logan couldn't deny.