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Chapters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
 
 
 

If Ever - REVIEW THIS STORY

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

Chapter 13

It was nearly dark in the med-lab, the way Hank kept it when Remy, with his light-sensitive eyes, was a patient. Rogue still didn't know why Remy was still there. There was a quiet hum of song that she heard before she reached the observation windows. Ororo ... of course she would be there, she and Remy were joined at the hip, nothing either could do would drive off the other, not even, apparently, the massacre of people Ororo cared about deeply. When her eyes adjusted, Rogue could see the hospital bed facing away from her amid a tangled nest of equipment, slightly elevated. Ororo's shoulders above the top of the mattress, her head resting at an angle that must have been uncomfortable and her fingers threading with slow hypnotic affection through the blunt-cut skein of silky auburn hair spilling over the top edge. Remy's hair, and that was Remy's hand over the side of the bed, palm up and fingertips loosely curled around a plastic cast. Alot of monitors and recusitation equipment for a man who should've been out of the woods weeks ago.

When she slipped through the silent doors she heard the cardiac monitor, irregular and soft, and Ororo's proud head rose like a lioness guarding a wounded cub. The analogy was reinforced by the fire that came into her eyes to see who had come in. Joseph stared at her from the shadows behind Rogue with a frown of concentration as the woman withdrew her legs from along LeBeau's back and rose with regal grace, one hand remaining on the patient's narrow hip.

Now Rogue saw why; he was half on his side and there was a thick plastic tube arching out of the chest-wall smattered with frothy blood; new flecks appeared moment by moment and her eyebrows furrowed.

"Why is he still heah?"

"Because he is an X-Man and this is his home." Ororo's voice was coldly formal, edged with anger that Rogue ignored.

"That's not what ah meant, I mean what is he still doing heah, in Med-Lab ..."

"Did you see no one in your passage here? Did no one make any explanations to you?"

A vague wave at the mansion above her, eyes narrowing at Ororo's accusatory tone, "They said there'd been some 'complications', something 'bout Sinister, nobody was too forthcomin'. Look, I can understand if you want to hate me, Ro, but what I did to Remy was justified and ..."

"I do not hate you, Rogue, and what you did to Remy was exactly what he intended you to do." Which made no sense to Rogue by her expression, but Ororo continued, "Of course I am disappointed in you for assuming the roles of judge, jury and executioner ..."

"Y'mean like he did for the Morlocks?"

Ororo's head snapped upright, her free hand clenched into a fist at her side.

"Ro ..." Rogue and Joseph started to hear Hanks' warning voice from the computer lab, almost unseen in the faint light from the monitors where he'd been listening. Ororo nodded slightly in his direction, her eyes fell to the floor.

"That ... is something Remy and I will discuss between ourselves when he is able. And it is something I have come to terms with in my own mind."

"Bet the Morlocks wish they had ..."

"Enough!" Another voice joined the conversation, sharp and not bothering to conceal impatience with Rogue's edged sarcasm. This quarter being heard from in Remy's defense stunned Rogue - Jean stalked into the lab, a searchingly unfriendly look for Joseph as she passed him to the bed. Rogue was amazed to see her eyes gentle as they fell on Remy. Then her head rose and she extended a hand to Rogue in unreadable invitation,

"Come, Rogue - you're so eager for him to be punished ... witness the punishment he thought he deserved."

Rogue was defiant until she passed around the head of the bed and got her first look. She stopped in her tracks, gloved hands rising in horror to her mouth as tears flooded her eyes, mercifully diluting the brutal reality. Jean's hand trembled when she touched Remy with an oddly possessive gesture, and Rogue knew then how near death he still was. She had to turn away, blindly pressing her face to Joseph's chest, his arm encircled her. Above her head his pale eyes flashed with an anger that made Ororo hiss between her teeth and half-raise her hands as her fury readily answered. Jean also adjusted her stance to come between Remy and these visitors, but Hanks' calm voice stayed them all.

"I am certain you are not considering combat. Not now, and not here."

No matter who he was, Joseph was moved to pity. The man on the bed was a ruin, his right thigh and hand, his left arm, all casted, bandages, stitches, ferocious bruises livid on thin golden skin tinged with an unhealthy pallor. His face was all but invisible behind bandages and swelling bruises and a presently incongruous richness of silky auburn hair. Was this the man who had hurt Rogue so thoroughly? Who had broken her innocence and her heart and even her soul?

"I never touched him! I never hit him once!" Rogue protested in a broken wail and Jean hastened to assure her that was not what anyone thought.

"We know this, Rogue, this was done by others." Jean said, "Warren, Betsy, Bobby and ... Scott ..." Devoid of anything but sorrow, and Rogue lifted her head, turned in the safe embrace of Joseph's arms to look at her, shock plain on her tear-streaked and tremulous face.

"No! They said it was Sinister!"

"It was, in a way. As it was also Remy himself."

"He did this t'himself? No one could do that to himself ..."

"He can when his empath powers are reversed, Rogue. When all he lives for has been taken from him and there is no hope of forgiveness or redemption. He can when he chooses death at the hands of his friends over doing any further harm to them."

"Reversed? Reversed?" Rogue parroted stupidly, feeling lost in the look that passed between Storm and Jean.

Joseph released Rogue reluctantly as she went to the broken man, fear taking root in his chest as she fingered the heavy curve of hair back from his bruised brow. Tears fell onto his senseless arm.

One of the monitors changed cadence and Hank appeared at her elbow, moving with swift efficiency to check Remy's pulse, wide black pupils eclipsing the red of his eyes, the sound of lungs and heart through the stethoscope.

Rogue never took her eyes off his face, nose braced and mouth swollen and cut, both eye sockets black, so little left of the beautiful rakish aristocracy she remembered. Finally she moaned softly, "I don't understand, please ..."

"We could not forgive him, Rogue." Ororo said, hard, but without condemnation, stating fact without necessarily placing blame. "Thus he disbelieved any possibility of forgiveness. All was lost - " Ororo's pale cat-eyes caught hers and held them with a sorrow so deep Rogue could hardly stand to see it. The ebony goddess loved Remy with a deep and patient understanding and always had, but she also knew how self-destructive he could be.

"He did not want to live. He could not bring himself to commit suicide and thought to let the Danger Room do it for him."

"No!" A gasped breath, "I don't believe it! He wouldn't!" Obviously knowing how deep his religious convictions ran, how far out of character such an act was, and Joseph listened and watched and gleaned information about the enigma he was surprised to realize this man was to all of them, not just Rogue.

But Jean only nodded, "Yes. I managed to divert him from that, but Sinister wanted him back and found a way to use us to accomplish it, a bastardization of his damping mechanism. We've captured it, and Scott and Henry are trying to determine how it provoked some into a form of temporary insanity, compelled them to expel him or otherwise force him outside the mansion's perimeters where Sinister could get at him." A grim smile, oddly fond and proud as she looked down at him. "Remy ... had other ideas. We'd been talking about the reverse empathy and he took the concept and ran with it. Used it to enrage them beyond what Sinister had intended, to incite them into killing him before Sinister got his hands on him."

"My God! Why would he ..."

"Indeed," Ororo cut her off, mercilessly confirming the dawning realization in Rogue's vivid eyes, "Why would he choose to die rather than betray us if he was, indeed, so foul a traitor? Why would he not simply escape, give Sinister what he wanted freely - even gladly - if self-preservation, as so many believe, is truly all that matters to him?"

Then Jean got into it, equally fierce in his defense, "And why would he find redemption in such a death unless he cared to prove to us all - to you, Rogue - how wrong we were?"

Rogue stared at her, bewildered; Jean had never more than tolerated Remy, and had made her disgust at his feckless ways clear more than once.

"I was wrong." Jean said, reading Rogue's thoughts without apology, "He was projecting the persona that protected his secrets, just as he projected the punishment he felt he deserved. And we, all of us in one way or another, gave it to him. And maybe to Sinister, too."

In the urgent murmur of their voices Joseph studied the man, intent now on discovering how such devotion had been inspired in three such exceptional women. Instinct, if not conscious thought, insisted this man was his enemy, as it had been insisting violent and inexplicable reactions since they'd come to this place, but there was nothing he remembered there. Big-boned and finely made despite old starvation and recent abuse, he tried to imagine the face without the injuries, the long angular stillness animated as Rogue had described him, always 'sparkin', she'd said, even when he looked relaxed. But there was no spark here, the man was hardly living.

His look settled on Ororo and then Jean, women of depth and intellect and force equal to Rogue, and all three - he did not need to look at Rogue to know this - caught on this man's survival with desperate will. Joseph was keen to the emotions of others, having none of his own he could understand and constantly wondering what vital characteristics of experience he now lacked. Rogue's face, her eyes, were a canvas for the workings of her heart, and for months he'd seen this man haunt her, read her memories and feelings in the way her attentions were drawn to males of a certain lanky height, to hair the color of his, a laconic posture and dark eyes, even the sound of a raspy laugh. This man LeBeau had cursed her with memories so horrible she woke screaming in the night, had crushed her heart so sometimes it seemed she could not stop crying. Yet her eyes now traced the curve of his long graceful fingers like she was dying for just what had hurt her, like the drug addicts in the clinic he'd awakened in, needing and despising their need. It was a craving he was coming to understand, feeling it himself in craving the memories a part of him sensed he would regret regaining.

"Projected? Projected?" Rogue whispered, horrified even through the desire to touch him, "So ah was feelin' his feelin's n' not m'own? God - how much else I thought was me ... was him? Or Sinister??"

"That isn't fair, Rogue, he didn't know he was doing it, it's even more involuntary than the charm power precisely because he wasn't aware of it."

Rogue jerked her hands back as if disapproving her own helpless need, her head turned hard toward Jean and anger gave her voice strength; "How do'y know that? He could lie a bird down from the sky, Jean, he smiled in our faces n' laughed n' joked, he made love t'me with the Morlocks' blood on his hands! Why should ah, or any of us, believe this is any different than every other lie he's told, every other secret he's kept?"

"It is not." Jean said with a flat certainty that brooked no argument, but Rogue would not be denied.

"How d'you know that? Ya can't ..."

"Because I was in his mind."

Rogue's hurt astonishment was obvious, "Why would he let you? Why give up t'you what he's been hiding from me, from everyone, all his life?"

"It was not by choice." Reluctant to get into details, Jean began to measure her words. Rogue would find out soon enough of the intimacy she and Remy had shared, and Jean knew the trouble it would cause her.

"His shields collapsed." Which meant little to Rogue, being psi-blind, until she saw how profoundly significant it was to Jean and Ororo and Hank. Then she remembered that Remy's shields had always been a source of deep frustration to Xavier, not even he had ever been able to break through and he was the most powerful telepath in the world ... uneasily she glanced at Joseph beside her, living proof of that fact. Suddenly Rogue had a vision of black monolithic walls like the end of the world, and Jean's nod confirmed it for Remy's memory.

Dazed, Rogue watched Henry's big blue mitts delicately adjusting and checking i.v.s ... bruises shaped like fingers, cuts the size of Warren's flechettes, long scraping contusions as she'd seen Bobby's rough ice leave ... she had left him with words of love on his lips and his eyes naked with loss, he had nearly died at her hand, and now of theirs, and everything she'd thought was true was false.

"Did he make me love 'im and then make me hate 'im? Mah God, can he make me see and remember and do anythin' he wants? What's mine?" With eloquently terrible insecurity.

Jean knew this was the crux of the matter for all of them who cared about Remy, as it was for Remy himself if ... -when- he came back to them and had a moment to reflect. The Professor had voiced this opinion to her and his anxiety had not been relieved by how her face paled; she had been in that confused and scarred mind and knew what path Remy's eccentric logic would take - all relationships lifelong would be suspect, any loving affection from anyone could have been unconsciously suborned rather than given, even his heart could always have been Sinister's to manipulate. Left to their own devices, those he thought loved him might not have, maybe no one ever had, and he was making them think they did, pushing them into meeting his needs, or worse - Sinister's designs. Not even the love he felt for them could be real if Sinister had placed him here. He would think all these things and Jean had not yet thought of a way to disabuse him of those conclusions.

"Rogue, whether he unconsciously influenced your feelings toward him may never be known unless he can learn - or has the capacity - to control both aspects of his empathy consciously." Tears welled fresh in Rogue's eyes, passionate color in all her features, and Jean leaned toward her fervently, "But that he loves you ..." One hand rose to her own heart without realizing it, feeling Remy's helpless and utter devotion as plainly as when she had been in his mind, "There is no doubt." A shake of her head in the dim light. "I tell you, Rogue, that he loves you as he has never loved anything in his life, even himself."

To Rogue, up was down, her own thoughts and memories tangled with his, even her most basic emotions not hers but drawn out of her just as Mystique had, played upon with consummate skill even though he knew they could never ... perhaps because ...

"He used me!" She cried, "Ah was safe t'him b'cause he never had to make a true commitment, he didn't hafta worry 'bout no other man evah wantin' me! Even if he didn't know it, he was usin' me, maybe for Sinister!" That it might have been subconscious didn't lessen the impact, her heart had been seduced out of her by someone who knew he would never have to make true use of it. Nothing real was hers, nothing! She didn't know she'd fallen until her knees hit the floor, her face dropped into her hands muffling the wrenching sobs.

Joseph knelt at once by her side but did not touch her, her weeping was so strange, so edged with furious terror. He looked to Ororo, to Jean, wondering why these, Rogue's friends of whom she had spoken with deep love and respect, offered no word or gesture of comfort. Indeed, although Jean's expression had softened, the dark woman was still and cool as a Queen, her hand absently stroking the narrow ridge of the man's hip, which he could not feel.

"Do you not hate him for this, Rogue?" Joseph asked her with disarming directness and she had no answer for him, no words could get past the confused turmoil of Danvers, Mystique, Cody, Remy, a cacophony amid which her own self was unheard. If, indeed, there even was a self she could call her own.

Joseph's touch was as uncertain and gentle as his voice; "All you have told me is destructive to you and yet now that you are here ... "

"Yes, Rogue - do you not hate him?" A much sharper statement and Jean did come close now, a hope she barely dared igniting her eyes.

"Ah don't know ... " Rogue's voice was uneven and harsh, "Maybe ah do because he wants me to, maybe ah'm safe for him t'love because he knows it'll never go nowhere! Ah cain't tell what's him or me or any of them in here!" Striking hard at her temples with the heels of her hands as if she could beat the truth out.

Driven by a sudden hollow feeling in his chest that he didn't understand, Joseph insisted, "You don't know? Has he not betrayed you, brought you terrible hurt ..."

Ororo bristled, "And was the first since the one whose life she took to treat her as a woman of flesh and blood and needs. He risked a heart too fragile to love her without ever having what all men need of the woman they love, him most of all."

Jean closed her eyes a moment but said nothing; Joseph did; "Did he not lie to her about who he was? To all of you without honoring your trust ... "

"You cannot speak of trust, the word is ashes in your mouth!" Ororo's tone was quiet but keen as a drawn sword, eyes paling dangerously.

"There will be a day you will know the burden of a past, Joseph, and I will speak with you of this day, then."

Joseph's eyes widened, white eyebrows arched with amazement and a spark of answering anger that frightened him with its potent immediacy.

His fingers on Rogue's shoulder whitened but the grip that would have bruised did not harm her, she didn't even feel it in the sidewards slip of her world. Inside she was flailing and clawing for a solid edge to cling to, somewhere she knew she was real, knew what she felt, but where, and what?

Jean blocked Ororo from Joseph and also from the questions he sensed she knew he was about to ask. "Remy loves her, Joseph. You, indeed she, do not understand. That he unconsciously seduced our affections does not lessen the veracity of his. Remy has always used physical intimacy to connect himself to the world he feels outside of, yet he was willing to sacrifice that, perhaps forever, to love her. This should tell you something about the man you do not know at all and have no right to judge."

But Joseph would not be dissuaded, he stood up to his suddenly impressive height and saw the moment of recognition in their eyes of who he had once been and did not remember. He hesitated breathlessly at the depth of their distaste. The glorious red-haired woman smiled at him, but there was no warmth in the small serene expression.

"You will not find your answers here, Joseph. Anywhere else in the world, from any other people, but not here." Having no idea how wrong she would be and unable to imagine it.

"And from here is where all of you are absenting yourselves right now, this level of emotion is not conducive to my patient."

Jean nodded, knowing better than Beast's machines and even the doctor's instincts how right he was. Remy's mind might be wandering, but his spatial senses still fed impulses into the maelstrom and he was twitching like he had his finger in an electric socket. She saw Hank glance at the restraint casings on the undercarriage shelf of the med-cart. Some levels of unconsciousness in Gambit were mindlessly deadly, he leaked power when incapacitated in delusional flares and bursts that could be highly destructive, and she could feel the disturbed roiling in him now. Hank glanced at the restraints, the syringe ... waking pinned down made Gambit frantic, he'd destroyed every set of restraints they hadn't gotten off before he was aware of them no matter how they were improved or how fast Hank sedated him. But Jean stayed the needle as she felt the Professor's presence, the timing proving his awareness of them. At the tenderly suppressive touch on Gambit's psyche, Jean smiled, reassured.

"The Professor wishes to see us all. Now."

 

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