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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
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
 
 
 

The Game of Empires - REVIEW THIS STORY

Written by Valerie Jones
Last updated: 02/13/2010 03:54:13 PM

Chapter 20

Remy stared unseeing into the refrigerator, his thoughts momentarily consumed by all of the things he desperately did not want to think about. The Professor’s bluff for Erik was an unintentional cruelty, he was certain. How could Xavier possibly have known that Remy had gone in search of him specifically because of the questions he now had about his real father’s identity? But that brought up the disturbing question of why Xavier had picked that particular topic in the first place, effective though it was. If Jean Luc’s intimation was correct, and the Professor did know something about it, why would he claim--?

"You want to hurry it up? Some of the rest of us would like to eat something today, too."

Remy’s unhappy introspection was shattered by a female voice, filled with annoyance. He shoved his thoughts away and glanced back to see the Puerto Rican doctor... what was her name?... standing behind him, arms crossed. Her scowl deepened as he watched, but rather than pick a fight on his first day in the house he stepped back and gestured for her to go ahead.

"Please, chere, be m’ guest." He couldn’t keep the sarcasm completely out of his voice, however, and she watched him warily as she passed.

"Do you practice that accent?" she asked as she grabbed things out of the refrigerator and piled them up on the counter beside her.

"Sure, chere. ’Bout as often as you practice y’ please an’ t’ank you," he answered sharply.

She paused in what she was doing and straightened slowly. Her lips were pressed together in a thin line of frustration. "All right, I guess that wasn’t very fair since we don’t even know each other. I apologize." She stuck out her hand, the motion as abrupt as her words. "I’m Cecilia Reyes."

"Remy LeBeau." He shook her hand, resisting the temptation to kiss it just to see what her reaction would be.

"You’re French?" She was quick to withdraw her hand and crossed her arms again as she regarded him.

Remy couldn’t help a small smile. "Non, chere. Aut’entic Cajun."

Cecilia raised an eyebrow as she reached over to gather up her breakfast. "I didn’t realize there was such a thing. In the Bronx, cajun is a flavor of chicken wings."

Remy stared at her and tried to decide if he should be insulted. He had absolutely no idea if the comment had been intended as a joke.

Cecilia turned away without further comment and walked out of the kitchen, stepping adroitly to the side to avoid Wolverine. The two made perfunctory "hellos" as they passed, and Remy shook his head.

"She’s friendly."

Logan glanced back at the doorway through which Cecilia had exited. "She resents bein’ a mutant and thinks we coerced her inta the X-Men." He turned back to Remy, who raised an eyebrow.

"What? Y’ get so short on crew y’ had t’ start draftin’ new members?" he asked skeptically.

Logan gave him a dirty look. "Girl’s got no place else ta go. She just doesn’t want ta admit it."

Remy found he couldn’t hold the other man’s gaze and looked away. "Guess I c’n identify wit’ dat."

Logan’s expression softened slightly. "Yeah, well, speakin’ o’ new X-Men, there’s somebody else I should tell ya about."

Remy’s gaze snapped back to Logan and he frowned at the slightly ominous ring to his words. "Who?"

Logan gave him an evaluating stare. "Do ya remember the second-gen Morlocks a few o’ us ran into a while back? GeneNation? Their leader was a girl called Marrow."

A chill scrabbled up Remy’s spine. "Oui, I remember," he answered faintly. "Storm killed her."

Logan shook his head. "That’s what we thought, only she didn’t die." His gaze on Remy became intent. "She’s here, tryin’ ta mend her ways."

"Here?" Remy knew his feelings were visible on his face, but didn’t care. The violent terrorist Marrow had once been a very sweet little girl named Sarah, and because of the lies he’d told the X-Men, Remy had been unable even to grieve for her death for fear that he might accidentally give away his secret shame. The fact that she was alive brought up a powerful tangle of emotions that he couldn’t begin to sort out.

Logan was nodding slowly. "At the moment, she’s skulkin’ around in the basement, but she knows who ya are, so watch yer back. She ain’t exactly bought inta the no-killing rule yet."

Remy drew a shaky breath. He couldn’t blame Sarah for hating him. After all, he’d ruined her life twice. But if nothing else, at least she was alive and in a place where she stood a chance of finding people who would care about her.

He nodded slowly. "T’anks, mon ami."

Charles looked up from his musings at the gentle knock on his door.

"Come in."

The door opened and Jean stepped into the room. Her expression was wary and her body language betrayed her discomfort. "Ororo said you wanted to see me?"

Charles took a deep breath and nodded. "Yes." The X-Men had found a wheelchair for him, for which he was grateful. He folded his hands carefully in his lap, wishing that he could also have had a desk to sit behind. The barrenness of his office left him feeling exposed and vulnerable.

Jean walked up to him and stood with her arms held almost rigid at her sides. Charles noted her stiffness and raised his gaze to meet hers.

"I thought I owed you at least the beginning of an explanation," he said quietly.

The hurt that had been hidden behind her flat expression flared to life in her eyes. She shifted back a step and crossed her arms. "You owe me at least that much, Charles." Her voice was full of reproach.

He nodded in acquiescence and forced himself to continue. "I know you feel that I have betrayed you-you and the X-Men both." Charles pressed his lips together for a moment, fighting to maintain his composure. "And, in essence, that is true." Just admitting it left him feeling cold, though he still didn’t know what else he could have done. Jean’s gaze narrowed in response, but she didn’t comment.

"What I want you to know is that there were reasons for what I did-- good reasons, I hope, despite the hurt it caused you." He desperately wanted to reach out and take her hand, to plead with her to believe that he had never wanted any harm to come to her.

Jean’s hard exterior cracked for a moment and she drew a shaky breath. "I want to believe that, Charles-- I can’t begin to tell you how much I want to believe that, but--"

Charles nodded sadly. "But my word isn’t enough."

She shook her head. "No. You’ve been hiding things from us for years." She waved one hand in a gesture of frustration. "I’ve been to the bottom of that pit and I’ve seen the barrier hidden there."

Charles sighed. Telling the X-Men the truth seemed like the only way to keep them from being completely torn apart, but he was desperately afraid of how much damage the truth might do. After all, he no longer had the power to give Remi his life back and for

Gambit, knowing what he had lost might be worse than total ignorance. So, as he always had, Charles was turning to Jean in the hopes that her sensitivity and compassion would help him to find a way to do what he needed to do.

"I’ve done far worse than simply hide things, Jean," he admitted slowly and Jean’s brows dipped in wary expectation. Charles braced himself. "I have lied to you all for many years... perhaps in some sense, I have manipulated you. I have even tampered with the memories of several of the X-Men."

Jean’s expression glazed with shock at his candid admission. She swayed slightly as if she were fighting to keep her balance and after a moment, she shook her head in a gesture of pure denial.

"...with my memories?" Her voice was barely above a whisper.

Charles nodded slowly. "Once." Her head jerked up and she stared at him, her face pale but her emerald eyes darkening with anger.

Charles forced himself to hold her gaze. "I hid approximately one week of memory from you. I could not bear to actually erase something from your mind, so the memory strand is folded over rather than cut... You should be able to recover what’s there."

"When?" The single syllable was harsh.

"Late August, 1985."

Jean’s gaze unfocused immediately as she went in search of the memories. Charles watched her face as her expression went from angry to surprised to bewildered in a matter of moments and knew that she had found the week he had removed so long ago.

She looked back up at him. "I... don’t understand."

Charles sighed softly. "It’s a very long and complicated story."

Jean stared at him for several long minutes, her expression guarded. "Is it true, then?" she finally asked. "Gambit is your son?"

Surprised, Charles gave her a jerky nod. She had made the connection faster than he expected. "Yes, he is."

Jean was silent for another stretch of minutes, her gaze focused on the toes of her boots. Finally she looked up, and this time her expression was intent. "He doesn’t know, does he?"

Charles shook his head.

"But he did--" she waved a hand, "back when we were kids. And you erased it." There was something both demanding and accusing in her tone. "Why?"

Charles closed his eyes briefly as the memory returned, undimmed by the passage of time. "Because it was the only way to protect him... and all of us," he replied, his voice pale with the remembered pain of that day.

After a moment, he forced himself to meet Jean’s gaze. "Please, Jean. Be patient with me. After all this time, you and the other X-Men deserve to know the truth... I just don’t want to hurt Remy any more than I have to in the process. Can you understand that?"

She blinked, then nodded shakily. "I-- yes." Her expression was a strange mixture of relief and disappointment. "But I can’t keep this to myself, Charles. Not for very long."

Scott slid his glasses on and, with a sigh of relief, opened his eyes. "Let’s hear it for next-day delivery." His grandparents had been happy to send him the spare glasses he’d left in Alaska.

Beside him, Hank chuckled lightly. The two men sat in silence for a while with the almost-warm midday breeze wafting across them. Ororo had arranged a picnic lunch but the two appeared to be the first to arrive.

Hank leaned back in his chair and stretched until his fur quivered. "I must admit," he said as he resettled himself, "that I am very glad to have you back, Scott. This team has sorely needed an anchor."

Scott looked over at his long-time friend in surprise. There was an underlying melancholy to Hank’s features that he couldn’t remember seeing before. "Have things been that bad?"

Hank’s eyebrows quirked. "Where should I start?" He smiled, but the expression faded quickly. "Things have not been... easy since you left." He shrugged uncomfortably. "Certainly, Gambit has had a great deal to do with it. Rogue has been lost in her grief for the past three months... hardly speaking to anyone, and yet none of us bothered to try to help her." Hank met Scott’s gaze briefly, and Scott could see just how much that analysis disturbed him. "Warren has been kidnapped and we have not one clue as to by whom or why or where he might be now... or even if he’s still alive. Elisabeth disappears onto the astral plane for days as she searches for him, until I fear for her health. And we have added three new X-Men, of which one is a homicidal terrorist whose heart Storm literally ripped from her chest, another has incomplete control over a pair of predatory slugs, and the third-- though I respect her abilities-- is as likely to bite your head off as say hello." He paused to draw a deep breath and flashed Scott an apologetic smile.

"Like I said... things have not been easy." He turned to look toward the house. "Unfortunately, I sense that the Professor’s return is not going to be the rejuvenating miracle I had hoped for." He glanced at Scott.

Scott frowned and crossed his arms. "I wish I knew, Hank. There are so many questions..." He trailed off with a sigh of frustration. "I wish we could have made this a happier homecoming."

Hank favored him with a lopsided grin. "If wishes were fishes... we wouldn’t have to have the lake restocked."

Scott chuckled despite himself. "Well, here’s one more," he added ruefully. "I wish I knew what to do about Gambit."

"What do you mean?" Hank’s expression was intent.

Scott shrugged. "Part of me wants to take the easy way out and simply condemn him as a murderer, a liar and a traitor."

Hank’s expression shaded toward alarm. "That’s a bit... extreme, don’t you think?"

Scott nodded, his smile sardonic. "Yes, but it would be so much simpler than trying to learn how to trust him again."

Hank considered him for several moments, his head cocked to one side in an attitude of thoughtfulness. "This does not have as much to do with Gambit as you’re making it sound, though, does it?"

Scott blinked in surprise. Always insightful, Hank still sometimes surprised him with the depth of his intuition. He sighed resignedly. "No, not really."

Hank said nothing, his expression patiently expectant. After a moment, Scott stood and began pacing, disturbed by both his thoughts and feelings.

"No, Gambit is just the easier target," he admitted softly. "For all that he lied to us-- even though the X-Men are supposed to be family-- I can understand why. I don’t agree, and it doesn’t make it hurt less, but I can understand."

Scott clasped his hands together. "I never really expected Gambit to be completely honest with us," he admitted, his gaze fastened on the ground. "He’s a thief after all, and from what little I know about his life, it doesn’t seem like people have given him much reason to trust. But still, to find out that what he didn’t tell us was that he was involved in the Morlock Massacre..." He straightened slowly in his seat. "I guess I would have expected him to have to tell us, somehow... just because it had such a critical impact on so many of the X-Men."

Hank watched him somberly. "So the real problem is...?"

Scott’s feet brought him to an abrupt halt in front of Hank. They stared at each other in silence for several moments as Scott struggled to say the words that hovered in his mouth. Why was it so hard to admit his fears?

Finally, he closed his eyes. "The Professor." When he looked up, Hank was watching him with unconcealed concern.

Scott let out his breath in a resigned sigh. "The Professor has lied to us from the beginning, Hank. I don’t know why, or what about, or even if there were good reasons for him to do so." Scott wondered if he looked as betrayed as he felt. "And whatever this secret is that he’s hiding, he was willing to abandon Jean to Onslaught rather than reveal it."

Both of Hank’s eyebrows rose at his pronouncement. "Are you certain?"

Scott nodded unhappily. "He pretty much admitted it. Jean’s... Jean’s heartbroken, I think." He sighed and sat back down in his chair, propping his elbows on his knees.

Hank cocked his head slightly and scratched the bridge of his nose as he regarded Scott. "So, if Gambit-- who you never expected to be completely truthful-- could hide something as painful as the Massacre, how terrible must be the secret of a man you have trusted implicitly, correct?"

Scott looked over at his friend, compelled by the frank question that defined so perfectly how he was feeling. "Yes."

Lilandra Neramani was, in a word... upset. Though she was Empress of the largest known interstellar empire, having at her command an armada of warships capable of taking on any existing military force, and having in her very being more authority than perhaps any other sentient creature, still she was subject to the reality that life often did the unexpected... and the unimaginable.

The focus of her distress was seated in a lawn chair about ten feet away, his attention split between Storm, who was seated on the ground beside him, and the remainder of the X-Men, most of whom were obviously uncomfortable with his presence. Lilandra didn’t really know the individual X-Men well enough to understand the complex undercurrents swirling around the mutant she had known simply as Gambit, and the truth was that she didn’t honestly care. Her attention was riveted to the man himself and she watched his every motion with carefully veiled intensity.

She had spent the entire night wandering the halls of the mansion as she turned the thoughts around in her head, trying to make them fit together into some kind of comprehensible whole. Memories came back to her in fits and starts of late night conversations she and Charles had had, when the whole palace was asleep and it was that still, quiet time in the early morning when lovers were most honest with each other. Charles loved to tell her about his X-Men-their lives, their loves, their adventures, and the many things they did that made him so proud of them. But it was only in that one silent time of the morning that he would talk about Gambit beyond the most casual of references, as if it were a deep, dark secret that he cared for the young man at all.

The reason had always puzzled her-until now. Perhaps she alone had heard the dreadful certainty in his words and knew that he was speaking the truth. How it could be true she could not begin to guess, but as her thoughts churned throughout the night, she had become more and more convinced. All she had to do was look at Gambit. Really look. She had noted the resemblance in the past, of course, but had dismissed it as coincidence. But once she had set aside her preconceptions, she was both amazed and frightened by what she saw: The angle of the high cheekbones and the set of the dark eyes-neither one quite right for a human-- but all too familiar to her. And his movements, though usually fluid and graceful... still she caught the occasional sharp flicker that was so characteristic of her own people.

Lilandra found that she could not force herself to look at Charles. She knew he was watching her watching Gambit, but it was as if she were too afraid to read the confirmation in his eyes. Even as she berated herself for the unreasoning terror in her heart, she could not help but argue in its favor as well. Never had she allowed herself to consider the possibility of having a child with Charles. Never. It was a political bombshell that could easily cost her the throne of the Imperium, for the noble houses of her people would not take well the idea of an heir whose blood was not pure Shi’ar.

She had long ago resigned herself to the fact that, though her heart might always belong to Charles, she would have to take another consort in order to provide an heir to her throne. That had not kept her from putting the day off, of course...

Sighing softly, Lilandra pushed herself to her feet. There was no help for it, if her fears were true, and she did not believe in ignoring problems in the hopes that they might magically disappear. Her empire survived and thrived because she faced its challenges head-on and did not let them grow to such proportions that they could topple her.

The over-tall grass sucked at her boots as she walked to where Gambit and Storm sat. Both looked up at her curiously as she stopped before them, and Lilandra could feel the sudden interest of the rest of the X-Men like a ripple of heat on the back of her neck.

"Storm," she said quietly, "may I ask a favor of you?"

The white eyebrows lifted fractionally. "Of course."

"Will you calm the surface of the lake?" Lilandra nodded toward the expanse of blue-green water that shimmered in the midday sun.

Storm followed her gaze, her curiosity obvious, but she said nothing as the wind died away and the gentle lapping of the water against the shore muted slowly and then disappeared.

"It is done."

Lilandra was too absorbed in her thoughts to thank the other woman. She turned slightly and extended her hand to Gambit. "Come with me."

She found herself staring into his eyes, blood red and lit with their own inner fire. The fire was dimmed by puzzled curiosity, however, as he slowly took her hand. Lilandra was acutely aware of the warmth of his fingers and the very human texture of his skin that was so much like Charles’. As she closed her hand around his, she was struck by the significance of the act. There was blood here, if her belief was proved true. Not only blood, but responsibility and a shared destiny that would rock the Shi’ar Empire to its foundation.

Gambit did not resist her pull as he rose to his feet, and allowed her lead him toward the lake with the others drifting curiously after them.

I am about to make a spectacle, Lilandra thought as they reached the water’s edge. Even on Earth, where there are none but the X-Men to care.

Gingerly, she crouched by the water and drew Gambit down with her. The still lake reflected their images in perfectly clarity, but leeched of color. The monochrome reflection suited Lilandra. It minimized the differences and allowed the underlying similarity to surface.

"What do you see?" she asked Gambit, meeting his reflected gaze.

He studied the reflection and she saw the frightened recognition that flared in his eyes as he looked between their faces. He turned to stare at her for only a moment, but a moment in which Lilandra knew that his heart was completely certain of the tie between them. She could not begin to put a name to the emotion she saw in his gaze. All she knew was that it penetrated her to her very core and left her feeling vulnerable and shaken.

Then he rose to his feet like an uncoiling spring and shook his head sharply. "Non!" With a savage twist, he freed his hand from hers. His gaze darted to Charles, filling for one moment with a wild mix of anger and hurt, but then the expression disappeared entirely as he spun on his heel and strode away from the lake.

Lilandra made no effort to reach after him. Her feelings echoed his too closely, though perhaps for different reasons. She found herself turning toward Charles, no longer afraid to meet his gaze, and was stunned by the ache she saw in his eyes. His pain dwarfed her own concerns and left her feeling obscurely shamed.

Her shame turned quickly to anger. Everything she most wanted-- as a woman rather than a ruler-- was wrapped up in that human man whose face was so much like her own. Her completely unrealizable dreams of a family and a home with her only love-- everything that she could never have-was suddenly very real. And it hurt more than she thought possible.

The stillness of the lakeside was eventually interrupted by Cyclops, who crossed his arms and looked between Charles and Lilandra with an expression of deep uncertainly.

"Would one of you please explain what just happened?"

Neither Charles nor Lilandra answered him, which, in a way, was answer enough.

 

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