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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 3

Stifling hot tonight as every day and night for the last three weeks, a heavy wet blanket vampiring the energy from his bones and setting everyone's nerves on razored edges.

"Chhh ..." Like they needed any more reason.

Didn't help tonight to have it feel so like the bayou; once he could close his eyes and imagine drifting curtains of Spanish moss, fireflies like lively earthbound stars and the mysterious night languages of deep-shaded swampy woodlands. But it could not warm his frozen bones anymore and never would again. Self-delusions disconnecting, the jaundiced eye never before cast back there where he'd felt safe and almost real. By now he knew he was homeless and had always been so no matter how he deluded himself. Even as a feral boy in the bewilderingly suspect bosom of clan and Guild, loving some as well as a damned and damaged soul could, even then not wholly hooked in. Wanting it and terrified of the vulnerability in that wanting. Too dangerous by birth and temperment and finally choice, too unrepentantly willing to put down whatever got in his way and damn the consequences. Scary. Hell, he'd scared himself often enough even after he got control of his powers.

Not even here, where he'd felt nearly normal. All a delusion. Had to be honest; the thought drew a wry twitch at one corner of his long fine mouth. Honest. No future here, or in New Orleans, and no heart enough for New York where too many would unwisely but stubbornly count on him. Couldn't count on Gambit no more, nobody.

He shifted his narrow rump onto his heels off the slate of the mansion's highest gable to escape the heat releasing into the dusk. Sat still as a gargoyle, long bare back deeply curved and arms dangling over his jacked-up knees, haunted angles and bruised hollows in the momentary glow from the cherry of his cigarette. No breeze to cool the sweat or lift the too-heavy drape of russet hair off his unshaven face and cold as a glacier inside. Why shouldn't his outside be as uncomfortable as his inside, neh? That it be so contrary was a pretty irony.

A flicker of clever fingers sent the butt in a fancy spinning arch of sparks off the roof and for awhile he just closed his eyes and dreamt anyway, he could still do it for a moment or two at a time.

On the riverbanks' rich loam with a satisfied woman under him and the purl of the big muddy sliding past instead of this damned hot roof a truly damned lifetime away from any comfort or ease.

Irrationally he longed for the high anonymous rooftops of any cosmopolitan metropolis and the consuming focus of an impossible high-tech pinch, for a three-day bawdy and all the mindless pleasures he'd lost himself in so expertly for so long. Blind drunk and wild stoned, testing every limit 'til he couldn't feel anything anymore, over-occupying every sense so he could rest. Crazy to find peace only in debauchery, but he'd always been tweaked. Bad part was it wouldn't work now, he already knew it.

"Lobotomy mebbe ... Yeh, mebbe 'dat." Dieu, anything but the constant churning edges of guilt and regret frittering him away into bloody tatters inside. What did a man do when there was no longer hope of redemption? When the final opportunity had come and gone? Sacre Mere, he'd been chewin' that question for months.

Onyx and garnet eyes methodically tracked the grounds, the forest, familiar in every shadow and shape. He was strong enough to leave now and leave he must, nothing remained here but standing witness every day to what he'd thought was his and now knew wasn't, and had never been. Had to be gone before Rogue came back with ... he couldn't even think it.

"Damn me ..." Soft voice raspy with misuse and abuse, "M'whole life been movin' on n' dis just d'same, big damn worl' out 'der ..." An old adjuration, big world, places to go and things to steal. Should be glad to be set free, a man smart enough to know the only sure thing was that nothing was ever sure. All good things ended, always. Hell, he could live easy, had deep pockets, should be glad t'be cut loose with no longer even the most tenuous of human connections to tether him. Free

"... as a fuckin' bird." Preternaturally sensitive fingertips brushed back and forth across the scowl of his fine-carved lips, not even aware he was doing it, narrowed look focused nowhere with a harsh blood-red light. Too many lies, too many secrets hedging every human bond he'd ever tried - and yet rightly so, by the Antarctic, by what was now! Everything he'd dreaded come to pass like his dreading it had made it real. Which made the old suspicion that he was truly cursed and never meant for anything but solitude and suffering real, too.

Truth be told - and it was time for blunt truths - he'd never been more than a ticking cancer maligning the healthy body of the X-Men's noble dream, and no matter how he deceived himself, he'd always suspected it. Every instinct had stridently counseled from the git-go against even considering being among them, he had businesses to oversee, Guild and family duties, a roaring fine life - sapriste, he was rich and clever and handsome as the devil and there was nothing he could want that he couldn't some way have. He hadn't intended to stick here and hadn't wanted to. Just curiosity, he'd told himself, and wanting to make sure Stormy was okay with them, she'd got into his vulnerable blown-open heart fast and deep and was the only thing in the world he cared about. Smart femme, that one, child to woman, the only living being he'd ever known who could read his most iconic face like it was her own and love him even then.

When he'd made to take his leave after seeing her settled, she'd tearfully dared him to take what she said she knew he wanted, under all his wry scorn for their noble naivete. Never knowing if it was her tears or his want, whether the want was to be with her or with them, he'd taken the gamble. Put himself among them like a crow in a flock of robins, ignoring with his usual blithe arrogance all the brutal experience proven once again accurate.

"Smart boyo, merde, a deep wide thinker, y'are, Rem' ..." His head dropped between his arms and his breathing shallowed as he struggled to keep the moan silent, forced back the tide of grief that would drown him once loosed. He could not lose control, it was all he knew for sure. Rocked slowly like a maddened bear too long in a too-tiny cage, long slender fingers sliding into his hairline and gripping ferociously to distract the sting of sorrow.

"Ah, mes amis, attender!" Rough with ironic sorrow, spreading his arms shoulder high and introducing himself grandly to the thrumming chorus of catydids and crickets, "I give you Remy Etienne LeBeau, Prince o' T'ieves, Master o'th' Games, legendary lover n' bon vivant ..." The words and his hands fell like stones. Stupid, boy to man, straying from the thick of the high hard beat of danger and excess where the deeper truths and questions never touched him. Givin' him a maulin' now, neh? Fate had a way of catchin' a man goin' awry of her pattern.

"Remy Etienne LeBeau - if 'dat even yer name ..." Rich with disgust. Without blinking or moving his eyes from the far hills, he took a deep pull off the bottle laying precariously on the slant near his heels without wincing at the bite.

The faces around him, all those eyes he'd come to know and some he'd even dared to love, eyes that could stop his heart sometimes in falling warmly on him ... came to him slantways now, accusing, despising.

Antarctica.

That memory would surely make him shiver in the hottest pit of Hell. Two years of burying his filthy secrets in the X-Men's righteousness so well he'd nearly forgotten them himself. Two years wanting nothing more than their companionship and the strange fine feel of doing right. A new one, that, yet he'd never taken more pleasure in his craft, and he was a man who truly loved every bolt and circuit and theory of high-stakes thievery like an addiction. For two years this man of no faith but in sleight of hand and his own wiliness had fought and bled and served their impossible dream, and had a good time doin' it even if he didn't believe in it. Felt a kind of redemption within reach. Dieu, thought they'd seen a better man than he ever had.

But in the end it was against his wicked nature and not his to keep, not what was gained and held by deceit. Foolishly, because he'd found a way to survive with his memories, he hoped that they could, too. But their hearts were whole and uncorrupt and they could not.

He lifted his face into the night, elegantly beautiful even thin and unkempt, and his eyes fell closed. Tired enough to want to just sit here and be a gargoyle on this rooftop of the only place he'd truly ever chosen to be. Their acceptance was no more than it had ever been, dependent on things he couldn't even take credit for. As a child, beauty and beguiling charm; later, the precursors of his mutant gifts manifesting in uncanny sensory and physical skills that had earned him the gold master's seal younger than any in the history of the Guilds. It was the first agony he'd endured gladly. Among the X-Men, it had been Ororo's word - his chest hurt suddenly anew for the loss of her, she'd left for Muir with the Professor before he'd regained consciousness and he had not heard from her. More than Rogue, Ororo. Queen and protector of the Morlocks. The only real friend he'd ever had, and his anchor in the world of mortal men.

Now his deceit was exposed and they all clearly saw the villainous corruption under his seductive beauty, knew it for amoral and fey ... Clan, Guild, friends and lovers, and still he was stupid enough to be surprised when this came round and bit his ass again. Felt like hooks in his guts until he had to revert to old habits in thinking of nothing deeper than his skin, scrupulously avoiding conscious consideration as he'd learned to do with things too inciting of madness. Reviving old ways, rebuilding defenses undone in the X-Men's gilded company, and it felt like taking up a revenant's moldy shroud.

He most especially tried not to think on Rogue, though she was a constant bone-deep ache in him that nothing eased. Loving her still shook him. He'd never thought he had the capacity to love that way, with his true heart and a soul he'd never known he had, much less a woman he couldn't even touch. He, who craved intimacy like a junkie. He couldn't conceive of one woman all his life until he met the one he couldn't have, and he'd discovered in the forced deferral of his body's wants the only soul in the world that mated his.

Was it better never to know a heart existed than to have it break so thoroughly? Vacancies in him he'd never discovered until he'd dwelt among the X-Men and the urgent contentment that was this place. Their faces and voices, their cause. Not even the LeBeau clan ever had him so thoroughly, not even Belle - he'd come to her wedding day with the scent of a sloe-eyed bayou girl on him and a blunt intent to have that girl again tomorrow. Never knew the concept of 'together' 'til the X-Men. A thief given true riches, treasures beyond price. But a thief after all, with the irretrievably perverted instinct to steal what they had given in trusting willingness. Would there ever be a day when doing what he thought was right wouldn't end in ruin? Not yet, in all his years of being alive. Everything degenerated from trouble to disaster to wreckage no matter how good his intentions.

He scrubbed his hands hard against his face, itching a two-day growth with a deeply frustrated sigh.

"Should've stayed stupid n' sassy, LeBeau ... " But he hadn't, and couldn't be anymore, couldn't stuff himself back into the safe dark place he'd carved out with the mindless depravity his life had been. It was too late, couldn't be undone ... almost unconsciously he dug a bent cigarette out of his pocket and held up a finger to light it, nearly set his hair on fire with the burst of energy that incinerated the whole cigarette in a flash.

"Fuck!" He shot to his feet, breathlessly frantic with the crazed need to let out what glowed against his will in his hands, fought to draw it back into a body too overwhelmed and a mind too near not caring what he took out with him when he finally exploded from the excess. Deep breaths, slow breaths -- hold on, don't let it out ... been low-level charging for days and couldn't focus enough to stop it anymore, blind power forcing out through the stress cracks in his control and he just couldn't do anything about it, not when it took every ounce of will just to breathe on day by day, hour by hour. Now minute by minute. Gradually he managed to reabsorb the wildly flaring charge, but it left him shaking and anxious.

The irony of this final punishment was not lost on him. Indeed, it had an eloquence that had to be Divine and tonight he finally conceded the game. Damned from birth. Seducer brought down by an untouchable woman, scoundrel entangled in selfless values he never believed in, survivor wrecked on reality the one time he'd dared dream.

With a shiver, he remembered what old Father Monestier had said after he'd heard the breathless terror of his confession, eleven years old and his eyes going demonic and his body burning with rampant destruction. Every day of his life since he'd tried to forget it and now it was all he heard, over and over in every unguarded moment. 'Cursed', the dear old man had said, and sorry about it by his voice, he'd baptized him and loved Jean-Luc's family as his own. Happiness was never meant for mutants and it was the first time he'd heard that note of fear that would become so familiar, that would mark as strangers everyone he knew, family and clan and friend. From that Godly man he trusted, in the voice of the faith to which he clung more devotedly than even he had realized, came this implacable truth. Mutants were the price of the sin men had committed in nearly destroying the earth, in inviting and allowing the devil to seed his soulless minions among them, as mutants were to the Church, forcing eternal vigilance. Rendering him no longer human. It had crushed him breathless in that tiny cubicle to hear that men were made in God's image and mutants were the spawn of a lesser Lord, the property of a power diametrically opposed to all that was righteous. Perhaps if he lived pious and penitent in some isolated place, Father Monestier had suggested sadly, if he struggled lifelong against the inborn wickedness ... Father hadn't believed that himself, but Remy vaguely thought he'd been charging the confessional by then, stricken and bereft of the last of his humanity.

He'd proven the Father right time and again thereafter, given his useless heart to the greedy dark inside him in a litany of treacheries great and small. Squandered his sorry life denying he gave a shit anyway, jamming himself into the bright vacuous vitality that skinned over a soul too corrupt for salvation. And then Old Scratch himself came to claim him, wearing Sinister's face and his own demon eyes, and he had given himself again in blindly ill-considered trust culminating in a massacre against the world's most piteous innocents. There was no atonement for sins such as his. No salvation for a thing born of demons and recreated in Sinister's cold dark science. He'd almost forgotten that here, among them.

He had to go. Because he was here, Rogue would not come home and he knew how much that stability meant to her. He was a danger to this place and its folk, he knew that, too; this morning he'd caught himself leaning face-first into the hallway wall shaking and breathless coming back from a whiteness he didn't recall falling into. Under his pressed palms the wall was a brilliant glowing breath from taking down the wing. Instincts he couldn't control and hardly recognized were going feral against the constant onslaught of their loathing, it lapped like an acid against his senses until he just wanted to make it stop. He had to go.

The only problem was that every time he understood that with perfect clarity, his thoughts cycled back to the one thing kept him hesitating, and not alone for his own survival: Sinister.

Sure as he breathed, Sinister would hunt him down, find him undefended and friendless and finally twist him into the mortal weapon it terrified him to suspect in his deepest heart he could be. Latencies glimpsed in extremity, depths that scared him like nothing ever had ... Probably take a long time, certainly be insane and likely crippled to keep him, Sinister didn't make idle threats. The imprisonment of the X-Men to advance his genetic experiments was Sinister's devoted goal, and using Remy to accomplish it suited his sense of irony. So it wasn't safe for them to let him remain, and there was nowhere safe to go, round and round until he'd finally realized, tonight, that it didn't matter. He laughed at that, soft and sad and nasty. What -would- happen could not be not as important as what -had-.

He threw back his head, leaned into the angle of the steep stone slope and wished with utter sincerity that he could fly off the roof and break his fool neck. But he'd tried that just after everybody had left for Harry's seeking cold beer and escape from the darkness he'd brought like pollution among them. The will to survive, those instincts that scared him for not knowing where they came from, for proving stronger than his puny will, had tucked him up and landed him safe. He worried over what kept him so stubbornly alive even when being alive laid waste to everyone he cared about, and had done so with a lifelong consistency that made him despair.

The bottle slid over the edge, broke in a wet shatter a few seconds later. Didn't matter, it was almost empty.

No one spoke to him at all anymore, tolerating his ghostly presence around their far peripheries because Xavier had uses for him, just as his clan had, his Guild. Sinister.

"Keep yer friends close n' yer enemies closer." Logan had said, and oh, that had hurt, Logan's acceptance had always meant more to him than he'd let on. Scared of having him among them and scared of him outside as an enemy - God help him if they ever discovered how much he feared the same things himself.

 

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