If Ever - REVIEW THIS STORY

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

Chapter 4

Jean made excuses, lied to her husband and friends, she who never lied, and so her lies were believed without question. Cold to the marrow of her bones and hiding it in false smiles and a sham of being called by Cerebro to accept a report from the Professor, nothing urgent, no, she'd be back in an hour or so, calmly insisting they remain and enjoy themselves while her heart and mind screamed at her to hurry, hurry. That she could feel even these fragmentary impressions told her how close he was, impenetrable shields and a habitual absence in psychic scans giving way under enormous, unprecedented pressure. No one knew how powerful Gambit really was, and now she suspected he did not know himself and lived in constant fear of the answer.

Gambit in a state of mind that struck fear into her heart. Giving up, breaking, no oblivion deep enough anymore and drunk as a lord, too, or she would never have sensed so much. Oh, those impossibly high and seamless black walls were cracking, so old they'd seemed integral in a boy not even out of his teens and she remembered wanting to weep the first time she'd tried him and had him disappear like a ghost from her senses. The look in his eyes to be so touched, terror and fury both bone-deep. She'd thought nothing and no one could ever breach that ancient safeguard, yet now everything was coming down, and she had to do something.

She glanced at Logan as she gathered her purse, saw the suspicion in his keen look.

Every waking moment of the last few weeks, even in the unanimous sense of furious betrayal absorbed from the memories of those who had been there, she'd been aware of Gambit and troubled by that awareness despite filtering out what sometimes spiked in her mind. Like a man being slowly disemboweled in full wakefulness, but she had not suspected he might not deserve it ... had Logan? She glanced at him as she headed out the door, found his dark and violently wise eyes on her. Was he condemning her for caring or for remaining silent to permit it? Crushing guilt, furious sorrow, that she had sensed, but that it was killing Gambit by degrees, that he might not survive, no one had suspected.

Startled, she felt Logan's rough palm slide down her arm as he settled her purse-strap on her shoulder.

"Reports comin' in are there, darlin'?" Skeptical.

"Yes ..." Her voice sounded weak, tremulous.

"Lemme walk ya out, can't be too careful 'round here."

A glance toward her husband and friends told her that her departure was being accepted, no one would follow. No one suspected except Logan, as he confirmed as soon as the door closed behind them and the raucous noise muffled.

"It's Gumbo, ain't it. Breakin' down, ain't he." Not questions, only looking for confirmation of what he'd figured out on his own, he knew her too well not to smell her moods and read the tells of her expressive face; "Might not be safe f'you to be on yer own with 'im, Jeannie." His hackles rose for no reason he could see, he looked around the nearly full parking lot, spread his senses after ...

"I don't think anyone else can help now, Logan." She replied gravely.

"He coulda trusted us, shouldn't hid all that, can't trust him, now ..." She looked at him curiously, unsettled by the harsh distracted note in his voice. A man with holes in his memory as black and frightening as any, secretive as Gambit was with a feral nature only lightly cloaked in civility. Condemning Gambit for being exactly the same when she knew he did not actually feel that way, hadn't only a few minutes ago. The attitude was jarringly wrong. So much suddenly seemed wrong here.

"We all know how slipshod his control is over his empathic powers, Logan ... and what you told me earlier has got me thinking. We know he can use that charm to devastating effect when he wants - so why didn't he use it in the Antarctic? No damper has ever inhibited it, it's effectiveness is increased by pre-existing affection for him and Rogue loved him, many of us had some level of good feeling for him ..."

Logan considered it, that beguiling charm affected both sexes so haphazardly that living with him had led to some interesting complications. It was as easy to like so blithely beautiful a creature, trust or not, as to lust after him.

"Maybe it isn't strong enough - "

But Jean was shaking her head, frowning at voicing what she had been so uneasily working her way toward in the last few minutes. "I think it's worse than that. What if, as subconsciously as the empathy, he might project the reverse? Loathing and hatred instead of attraction and desire?"

Logan was shaking his head, "It's never been that way, Jean, one of us would've killed him a long time ago, there's too many who don't like 'im, charm or no."

"Yes, but what if he's never done it before? What if something Eric the Red did, something in Rogue's touch, or even her reaction, triggered it? What if what we felt - and what we still feel - is only a reflection of his own intent?"

She would later mourn not stopping to think beyond -what- might have triggered it to the possibility it could be a deadly dangerous -who-, right now it was all coming too fast.

"Y'mean usin' us t'hammer 'im because he wants it that way? That's seriously twisted, that little hedonist don't have a masochistic bone in his body - 'cept Rogue, of course. Nah, doesn't jive, he goes along t'get along every time, survives whatever, however - lookit Sinister, f'God's sake, he lived through that ..."

As if he knew more of what that meant than she did and she remembered him once saying that terror had a smell no one could disguise. It had a feeling, too, and she was feeling it.

"He's not doing it consciously, Logan, you said it yourself, he might not know about it any more than he's usually conscious of his charm power, we have to remind him all the time to rein it in ... "

"Shit ... " Getting it through the faint red rim of anger at being mind-manipulated, nothing Logan hated more than having his head messed with, and he wouldn't be the only one pissed to find out Gambit could do that, too. Really irritated him. Alot.

"So why don'tcha tell them this, get all the bullshit over?" A jerk of his shaggy head toward Harry's, but Jean stayed that impulse.

"No, Logan, I'm not sure, and right now ... come on, the very idea infuriates you, and you like him." She looked at him openly, allowing her true concern to show and growing more frightened the quieter Gambit's psychic sense became. Unconsciously she looked in the direction of the mansion. Too much power turned inward, compressed, folded in upon itself over and over and with a sinister purpose forcing its way out.

Logan was thinking about Psylocke, Emma, even Scott, so many members of their own and the other X-Teams who had never been at ease around LeBeau, all telepaths of varying degrees and sensitive to what would be hidden. An entity they'd discovered to be convoluted in unknown powers and unguessed treacheries.

"Yes, there's so much we don't know about him, Logan, we have no idea - but I'm afraid finding out has become a matter of now or never."

He studied her, seeing an urgency to help LeBeau he didn't understand but somehow, under his irritation, approved. Black and red eyes ancient as the first dust in a face so young he was barely a man. Love naked from the heart in unguarded moments when he looked at Rogue. Remembered damage the kid had taken more than once in tempting Logan's rages - giving him a focus for his bouts with ferality - that he held no grudge to and never had.

Jean read his decision and cupped his grizzled face in her hand for a moment, grateful for his stalwart heart.

"Sometimes, Bub, I think your 'tells' run rings around every telepath on the planet."

"Yeah, I think so too." Teasing, but half meaning it.

A bloody flash in her mind wiped the smile off her face, a cruel vision of broken bodies, oppressive dank darkness, a choking smell ... of being ripped from crotch to throat by Sabretooth's claws ... she gasped.

"Don't let Scott come, Logan."

And he knew it was no disrespect for her husband that prompted the request, the Cajun had always rubbed Scott wrong, done it on purpose whenever he got the chance.

"Don't let anyone come unless I call for you, keep them here, please Logan ... there is something ... odd."

Speculation narrowed his eyes and his big blunt hands rubbed slowly up and down her arms without bothering to disguise his anxiety over hers - it seemed to rachet up by the second and he wondered what she was feeling from the Cajun that had her so edgy it was spilling over onto him, too. He looked around again, wary, nostrils flared to taste the threat he felt in the air.

"Alright, darlin', I'll do my best."

She took to the night sky without farewell straight as the crow flew, feeling herself already delayed too long, feeling the urgency grow, seconds ticking off like blood draining from a corpse.

They hadn't known, not even Gambit had known, but *she* should have! The very fact that there was so little ambivalence about him now despite the real affection he'd earned from some of them over the years, despite logic and the truths of the Professor's admonitions, yet it had taken Logan with his bluntly animalistic insights to unravel the clues.

Xavier had demanded vows of honor to do Gambit no harm during his absence, but did even he know their shunning was more painful than a thousand blows to someone so needy of human affection? Was Gambit using them all, even the Professor, to punish himself - to be able to do such a thing and not even know it ... And were they truly so willing? Confusing as it was, that they might not be so cruel renewed her faith in the basic humanity of her teammates, but she was ashamed never to have questioned her sense of the rightness of Gambit's punishment.

Scott's rage had been so pure and devastating, all of them who'd been there at that trial, a passion that never seemed to diminish and drowned out the flashes of Gambit's nightmares in her. Never once had she tried to look at them, and they came now, pulsing hard as if exploding outward ... no more than he deserved ... Dieu, no more than he deserved.

Tonight, he no longer had any hope of that ever changing, and had ceased to value a life so unrelievedly bleak. The ache in her heart had been tangible no matter the strangely unexamined logic that had told her he had it coming. On this frantic flight tonight her reason came back in a slow gradual wave, the realization that she had been manipulated as much as everyone else. Remembered the untouched loneliness beneath the amoral wander of Gambit's surface. She'd always known he needed them, was happiest in this place with these people even sacrificing most of what he claimed made life worth living. It was something she thought only she and Ororo knew, an endearing vulnerability she'd never recognized as love for them all. He'd dared love Rogue, too, when Jean knew it scared him to his toes, and now it had all been torn away, all of it, X-Men, happiness, the woman. Hope. Exquisite torture to be teased with tastes of what, in the end, he could never have. Too late to return to the bright emptiness of his former life, lose himself in the whirl and chaos. Too changed, too much learned that could not be unlearned ... So much so clearly, so suddenly, made her truly begin to panic.