If Ever - REVIEW THIS STORY

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

Chapter 5

She found him in the Danger Room engaged in a ferocious solitary battle armored only in an old pair of jeans, sleek pantherish body scored with scrapes and laser burns, running with sweat. Even his tender long-toed feet were bare as he leapt across one catwalk and dropped down onto another quick as a monkey to avoid a Sentinel's beam. Seven of them were live in the dank ruined cityscape and him bouncing and twisting around the rooftops far too unsteadily for the power of his opponents.

Blood-drops marked his path, cuts on his feet, a bright smear on the back of his shoulder, not mortal, but cumulative enough to slow his reactions. A glance at the counter told her three hours; he'd been in there since shortly after they'd all left and the program had, as it was designed to do to keep them at peak efficiency, cycled up every twenty-five minutes to increase the challenge - why did Cerebro not detect only one living combatant and implement the safeguards? It ran like a full team battle sequence and yet it was only him, alone. He stumbled and went down hard to one knee, the silvery spin of his bo staff barely deflecting a laser strike that could have sheared off the top of his head and her hands planted themselves on the glass with a cry he could not hear.

Hank said his bones were lighter than normal for all their length and strength, that he possessed redundant sets of tendons and particularly elastic sinews, a weave of extra ligaments in his hands, feet and spine as well as major joints. Agile and quick and supple as a cat, sometimes it seemed he could fly in his impossible grace, sailing out over empty air and changing trajectories and landing zones with sinuous twists of that long lithe body ... usually laughing with the sheer exhilaration of the hunt, the chase, the fight. Not today.

Today, his face was grim and haunted and he was not moving with his usual loose-jointed ease, sweat darkened the long auburn drape of hair whipping out behind him as he ran, leapt, swung one-handed through a piped maze, lost his grip and fell in a bruising sprawl on his stomach even as the sentinel took aim at him.

In a flash of motion her hand went for the override thinking to insert an interruption, and to her horror she felt exposed circuitry and diodes where the panel should be ... he had disabled it, found a way through supposedly inalterable Shi-ar technology - Master Thief! The Sentinel fired and her head snapped up, her heart in her throat, but Gambit was disappearing into the angled rubble.

After a brief frantic search she found him again among the dust and smoke and bright explosions, a solitary mote struggling dichotomously to survive despite his obvious machinations otherwise. Gambit was a religious soul by inclination, outcast from his church but having the faith of a bayou man in luck and magic and the eternal damnation of suicide. A thinking man would let his enemies do for him what he could not do for himself, and a noble man would spare even his living enemies the blame; let it be mindless machines.

*Gambit!!* Her psychic shout was heard, his head jerked up (Quoi?) so she could see the ravaged ghost he had become, disconcerted at first, gasping for breath and trembling with exhaustion, guilty, anxious ... but more terrible still the small eventual smile when he saw her high above in the window. Oh, it was warm and sweet and infinitely weary as he stood up unsteadily into the oncoming beam, and only her telekinetic strike to buckle one of his knees saved his life.

"No! I will not let you do this! You don't understand, Gambit, this is madness!" Her voice echoed over the intercom, strident and afraid, her head ringing from the strike. Bluntly she thrust her mind into the control panel, frantic to stop it. She knew he could hear her but he didn't respond, he started working his way up to the rooftops savagely intent on making the best possible target of himself before she could stop him. It almost worked. He had closed his eyes and forced his hands down, the killing beam was no more than a foot from his face by the time she managed to breach the controls telepathically and shut the program off, sending him tumbling thirty feet to the suddenly empty floor of the Danger Room. He landed hard, his bo staff went clattering out of his hand in an arc,

"Non! Mais NON!!!" Frantically looking around in frustrated disbelief as he struggled to his hands and knees, then his fists were banging into the floor in front of him, "Let it be, PLEASE! Let me ..."

From the sliver of the doorway, Jean's voice reached him, implacable as a glacier; "Run? Not this time, Gambit. Not this way."

"Sil' vous plais ..." A raw choking moan, "C'est morte, c'est morte, only d'body lives ... n' it hurts alla time." As she watched, her heart breaking, he folded down into himself, down into a space too small for so tall a man, elbows tucked hard into his narrow body, face and hands lost in the disheveled tumble of his hair as he bent his forehead with carelessly vicious force to the floor. There he held himself in potently abject silence, but within he was not still nor silent, and she could feel his desperate battle being lost. The blood-smeared insteps of his pale feet, the long narrow curve of his bare back, vulnerable, penitent, lost ...

Gently, and from a carefully gauged distance, she dared reach into the gaps broken open in his failing walls, almost too frightened to imagine what forces could break the barrier not even the Professor had ever penetrated. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to see the outflowing streams of his life, felt him fighting ferociously just to keep it from exploding all at once. Horrors he had wreaked on innocents, the endless litany of depravities Rogue had seen that overlaid his psyche in a seemingly endless layer of sins, places and people and events in a relentlessly nightmarish tumble. She had to be quick, gaps became cracks and then discorporate pieces that ground together like collapsing temples in the increasing rampage ... he was losing it, he was afraid of that and not for himself. The incipient threat of something in him that his weakness would release, something that would wound the whole world...

Stubbornly she forged her way against the rising tide until she found a place stable enough to allow her access to the gnashing darkness of Gambit's mind.

Unlike any she had ever encountered, endlessly layered as a very old pearl and labyrinthed in a darkly unending metropolis of dizzying complexity. Was it always so chaotic, or was she witnessing some mortal breakdown? Depths voided themselves ... there was a low hollow noise like wind across bottle necks and a constant wide volcanic rotation just within that nearly tangled her into the flow of confounded images before she recovered herself to resist. A psychic trap, she realized with great surprise, and scanned for others, finding them in vicious and cunning profusion along with a series of deeply scarred ruins in the distance ... fallen walls behind fallen walls behind the terrible impenetrance of this falling wall.

Words could not have said with more clarity how early, how often and painfully this mind had been ravaged before that final shield rose. They'd always assumed Remy's ghostly blankness on telepathic scans was innate, and to discover now that it was a conditioned response shook her deeply. All the breathless wonder of the psychic plane, the fullness in that gorgeous interconnected solitude she loved so much, made into a place of terror and pain. No wonder. God, no wonder.

With a deep inner breath, she proceeded, daunted by the intellect arming his dead ends and the viciously cunning abandon of the mazes he'd built to hide himself within. While the substance of his memories rushed by in giddy profusion, she looked for his true life in them, trusting her heart to tell her what was so and what only tried to frighten her away. It was hard not to be frightened of what he showed her, images rose and got sucked under the black flood like bloated corpses as she pressed on.

He was more aware of her intrusion than a non-telepath should be, far more dangerous, too, for the hunt and kill instinct that leapt to each inadvertent revelation of her presence. That was another unpleasant surprise - his defenses had never been more than that, simply refusing entry and rendering him invisible to telepathy. Indeed, Gambit had seldom been able to lower his shields of his own volition, and only as an emergency tether to a telepath on the Astral Plane, inert and invisible there, but suffering nosebleeds and incapacitating headaches for days after. Inside his shields, however, the refusal was murderously aggressive and perhaps, she sensed with rising fear, even deadly. Being non-threatening was not enough, she had to dodge and flee before any of his mental guards caught her; it was not a mind she wished to be trapped in however much she needed to see it.

And see it she did, at last, clear and pale and quiet as a sad ghost in the quicksilver stream, a frayed and fragile ribbon of core memory truncated and spliced over and over by some outside hand she didn't dare imagine. Three years old and hiding from rapists and slavers, starving and stealing scraps and freezing in filthy bolt-holes, unwashed and feral as a little animal ... the boy wolfishly cunning and scarred, cruel with necessity and sometimes shamefully imaginative delight, whoring himself body and soul to survive. Trusting no one, belonging nowhere and to no one and a great tormented emptiness that was never filled. A poignantly and painfully brief flowering in Guild and church and the disciplined rebelliousness of skilled thievery before being demonized, even to himself, at his changing, powers that loosened his bowels every time they manifested something new.

Once lost, that family, that church, the direction of the life he'd learned, the thief had gone willingly into decadence and excess. Yet even then, she did not mistake an enduring color of innocence, a surprising purity of formless hope stubbornly surviving that should have been extinguished time and again. She could not know it was the very thing Essex kept striving to identify, only that it hadn't faded until he'd learned what Sinister was and found himself too well-trapped to do anything but suffer the consequences. First in his guilty and repentant mind and then, when his conscience could no longer stand to cooperate with Sinister in even the smallest way, in his body.

This truth was hard to see, he hid it in an inky blackness, but see it she must. The Marauders had caught him escaping from the Morlock tunnels, leading them away from where he'd hidden the little girl, the only one he'd been able to save. Torn and bleeding ... Directly in that slender stream she stood, feeling and seeing their hands, smelling the foul gore of uncounted innocents on the claws that ripped open his stomach and chest, and then bore him broken and dying back to his Master for the uses he could still serve.

The walls in him, the lost mazes, were no less than a subconscious tomb erected to save that small spark of himself he could. So much more recently than they'd thought had he become truly ancient. Only with the most patient and gentle pressure was she able to slip into the font of that faint pale stream where it hurt the most and, once there, she rooted herself against being drawn into the hypnotic depths that revealed themselves just beyond ... a faint taste of rich unknowns there, a terrible and mortal power. Every instinct told her that there she must not go, that there he must remain quiescent in so uncertain a state, and it was his belief as well, the only one she felt clearly - this must die with him, not be freed with his dying, what lurked like black-water leviathons and felt like savage red-hot rage.

Quivering with sorrow and outrage she forced herself to witness for him what he could not consciously look back on himself, the crucible of Sinister's experiments that had forged the man he was. Unendurable cruelties as Essex's research subject, imprisoned for so long that time became meaningless in a cataracted eye of opague glass so small he could neither stand up nor lie down. Set into false freedom and recaptured again and again like a rat in a world-sized maze until he understood he could never escape, even freedom was no refuge. Starved in body and mind, cut with gleaming ice-cold scalpels, injected and probed and altered in blithe disregard of the attendant physical and psychic agonies, without the scientifically compromising effect of analgesics or of any mercy whatever.

It was all she could do to blunt the sensations still shockingly clear in his memory to manageable proportions. Long periods of vacant neglect passed in mind-numbing grayness, injury and degradation when his body was given as reward or diversion to the Mauraders, their only rejoinder not to kill or maim him beyond use in the laboratory. Abused in every way a living being could be and more because he had a mutant's capacities to suffer further and was too beautiful not to tempt depravities from these depraved beings. Yet he had clung to that shred of himself buried deep and safe behind his walls, he had claimed victory in that agonizing isolation even when insanity would have been merciful.

Would she, would any of them, have been so stubbornly brave? Been able, after all he'd suffered, to see the chance at escape and dredge up the strength to take it, and then live with all this trapped inside him like a tar-pit ever waiting to suck him back down? Was that why he liked being among them, because there, only there of all the world, he was truly safe from Sinister's grasp? Behind his impenetrable walls and unruffled charm he hid his terror and insecurity and mistrust, hoarded the capacities and skills and powers others always wanted from him, took from him. Buried the heart too sensitive to otherwise survive and interred along with it a soul too wounded, a spirit all but destroyed. Today it gave up the fight it had never yet lost and she went liquid with sorrow.

Not even the Professor had ever suspected that so much of what he hid from them was not the sins of his past or capacities he was afraid himself to look at, but a fear of abandonment so great it overwhelmed him. It was this vulnerability he could not bear to have known or yield to, this need that had led him astray so many times he no longer trusted the heart that empowered it, and so he buried that heart and the pain so inextricably joined to it in the same black grave. Love no one, need no one, and yet he could never stop himself from doing either, he had only learned to hide it in slippery nonchalance, in self-indulgent appetites. All he had once wanted was to be loved, to belong somewhere, and it had eluded him or been used against him until he determined for his own survival that it was a thing he neither wanted or valued. Bravado, the swagger and self-possessed arrogance, even his sins shielding a soul too broken to believe in anything but the transient kaleidoscope of risk and pleasure that kept him too busy to realize how empty he was.

Ororo's face came up from his memories in a treasured wash of love, the first time she'd felt that emotion in here and by now she was not surprised that it hurt him profoundly. For her own relief, she lingered in the fading glow of these few gentle memories, suddenly exhausted from the battle it was just hold her focus in his sorrowful maelstrom. Such absolute faith in the face of the grave wise child Ororo had been and a man needing the penance of her defense like the breath of life. Pale cat-irised eyes that had seen his true heart when he no longer could and found him bewilderingly worthy of her unquestioning love. It was the first time he'd ever felt of any value to anyone beyond what goods he could steal, what pleasures give to whoever put value on them. That sense had increased with the X-Men - and especially with Rogue - the first time he'd seen her was a vision enshrined with reverence and regret and ravaging longing.

From below a tentacle snapped up toward her and she barely eluded it, driven off this tender place with the last of his coherent strength. She had seen what she needed to see. Where his life assumed depth and purpose, when he had come to know true richness of soul and had reveled in it with the guilty lust of a man never expecting to have it himself. That he was, in it all, noble and true-hearted and fallible as anyone. This place, this mansion where he lived and the people in it's halls, ephemeral as an oasis in the twisted bog of all the rest of his life, fading like a dream now, impossible to hold in the devastated clarity of resurrected truths.

All his defenses were collapsing, and all the sense she had of him was wanting it to be over. Nothing of hope to tether him to in the howling flood that was emptying his psyche like a broken vessel, resigned to an end one way or another, of body or mind. There was not much time and if she stayed she ran the risk of being trapped in what was amping toward inevitable combustion.

Gradually, she became more aware of her body, saw Gambit on the floor shuddering and his hands white-knuckled around his head, magenta lightening sizzling and crackling in a nimbus around him. Fighting her, himself, fighting to die without letting whatever hid deep in him break free. Maintaining delicate contact with the fragile center of him, she approached cautiously, sinking to her knees beside him and shielding against delerious bursts of kinetic energy flashing and pooling around him on the adamantium floor.

Vaguely she felt the tingling warmth of his uncontrolled charm power, a faint unconscious instinct for survival, and for the first time she let it come to her ... sinuous and sensual, yet carrying a vulnerable sweetness she hadn't expected. That a man should die of sorrow and self-recrimination thinking it best for all, never even glimpsing the truth of his own value...

He tried to shove her out of his mind and nearly did, a blunt push against her trying to save him that lost all coherence when she reached out her hand and touched his in the glossy tangle of his hair. Oh, so long since he'd been touched that way, had the warmth of a loving human hand on him, and that simple contact in the teetering instant between insanity and implosion shattered his last tenuous hold.

With a hoarse cry he jerked up to his knees and hurled himself, body and shreds of mind, right at her, slamming into her merciful instincts to catch both like she was all of solid ground to a drowned man. One of her hands pressed wide on his bare back and the other held his head to her, sensing him a ghost alive only where she touched him. A wet gasp against her neck presaged wretched sobs, raw violence escaping under enormous pressure, but even while his body clung with senseless tenacity, his mind still retreated. This was his farewell, a man who loved living too much to go too gently.

*Remy ... * His arms tightened with involuntary but bruising force and she had a sense of his faint dismay to realize she had never called him by his true name, a flare from the chaos of his thoughts that said how it hurt to hear it now. His head pushed hard into the crook of her neck and shoulder with a ragged sound she heard as a full-throated scream in his mind - let me go, let me die, let it end, end, and yet begging her not to push him away, not to let him go, never let him go.

*Remy!* Shouting to be heard over the grieving storm that carried him so fast from himself, fallen over the brink and escaping to the refuge of vacant mindlessness. Only her arms held him to this reality, she knew it with a terrible certainty, only the one small sliver of calm she dared risk into the hurricane of his tortured psyche. Flashes of power breaking free of him that intimidated her as little in the psychic world could, enormous potential untamed, had he known of it, he could have blown out her mind with a thought.

Then she realized that he did know it, and had chosen to end his life before his final restraint came undone.

She held him lightly in his mind, but his quaking body she held with every bit of her strength and she did not let go, hiding her terror for him and of him in a cool and loving silence, fighting for a calm still place that might anchor him in the cacophony. She would not let him go without a fight, would not let die that soul he'd struggled and suffered so hard to keep alive. He did not go at first, too grateful for the human touch - not that she struggled to save his life, valueless to him, but that she cared to try. Tears soaked the collar and shoulder of her blouse, his breath burst hot against her neck in naked desolation, wanting no one near him and yet so defenseless that to be alone was unthinkable.

Jean understood with terrible certainty that if she left him now he would be dead within minutes. The mind could kill the body, she knew this better than most, and knew he had discovered this himself, so she answered the silent cry of his need with a wash of empathy, nurturing and protective and reaffirming, trying to give him the strength to hold on to himself another moment, another. He shook like a live wire, arms crushing, fingers forming separate bruises on her back and sides, lost in the backlash of a lifetime of unleashed emotion. Insanity ground through him in giddy violence and she felt it extinguishing the mortal spark he'd clung to so tenaciously, couldn't bear to think a soul so impossibly enduring should finally perish at the X-men's hands.

He had nothing to stop it with, not hope or strength or will, stripped of pride and the only honor he had ever acknowledged in himself. Rogue's love his validation, theirs, gone. The LeBeau Clan, the Guild, the women and men he'd taken as lovers, drawn first unknowingly and then purposefully, still not enough. The X-Men and Rogue had been all of a home he'd ever dared claim, and now it was gone.

Her heart clutched, tears could not be withheld - loving them all so much that their condemnation became his, wrecked on their accusations as if they were, indeed, fact. And only she knew, might ever know, how profoundly they were mistaken. With ferocious determination, Jean kept trying to reach him in the chaos bleeding out his mind, called and wept as she held him, praying he would feel her solidity, but as the elemental storm begin to wane, it carried him further away into a cold ghostly grayness that frightened her more than the violence had. Fainter and fainter in her senses, and not from any resurrection of his defenses, but because his mind was departing a torment he had no reason to hold onto. Gradually, his body stopped shaking but for a constant fine tremor, breath a ragged uneven gasping and the press of him loosened ... a sense of gratitude that she had eased his passing horrified her with it's warm finality.

*No! Remy, come back*

Only his hands betrayed all other intent, those clever remarkable hands that became the last voice of wanting to live by holding onto her, gentle in their awareness ... aware of her ... of course!

Tactile sensuous Remy LeBeau who couldn't keep his hands to himself no matter where he was, touching everything in reach and never still ... What had undone him in the first place but her touch? Her physical human touch? The mistake had been endemic to being telepathic, trying to reach him solely in his mind, a contact he abhorred and avoided instinctively. But his body ... He made no secret of enjoying physical attention nor even of needing it, it was all that eased for him the deeper unmet hunger.

Talk to the body, then, if the mind fled, reach the physical that ruled him so utterly ...

He needed her with a desperation that consumed him, needed the warmth of her, the press of her living body, anything that would blunt the pain that could not be contained in mortal flesh ... and the charm power she usually deflected with insulted ease wrapped itself around her in ripples of inchoate yet commanding pleasure that made her suddenly -aware- ...