The Game of Empires - REVIEW THIS STORY

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

Chapter 31

Rogue couldn’t tear her eyes away from the shift and play of emotion on Renee’s face as she talked. She looked so much like her father that it was uncanny-not just her features and the lean, rangy build, but her mannerisms as well.

Every time Rogue saw something she recognized it felt like another knife being driven into her heart, but she couldn’t turn away. Just a few weeks ago she’d gone to see a doctor in the mad hope that she might have returned from Antarctica with new life growing inside her-that some piece of the man she loved might still exist-only to have that hope dashed.

Then, miraculously, she’d gotten Remy back, alive and even willing to forgive her for her betrayal. But now he was gone again-dead again, though his body still walked around the mansion inhabited by a stranger-and the child she’d wanted so badly was sitting right there in the med lab talking to Hank.

That’s mah baby in there. No matter how she felt about Rem’aillon and the events of the last few days, she couldn’t turn her back on her own daughter. She simply couldn’t. She knew all too well how much it hurt, and she couldn’t do that to this girl with the jagged white streak in her hair who looked so much like Remy.

Hank and Renee spoke for a little longer and then the blue furred X-Men removed the I.V. from her arm and taped up the injection site before he took his leave. He gave Rogue a piercingly sympathetic look as he passed but didn’t say anything, for which she was grateful.

Clamping her bottom lip between her teeth, Rogue made herself go into the examination room. Renee’s face lit with a smile as she walked in, and Rogue’s stomach twisted.

"How are ya feelin’, sugah?" she asked after a moment.

Renee shrugged, her smile dimming. "Okay, I guess. I can’t believe I’m really home." Her gaze grew distant. "Or as close as I can get, anyway."

Rogue self-consciously twisted her gloved hands together in front of her. "Ah guess it must be pretty strange." She made herself move closer to the bed-close enough to touch, though she didn’t reach for Renee.

Renee looked up at her and nodded. "You’re all so young."

Rogue bit back a snort at that. She doubted she and Renee were more than about five years apart in age, but that kind of weirdness was par for the course with the X-Men, it seemed. At the moment, at least, the knowledge didn’t bother her particularly.

Rogue cleared her throat to break the silence that had fallen. "It’s almost dinner time," she said, "if you’re hungry." She shrugged uncomfortably. "The dining room furniture only arrived yesterday, so this’ll be our first big sit down in a good long while."

A bright, surprisingly happy smile bloomed on Renee’s face. "Ooh, I’m starving. I always loved family dinners." She slid off the examination table. "That was one of the things I missed most when we moved into the Governor’s mansion."

Rogue blinked, unsure what to make of the statement or which question to ask first. She finally settled on, "We?" as the best place to start, and Renee nodded.

"You, me and Cody." Her expression turned wistful. "I wish you could have met him."

Rogue’s heart pinched at that. She’d almost forgotten that Renee had had a twin brother. But rather than let either of them dwell on his loss, she forged onward.

"So did ah marry the governor or somethin’?" It felt distinctly odd to be talking about what a future version of herself had done, but she couldn’t help but wonder what kind of husband she’d eventually found in Renee’s world. If that future Rogue had survived Remy’s death and learned to love again, maybe she could, too. Eventually.

Renee gave her an odd look and shook her head. "No, Mom. You were elected governor."

Rogue’s thoughts slid to a jarring stop. "Me?" She’d never had any political ambitions that she could think of.

Renee shrugged. "Sure. Why not?"

Rogue pondered that as she turned to lead Renee out of the medlab. Being an X-Man had never left her with much time or energy to devote to other things, and the few times she’d tried to live some kind of normal life her powers had always gotten in the way. But in Renee’s future, she’d gained control of her powers, married and raised two children, only then to go on to become the governor of New York. It seemed unfathomable.

"Yah world must’ve been pretty peaceful, sugah," she finally said and Renee nodded.

"It was. At least, in comparison to everything else I’ve seen since then, it was." They reached the lifts and Renee reached out to press the button with one gloved finger. She didn’t look at her mother, but instead kept her gaze on the tiled floor in front of the elevator doors. "The X-Teams still had plenty of work, but... yeah... it was a good place."

Rogue’s mind didn’t stay on the wider picture, but instead returned to her personal future. "Did ah marry again, then? After-" Her voice quavered suddenly and she had to pause to get control of it again. "After ya daddy died?"

Renee raised her head, her red irises flashing with emotion Rogue couldn’t identify. "No," she answered. She heaved a sigh. "You dated a couple of different men, but I don’t know how seriously. I was pretty bad about that."

"Bad?" Rogue raised an eyebrow.

Renee ducked her head and shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. "Angry."

"Oh."

They fell silent as the lift arrived. Neither spoke as they made their way to the ground floor and stepped out into the hall. Rogue immediately froze. The Professor and Rem’aillon walked toward them, chatting amiably, but the conversation ended abruptly when the pair spied her.

The awkward silence that followed could have come straight out of a soap opera, Rogue thought. She couldn’t help the horrible, frantic fluttering of her heart as her eyes met Rem’aillon’s. In that moment the realization hit her all over again.

He’s dead. Remy’s dead.

The man across from her winced, and Rogue’s stomach twisted. He’d read the thought straight out of her head. Hot anger rushed through her.

Stay out of mah mind, she thought toward him with as much force as she could. Ya got no right, ya hear? Ya just stay away from me.

Rem’aillon’s expression closed in on itself. Avoiding each other isn’t going to make the white elephant in the room go away, he responded, and Rogue found it distinctly strange to hear the familiar voice in her head instead of her ears.

This, however, wasn’t a conversation she was in any way ready to have. Just stay away from me, she repeated, and punctuated the warning with a glare.

He shrugged, a tiny flicker of motion that was too much like Remy for comfort, but didn’t say anything else.

The professor cleared his throat uncomfortably, looking between them. But, Rogue thought, he probably wasn’t used to being on the outside of telepathic confrontations.

Shifting his attention, Charles held out one hand to Renee. "It’s so good to see you," he told Renee with a genuine, if thin, smile. "How are you feeling?"

"Better, Grandpa." Renee replied. Tucking her long hair behind her ear, she went and sat on the edge of the hoverchair and leaned over to hug him tightly.

The Professor looked very surprised as he returned the hug. It was a more personal gesture than Rogue had ever seen any of the X-Men use with him. Even Jean only bent down to hug him, as if the chair formed an invisible boundary on the Professor’s personal space which no one violated. But Rogue had seen Rem’aillon casually seat himself on the sloping edge of the hoverchair, too, while he talked with his father. It spoke loudly of the familial connections between them and brought home to Rogue once again how unlike her Remy this man was. He and Renee had both grown up climbing into and around this chair and sitting in the lap of the man who inhabited it.

"Are you hungry?" the Professor asked as Renee released him.

Renee stood with a smile. "Starving."

"Well, dinner’s not quite ready yet, but I’m sure they could use a few more hands." He gestured down the hall toward the elevators. "Remi and I are going to check on Elizabeth first, but we’ll join you in a bit." He nudged his chair around Renee and, with a nod to both women, started toward the far end of the hall. Remi followed after a moment, casting a lingering look over his shoulder as he walked away.

As Rogue watched the two men move away she wondered how she was supposed to feel. As an issue of fact, she was as much a part of this family as the rest of them-her daughter was the Professor’s granddaughter, after all-but she just couldn’t see herself fitting in. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to.

Rogue pushed those thoughts away with determination. For Renee’s sake, if nothing else, she would do her best.

She summoned a smile. "C’mon, sugah, let’s go see who’s cookin’ tonight."

Jean looked up from her study of Elizabeth’s broken mind as the Professor and Remi appeared on the astral plane. Around them, Psylocke’s mind stretched outward in a featureless white plain littered with brightly colored fragments the size of automobile tires, like the jigsaw puzzle of some invisible giant. The pieces ran with liquid colors that changed depending on what angle Jean viewed them from, and the jagged edges filled her with apprehension. She despaired of even finding two pieces that went together-rebuilding all of them was a task she could not hope to accomplish.

Remi looked around, eyebrows arching speculatively. "You weren’t kidding," he told Jean after a moment.

"No, I wasn’t." She followed his gaze. "Her mind is literally shattered. This is all that’s left." With the toe of her boot she nudged one of the broken pieces, and though it looked heavy and solid, the piece slid a short ways across the slick white surface that passed for the ground. There was hardly any friction.

"Okay." Remi hitched his shoulders beneath the long brown duster that characterized his astral self and then gestured toward the emptiness. "I’m going to go look around."

The Professor joined her as Remi wandered away. They watched in silence as he paused and squatted down to look more closely at one of the segments, but he didn’t touch it and after a minute he rose and resumed walking.

Jean found his behavior disheartening. "I’m not sure he can do it," she told Charles with a sigh. Even though Cable had been grudgingly impressed by how quickly Remi was regaining his telepathic discipline, the task was just so huge. It seemed impossible.

Charles gave her a sympathetic look. "I’m not sure I could, either," he admitted. "But Remi is fully my equal as a telepath-maybe more. We have to have faith."

Jean nodded, brushing an errant hair out of her face as she looked around. "It’s hard to believe a machine did this." She still got the cold chills when she thought about it. If Scott hadn’t shoved her away from the beam, would it have been her lying here, broken beyond recognition? What if the government started deploying more of them?

In the distance, Remi turned and began walking back toward them. Jean turned back to Charles. "Scott didn’t sound very hopeful that Mutant Affairs would be able to do anything about the organization that attacked us."

Charles shook his head. "It’s not likely. The problem is that too many people would be glad to discover a weapon that can neutralize telepaths. As far as they’re concerned, this is a windfall. They can kill the telepaths without hurting anyone else."

Jean shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. "It’s terrifying."

Charles nodded somberly. "More than the fact that Elizabeth is our friend and we want her restored to herself, if we can convince the people at Project Grayscape that their weapon doesn’t work on alpha telepaths, we may be able to head this disaster off." He turned to watch Remi approach. "For that reason more than any other, it is imperative that we find a way to help Psylocke."

"It’s doable," Remi said as he joined them. Jean was surprised by the quiet confidence in his demeanor.

"Are you sure?" Charles asked, and Remi shrugged.

"I want to think about it some more before I try it, but yeah, I’m pretty sure."

Jean and Charles exchanged doubtful looks, but neither contradicted him. As the silence stretched, Jean found herself floundering for something to say. They’d been teenagers the last time she’d spent any real time around Remi. The fact that she’d had a crush on him back then still made her blush when she thought about it, but the truth was that she honestly didn’t know him very well.

Finally, Charles brushed his hands together. "All right. Well, if you’ve seen everything you want to, we should join the others for dinner."

Renee found herself seated near the head of the long dining room table, comfortably sandwiched between her mother and grandfather. Remi sat on the Professor’s far side with Scott and Jean beyond him. There had been a small tussle between Sam and Bobby over who got the seat next to Rogue, the reason for which Renee hadn’t quite figured out, but Bobby had apparently won and kept leaning well into Rogue’s space to talk to Renee. Rogue had finally smacked him in the shoulder and threatened to stab him with her fork if he didn’t quit, which made Renee laugh.

Conversation at the table wasn’t as easy or comfortable as Renee remembered from her childhood, but she ignored the undercurrents and the occasional awkward pauses with determination. She simply wanted to enjoy being home.

"So, Renee, how old are you?" Scott asked at one point, and Renee had to stop and think before she could give him an answer.

"Um... twenty or so," she finally answered, and shrugged a little helplessly. "With all the time travel, I can’t say exactly."

Across from her, Remi nodded. "That should be right. Cairo was a little over four years ago, now."

Renee’s heart clenched at the mention of Cairo, Illinois. The memories rolled over her and she met Remi’s gaze. "That was the night Cody died." That was the night you left me to the Shadow King.

Remi didn’t appear to hear her thoughts. He shook his head softly. "It’s so strange. I was there twice that night." He glanced over at the Professor before returning his gaze to Renee. "For me, all of that happened thirteen years ago. Four years ago I was just dragging Ororo out of the pool."

Further down the table, Ororo paused with her fork halfway to her mouth at the mention of her name. Her gaze flicked back and forth between them.

"I am afraid I might have drowned had you not, Rem’aillon," she said after a moment.

Remi’s expression twisted sourly. "You did drown." At her puzzled look, he added, "While we were there fighting the Shadow King. That’s why-" He paused, distress flitting across his features. Then he tossed his fork down and tipped his head back, running both hands through his hair. "That’s why I had to go further back. Even the Witness never realized you couldn’t have gotten out of that pool by yourself; that Gambit had to be there to save you."

For a moment Renee’s mind filled with the sharp smell of chlorinated water and the muggy warmth of a summer night in Illinois. She felt Ororo’s slight weight in her arms, holding her up as she retched on the water she’d swallowed. From the expressions around the table she gathered that they’d all shared the projected image from Remi. Beside her, Rogue stiffened and Renee’s stomach began to churn at the thought of him impersonating her father. Just how far had that charade gone?

"Whoa. Can you be in two places at the same time?" Bobby asked before she could follow that line of thought any further. "Doesn’t that, like, mess up the space-time continuum or something?"

A smattering of chuckles followed his words.

"My dear boy, I believe you have been watching too much Star Trek again," Hank said with a toothy smile. "However, it does pose an interesting question."

He pulled off his glasses and examined them in the light from the chandelier before turning his attention to Remi. "That of what will happen if your actions here should result in either of you never being born, for example. Actually, in Renee’s case I’m afraid that seems like a... fairly likely scenario." His fur quivered as he spoke, as if he were picking his words with caution.

There was a short, intensely uncomfortable silence. Remi stared at Rogue for most of it, but her gaze remained fixed on the tabletop, an angry furrow between her brows, and eventually Remi turned to Hank. Renee felt like she couldn’t breathe.

"Nothing Renee or I do here can cause that kind of paradox," Remi finally said, his words like a shout in the stillness. "We aren’t from the future of this timeline so our actions here can’t affect our own origins."

Bobby scratched his head. "Yeah, I didn’t really get that when the Professor tried to explain it before. You’re from the future but you’re not from our future, but we’re in the timeline we’re in because you went back in time before and that did cause a paradox that wiped you out, only it didn’t..."

Remi uttered a wry snort at his summary. "You actually understand it pretty well."

Hank resettled his glasses on his nose. "The laws governing time travel and paradox are rather... paradoxical." He flashed a grin at his own joke before turning serious once again. "My understanding of events is that you and Renee are not actually from a real future, but are instead from one that was something of a mathematical figment created by the paradox’s collapse."

Remi nodded. "Yes. One of the things that happened during the paradox’s collapse-part of its physical mechanism-was that it created an entire spectrum of alternate timelines that existed only during the collapse itself." His gaze grew distant. "If the Gamesmaster hadn’t warned us-if we hadn’t jumped out just ahead of the timewave like we did-we would have been destroyed along with all the rest of the alternate timelines as the paradox finished collapsing."

"And the world you experienced-where the Shadow King had essentially dominated all of humanity-would have become the real one." The Professor steepled his hands in front of his face and surveyed the table.

Scott leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. "That’s always the justification, isn’t it?" he asked with a scowl.

The Professor’s expression darkened, and around the table people shifted nervously in their seats. Rogue’s knuckles turned white where she gripped her silverware.

"Justification for what?" Renee asked, looking from face to face. Her stomach continued to churn, until the smell of the food on the table began to nauseate her.

The others looked at each other, as if trying to decide who would answer. Eventually, Remi sighed.

"It was my choice," he said with a pointed look at Scott.

Scott uncrossed his arms. "I know, and I understand the reasons." His gaze shifted to the Professor. "That doesn’t mean I agree."

The Professor nodded acknowledgment, his eyes shadowed. "I respect that, Scott. I hope you know that."

Renee focused on Remi. The tension in the room had grown so thick she could hardly stand it. "What are you talking about?" she demanded.

Remi seemed to brace himself. "When Dad and I started to realize just how many variables there were, how difficult it would be to guarantee someone could be in place to make sure Ororo survived falling into that pool and that she escaped the Shadow King..." He shrugged regretfully. "We didn’t think it was worth the risk. We already knew one set of circumstances that would lead to Ororo being rescued because it had already happened."

Renee stared at him as she tried to process his words. "I don’t understand," she finally said.

Remi shifted his shoulders against the chair back. "Do you remember that your dad left me a copy of his memories in his will?"

She blinked. "I-yes, I remember." Fear crept in around the edges of her heart, leaving cold footprints. "Why?"

"It was just too risky for me to try to recreate enough of Gambit’s actions to end up at that pool. We found that out when we tried to rescue Storm ourselves." Remi’s familiar red eyes bored into her, strangely pleading. "Not when we knew Gambit would stumble into it all on his own, without interference."

When Renee didn’t say anything, he went on, "It was relatively easy to swap out sets of memories-Gambit’s for mine. Jean Luc was willing to help-" His lips continued to move but Renee could no longer hear the words through the rushing in her ears. Her gaze slid involuntarily toward her mother, who had gone pale with the kind of grief Renee remembered from her childhood.

"No." Renee shook her head vehemently. "No."

"I’m sorry, Renee. It was the only way."

"No!" Renee shoved herself back from the table. Fury and horror swirled inside her as she realized what Remi had done. He hadn’t just impersonated her father. He had stolen Gambit’s life, his memories, his staff, and her mother’s heart.

Blindly Renee turned and ran.