Work Text:
“Even if it is full of love, all a ghost can do is haunt.”
— Avina St. Graves
They say ghosts don’t exist. I say they never been loved hard enough to know better.
Belladonna’s been gone three months now. Long enough for the world to turn without her. Long enough for the Guilds back home to stop fightin’ over who gets to claim her legacy. But me? I still hear her laugh when the city wind hits the alleys just right. Still smell that damn jasmine perfume she used to wear, cut sharp with gunpowder.
New York ain’t home, not really. It’s too loud, too high up, too cold. But it’s where the X-Men are, where the work is, where I can pretend I still got purpose. Every morning, I walk past the window and watch the sun catch on the metal spires, and I think: if I squint hard enough, maybe I’ll see the bayou in there somewhere.
I didn’t go to her funeral. Couldn’t. Didn’t got the right, maybe. When you the reason someone ends up buried too young, the last thing you deserve is to stand over their grave like some poor widower out a movie.
The others don’t ask. They got their own ghosts. Storm looks at me sometimes with that quiet kind of pity that makes me want to disappear. Wolverine grunts, like he knows exactly what kind of pain I’m carrying and wants to cut it clean. But it don’t work like that. Love don’t die when the body does. It lingers—like cigarette smoke, like perfume, like a bad idea you keep chasing long after you know better.
Still — no one says her name. Maybe they’re afraid it’ll break me. Truth is, I already been broken. I just got good at hidin’ it.
I can still see her sometimes. Not like a ghost out a storybook. More like a trick of light, caught between the blink and the breath. I’ll turn down a corridor in the mansion and swear she’s there—bare feet, white dress, that little tilt of her chin that meant she’d already figured me out. Then she’s gone, and I’m left talkin’ to the shadows again.
The worst part ain’t the hauntin’. It’s the love that’s still got nowhere to go. I got all this ache inside me, and no one to give it to. She was my first everything—first kiss, first fight, first reason to run, first reason to come back. And now she’s just air.
Funny thing, chére —when we was kids, I used to think the swamp was the whole damn world. Thought if I just swam far enough, I’d find us a place where nothin’ could touch us. But we grew up. And turns out the world don’t give a damn about two fools in love from New Orleans.
Some nights, I still shuffle the cards, listen to the click and whisper of them sliding against each other. The rhythm keeps me steady, like a heartbeat I can control. But every now and then, one card slips. Falls face up. And if it’s a Queen—don’t matter which suit—I can’t touch it. Can’t turn it over. Can’t breathe for a second.
Maybe that’s what ghosts do. They don’t rattle chains or whisper your name in the dark. They just linger in the spaces between your thoughts, waiting for you to remember.
I used to think I’d see her again someday. Thought fate would twist and pull us back together, same way it always did. But now I know better. Some stories don’t get second chances. Some love stays trapped in that moment before goodbye, full of all the things you shoulda said but didn’t.
So I keep her with me the only way I can—half memory, half guilt, all heart.
And when the night gets real quiet, I swear I hear her voice sayin’:
"Remy Lebeau, you damn fool. You never did know when to let go."
And she’s right.
Because love like that — it don’t fade, don’t rest, don’t move on.
It just lingers.
And I guess that’s all it ever could do.