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The training room of the Avengers’ tower was quiet. There was no echo off the training mats, no laughter, no banter from people sparring, and no mechanical whir of simulated battlefields to fill the massive space. There was just you. You, your training dummy, and the dull thud of your staff, engraved with the four card suits circling either end.
You still remember how you ended up here, how Remy’s warmth faded away in the cutting winds atop the Baxter Building.
You’d been in bed, exhausted after a week-long outreach mission on the West Coast. Remy was with you beneath the covers, wrapped around you in a bid to block out the New York chill that neither of you were truly accustomed to. You were drifting, floating in that pleasant haze between consciousness and sleep, buried beneath a pile of blankets that still clung to your body heat when you shifted towards the cool mattress just to your side.
Remy shifted, the blankets moving with him and tipping just enough to rouse you as he pressed closer against your back.
“Mornin’,” he’d murmured, voice low and rumbling with the remnants of sleep. His accent curled around the word, drawling and warm, “Mon amour.”
You groaned, a small little noise rasping from the back of your throat, as you turned and pressed into his chest, leeching off of his warmth. “Five more minutes,” you grumbled, the words muffled into the soft cotton of Remy’s shirt.
He chuckled, tugging you closer, because Remy LeBeau was nothing if not a fiend for physical connection. He'd bury himself beneath your skin if he could, make a home nestled against your heart in the cage of your ribs. He'd tear open his own flesh if it meant making you happy.
“You sure, mon cher?” he asked, and despite how tightly your eyes were shut, you could still see the smile he had plastered onto his face; all dopey and lovesick, hopelessly endeared in a way you could hardly compete with. “You have the whole mornin’ to y’self. Y’sure you don’ wanna take advantage of it?”
You groaned again, tugging the blanket closer and tucking your legs up, tangling them with Remy’s. “No,” you said, resolute— or stubborn, as Logan so often accused— in your decision to stay in bed and pretend it wasn’t the middle of Winter. “I don’t wanna get up.”
Remy’s laugh was smooth, warm. It sounded like home as he gave in, wrapping you into the blankets and his embrace, letting you give into the pull of sleep once more. Loved. Content. Safe.
You woke up cold.
The timestream entanglement was unforgiving, ripping people and places away from their universes to toss them into the middle of another one. No warning, no prep time, nothing. Just you, stranded on the roof of the Baxter Building with nothing but the staff Remy gifted you years ago, staring up at a blood red moon looming over you.
The staff slammed into the body of the training dummy, thumping dully, but firmly into the abdomen. There was no echo, no stagger, just your quiet grunting and labored breathing as you twisted around, the mats beneath you swallowing your steps, and landed another blow. The staff moved fluidly, an extension of your own arm as it twirled and spun.
Not long ago, it'd been meeting flesh, the metal stained with dirt and blood. It was an unavoidable mess— you, of all people, would know. It took you hours to scrub the thing clean, locked away in the newly restored Avengers’ Tower with a bucket of soap and a rag, desperately trying to cling to the one thing that linked you back to your own universe.
At least Sai had her wolf. You? You had nothing but the clothes on your back and the staff that never left your side, surrounded by faces that you knew, but who didn't know you.
You saw him coming before he entered the room, reality splitting before you, variables shifting into branches of time that could've been before settling with the hiss of the door opening.
“There you are, mon ami,” Gambit greeted, an easy smirk stretching over his face as he approached. “You're a tricky one to find, neh? Gambit spent some time tryin’ to track you down.”
Your grip tightened on your staff.
You’d seen countless futures, had watched timelines split apart and fracture, some branches erased before your very eyes. The chronoverse had expanded your vision, converging timelines broadening your horizons; you could see more than you ever had and then some, and this time, more than one future could stick. None of those visions had ever included Remy LeBeau.
He showed up on Krakoa with a smirk that skewed too far right and a name tattooed in the space you remembered a large, branching tree being, greeting everyone except for you with a seasoned familiarity that you’d suddenly been stripped from.
Congratulations, they’d all said, smiling, happy, excited to see him coming back from his honeymoon with Anna Marie. You knew that this wasn’t your Gambit, it wasn’t Remy, but it still settled wrong in your chest to hear them call her Mrs. LeBeau.
It wasn’t jealousy that lingered over your shoulder as you left Krakoa, heading for Midtown to hunker down with Mr. Fantastic and Tony to try and sort out the chronoverses. You didn’t envy Rogue— you knew that after everything she’s been through in this universe and your own, that she deserved something good. Even if it was supposed to be yours. Even though it was Remy— envy meant that she had something you didn’t. But you knew what it was like to be loved by Remy. You knew his warmth and his comfort, were familiar with the feeling of him cocooned around you, overflowing with adoration. You just… missed him.
You missed your Remy, not Gambit, not this other version of him that smiled the wrong way and looked at you like a stranger. You were happy for this Rogue, truly, but it wasn’t enough to fill the hole of your own loss.
Which is why you were here, locked away from the celebrations in Krakoa and the tournaments in the Heart of Heaven and the mess in the Grand Garden. Besides, you reasoned to yourself, you were useful here; more than another body in a battle you struggled to keep up with. Your premonition was helping; your visions in the hands of the greatest scientific minds in their centuries. It was something to do.
Which was another reason you couldn’t possibly fathom why Gambit wanted to be here, of all places.
“You done with your honeymoon?” you huffed, the speed of your hits increasing like it’d be able to scrub the suits off of your staff if you spun it hard enough.
Gambit, completely ignoring the obvious signs that you wanted to be alone (why else would you be in the empty Avengers training room?) grinned. “I see Gambit’s reputation has reached far.”
You wanted to scoff at the easy charisma, to shove the warm familiarity of his cadence deep under anything that didn’t remind you of home. You settled on indifference, bordering towards an anger that you knew would burn out the instant you tried to stoke it. Shut it off, you silently pleaded, willing your focus to stay with the dummy, just ignore it.
“Though, I can’t seem to say the same for you, ami,” Gambit continued, watching as you landed hit after hit, movements quick, but controlled. There was almost a rhythm to it, the steady thump of metal against padding, the swipe of the staff cutting through the air. A controlled force, honed over years of fighting, of training, of surviving. Gambit would be lying to say it didn’t intrigue him.
“For all you know about Gambit, Gambit don’t know a single thing about you, petit.” He came up beside you, dodging the wide swing of your arm as you stepped forward in a kick. There wasn’t any caution, no hesitation to invade your space, to follow as you circled to the other side of the dummy in an attempt at creating space disguised in a flurry of kicks and twirling metal. He just grinned, settling behind you, just over your left shoulder, and chattered on.
“Logan says you’re a mutant,” he drawled, shifting just out of your reach when you purposefully jabbed your elbow back in a passover, “though you ain’t one Gambit recognizes. So, what can you do, mon ami? Somethin’ fancy with that staff o’ yours?”
In a flash, his own staff was extending in his hand, coming up to catch the end of your’s midair. You startled, stepping back as Gambit smirked, eyes crinkling in amusement at you before his red eyes trailed up to the end of your staff.
His gaze lingered on the suits engraved in the metal, the ones trailing down the segments of his own staff watching on, unbothered by the similarity that had Gambit’s mind racing.
“No, Gambit don’t think that’s right,” he hummed, cocking his head. “Maybe somethin’ up here den?” He tapped his temple twice, eyes shifting, narrowing to gauge a reaction you weren’t giving. “Y’seem like the type.”
You scoffed, drawing your staff back and hesitating over the button to retract it. “What? A telepath?” You turned away, fist clenched tight around the handle of your staff, squeezing over the covering that hid the initials engraved in the metal. You needed to get out of here, to get away from Gambit.
“Maybe,” he said, retracting his staff and falling into step beside you on the way out. There was a part of you that preened at the attention, that wanted to latch onto him and relish in the nearness that was so close to your grasp. Your logical brain won out, though, flashes of Remy looking at you with reactions ranging from disgust to awkward rejection beating back any familiarity that wanted to scratch through the barrier of isolation you didn’t want to be stuck in in the first place.
You remembered the first few days when you showed up, the desperate search for familiar faces and any sort of explanation. You had found Logan, had called out to him just to be met with a cold glare that you’d long since broken away from in your own universe.
No one knew you here, from any universe tangled together in the great knot of time you’d been working to unravel. As far as anyone else was concerned, you’ve never existed until now. It was isolating, and no matter how hard you tried to convince yourself, it hurt. Your friends looked at you like you were a stranger, they spoke of events as if you weren’t there— and in a sense, you weren’t. It was hard to make memories with people when you didn’t exist to them.
Maybe it was selfish to have hoped it would’ve been your Remy when he first showed up. Maybe it was cruel to have hoped that you could have something that was no longer yours as far as the universe was concerned. Maybe this was your way of learning that nothing you had could ever last. After all, would you even be able to go home after this? After the timestreams were untangled and the universes could right themselves, would you have any hope of finding yours?
Mr. Fantastic had described it to you as throwing a dart blindly into a room full of people. There was no way of knowing who it would hit, and an even slimmer chance that it’d hit the person who you wanted it to. There was no way of knowing which of the infinite universes could be yours, and even less knowledge on how to send you back, given that you could find it in the first place.
So, maybe this was your fate. Stuck in a universe that didn’t have a place for you, fighting a war that had nothing to do with you in the first place.
“Maybe it’s something else.”
You looked at Gambit, at his smirk that lifted wrong, at his eyes that stared at you like he could read something that you couldn’t. He was perceptive, no matter which universe he came from. It was hard to tell what exactly he was thinking.
“I get the feeling that you know me.”
“Do you, now?”
You took the stairs up to the roof, unable to stomach an elevator ride with Gambit picking you apart like something he could understand with enough smooth talk and a grin. Naively, you told yourself that if you couldn’t see him, it wouldn’t hurt. Even worse, you’d thought that leaving the training room would stop him from following.
“Y’get dis look.” He grabs you, gentle, but still firm, and turns you to face him on the landing between floors. When you go to tug your arm out of his grip, it tightens. “Like I should know you. Like we all should. Logan didn’t tell me much, but your face says it all for you, petit.”
You stare at him, jaw clenched. You’ve always known Remy to be good at reading people— it was how you got together back home. A dumb game under the haze of alcohol and dim lights where everything about you screamed just how attracted to him you were. You ached knowing how little that changed, how no matter where you were, you’d always be drawn to him.
“How do you know me?” His expression softened, pleading. His hands were wrapped around your arms, thumbs rubbing subconsciously against your skin, and the tenderness of it scared you.
Because this wasn’t the Remy you knew. Because this was a married man. Because he was pledged to Rogue in a way that ran deeper than the way you were pledged to your Remy back home; the Remy that smiled at you like you hung the stars in the sky and held you when your premonition wrapped you in its cold grip. The Remy that undoubtedly woke up cold and alone in a bed covered in mismatched sheets because you couldn’t agree on a color scheme, who searched for you when you weren’t on the fire escape, breathing in the present that liked to elude you for timelines that hadn’t begun to branch apart yet. Who was left confused and lonely because fate decided that you were the perfect plaything for a war that was a multiverse away from you, because the best soldiers are the ones with everything to lose if they fail.
So, you answered, voice small and overflowing with the same conviction that kept you here, searching and training endlessly for a solution to all of this, for a way back to a home that you couldn’t let go of. Not yet.
“I don’t,” you say simply, and when Remy looks you in the eye, he can see that it was true, even if it felt like tearing skin from bone.
His grip loosened, and you stepped back, retracting your staff with a sharp click.
“Sorry for the misunderstanding.”
You could feel Gambit’s gaze burning through you as you turned away, his eyes settling heavy over the staff clipped to your belt. If he recognized it or not was of no importance; your footsteps echoed alone as you disappeared back down the stairs.