Chapter Text
Scott watched the new guy spar with Logan, frowning deeply. The new guy was good. He used the bo staff like it was a fifth limb, and he was fast enough to dodge out of Logan’s way.
Charles sat next to Logan, his face polite and entirely unreadable. “He’s quite the fighter,” he said neutrally.
“He’s decent,” Scott said begrudgingly. It was nice to see Logan losing for once. He hadn’t even managed to land a hit on the guy.
“More than decent,” Charles said. “He hasn’t had to use his powers yet.”
“That’s probably for the best. I don’t think Forge’ll be happy if he has to remake the Danger Room for the eighth time this month.”
They lapsed into silence for a long moment, watching Logan and the new guy. Scott needed to figure out his name. He’d said his name was Gambit, but what kind of asshole introduces themself as “Gambit”?
“What’re you thinking?” he asked eventually. The downside of being friends with a telepath–they always knew what you were thinking, but you never knew what they were thinking.
Charles hummed. “I think he’s a strong fighter. It may be useful to have him around. And he seems willing enough to join us.”
Logan hit the ground hard. The new guy grinned widely enough that Scott could see his pearly white teeth from the viewing room. He lifted his hand in a finger gun motion. The intercom was still being repaired after Banshee blew them out, but Scott could hear his words perfectly clear.
“Bang. You dead.”
Charles made an approving sound. Scott’s frown remained, but he had to admit it was a good show. He’d be a good addition to the team.
And if he betrayed them, well, it wouldn’t be too hard to find another art teacher.
—+—
Scott expected it to take months for anyone to accept Gambit, but within a week, it felt like he’d been on the team forever. Most of it was because of the students.
Most of the teachers at Xavier’s Institute weren’t especially good at teaching. Most of them weren’t even teachers, really, but had been thrust into the role anyway. None of them were bad with kids, except for Logan, but they weren’t exactly prepared to teach a class.
Gambit took to teaching like a duck took to water. Most of the time, he put on a semi-relevent movie in the background and let the kids run wild painting and drawing.
He was still a bad teacher in most ways. He didn’t assign homework, and his curriculum seemed to mostly be based on vibes. But the kids were safe, at least.
“He’s good with them,” Ororo said to Scott about a month after Gambit joined. The two were positioned on the stairs, watching Gambit help some kids put up their paintings.
“Do you know if he has any family?” Scott had been wondering if he had any experience with kids. Some younger siblings, maybe, or even a child of his own. He didn’t know much about Gambit, all things considered. He still didn’t know what his name was.
“No,” Ororo said. “I don’t think so, at least. But smart thieves know to stash away their treasures.”
“You think he’s a thief?” Scott wouldn’t be surprised if he was, but he hadn’t gotten any proof. Yet.
“You forget, Scott,” Ororo said, “I was raised by thieves in Cairo. I can spot a thief from a mile away.”
Gambit held a ladder for Jubilee, letting her put up a brightly colored painting on the wall. Scott watched him. “Has he stolen anything?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Ororo said. She tilted her head, disrupting her white curls. “Hopefully, he’s left that life behind.”
“And if he hasn’t?”
Ororo smiled at Scott. “We’ve fought Magneto and won. We’ve fought the MRD and won. We’ve fought sentinels and won. Do you think, if it came down to it, we’d lose against a thief with some cards?”
—+—
About halfway through his third period Algebra class, Bobby heard scraping from the hallway. All of his students’ heads shot up from their work, desperate for the distraction from their work sheets.
“Stay here,” he said, stepping out into the hallway. He was also desperate for the distraction. The only thing more boring than doing math is teaching math.
The new teacher was out in the hallway, accompanied by two students. They were dragging something under a sheet down the hallway. Bobby stared at them for a moment, not quite comprehending what he was seeing.
“Hi,” he said.
The new teacher looked up and flashed a quick smile. “Bonjour, mon ami. I don’t think we’ve met before.”
Bobby’s brain short circuited when he saw him. Bobby didn’t like to think he could be blinded by a pretty face, but Gambit wasn’t really pretty, more striking. His eyes were unnerving, red on black, but somehow nonthreatening. He wasn’t dressed like a teacher–he’d opted for a ruffled tank top and jeans, both of which had paint splattered over them. His rusty brown hair was up in a man bun, which Bobby normally hated, but somehow it worked here.
He tried to recover. “What’re you doing?”
Gambit peeled up the sheet a bit, revealing a marble bust of a man’s head. “A bit ‘o hands on demonstration for the kids,” he said. “The Bust of Adonis. What do you think?”
“I think you need to be a bit more quiet,” Bobby said. He’d fully recovered now. “I’ve got a class in there.”
“My apologies,” Gambit said. “We’ll be quieter.”
And they were. When they started to drag the statue again, Gambit lifted it in a way that kept the scraping quiet. Bobby thanked him and returned to class.
A little later, during a passing period, Bobby googled Bust of Adonis. Apparently, the bust had been stolen two years ago and had been missing ever since.
—+—
Rogue didn’t like gossip. Well, that wasn’t true. She liked regular gossip, about who was dating who, what scandal was brewing behind the scenes, who’d been spotted at a seedy motel with a woman who wasn’t their wife.
The thing she didn’t like was telepathic gossip. Part of the fun of gossip was putting a puzzle together, solving a mystery, connecting the dots. Telepathic gossip felt like cheating.
But if Rogue needed an answer to something quickly, she went to Jean. And unfortunately, the new art teacher was stirring up a lot of questions for her.
“Is the new art teacher single?” she asked one day in the teacher’s lounge. She tried to keep her tone light, but that’d never worked on Jean. She looked up, her eyes alight.
“Oh,” she said, “oh, do you have a crush?”
“We’re not teenagers, Jean,” Rogue said, rolling her eyes.
“Sure. Do you have a crush?”
Rogue bit the inside of her lip. She sighed. “He’s cute, okay?” And funny. And witty. And he was from the South, so he actually knew what the word seasoning meant.
“I’ll ask him,” Jean said. She paused. “You should wait a bit. Just until he’s off probation.”
“I’ll wait, I’m not that desperate,” Rogue said, and ignored the look on Jean’s face.
—+—
Three months in, Scott finally learned Gambit’s real first name. He heard it from Jean one night while she told him the recent school gossip. Scott wasn’t the type of person who really cared about gossip, but Jean liked it, and who was he to stop her?
“So Rogue came to me, asking me to help her figure out if Remy’s got a girlfriend,” she said, eyes alight. They were in bed, curled up, her chin on his chest. “Apparently, she wants to ask him out, but she wants to make sure he’s not married first, so she had me ask him.”
“Who’s Remy?” Scott asked. He was paying more attention to the way Jean’s hair fell over her bare shoulder. God, she was beautiful. He was the luckiest man in the world.
She poked him playfully. “Gambit. His name’s Remy.”
Scott squinted. “Like the guy from Ratatouille?” He hated that he knew that movie. It had been a mistake to let the students vote for movie night.
“It’s French, apparently,” Jean said. “Anyway, I asked Remy if he had any partners that could chaperone the Spring Fling dance, and he said no. I read his mind during it, to make sure he wasn’t lying or anything, and he was a bit hard to read, but I think he’s single. I’m pretty sure.”
“You can’t read his mind?” Scott asked, surprised. The only person Jean couldn’t read was Charles.
Jean shrugged. “Charles said it was probably a secondary mutation. Remy doesn’t trust Hank enough to get a genetic work up yet, but hopefully we’ll figure something out.” She shook her head, disrupting the hair on her shoulder. “I think Rogue’s going to ask him out soon.”
“Oh,” Scott said. He didn’t especially like Gambit, but he liked Rogue. She deserved to have someone good. Scott had been incredibly lucky to find Jean–he hoped Rogue had the same luck. And he really hoped that luck didn’t lead her to Gambit.
—+—
The new teacher is jumpy around Ororo. She half expected it. After Logan, she’s the most threatening teacher on campus, even if she doesn’t need knives to achieve her status.
But he was approaching the end of his probationary period, and soon, he’d be accompanying the team on missions. The last thing they needed was for him to be more scared of one of his teammates than his enemies.
One day, after school, Ororo found him in the art room, putting away some paints. She had to admit, he’d done a good job with the classroom. The only decorations he’d put up were the students’ art. Bobby had mentioned something about a statue head, but she saw no trace of it.
“Remy,” she said. Gambit froze in place, a deer in the headlights expression flashing across his face. He masked it quickly enough, flashing a bright smile.
“You need something?” he asked.
Ororo inclined her head. “Come with me,” she said. “We’re going to train.”
Gambit blinked, but didn’t object. He left the paints out and followed her down to the Danger Room.
“Something wrong?” he asked. There was something in his voice Ororo couldn’t quite read. The accent made it a bit hard.
“No,” she said. Normally, she’d be a bit more open, but she needed to figure out what he was like. So far, all she knew about him was that he was good with kids, Southern, and a thief. She didn’t have a read on his personality.
They stopped at the armory on the way there to pick up Gambit’s staff. Forge had offered to make him a new one, but Gambit had been attached to his old one. Ororo scanned it, trying to see if there were any secret weapons on it, but it seemed like a perfectly normal weapon.
“Y’know, most of the time, when a woman drags me into a private room, it’s for something a lot worse than training,” Gambit said, twirling the staff across his fingers as he waited for Ororo to select a Danger Room program to her taste. The item seemed to give him some degree of comfort.
“Is this a common occurrence for you?” she asked.
“Common enough.” He shrugged. “What ‘bout you? You usually drag strange men into a room?”
He was turning the question back on her. Was he avoiding it, or trying to get a sense of Ororo?
“Common enough,” she replied. She picked out a program, medium difficulty, and let the room whir to life. Turrets poked their heads out of the walls.
Gambit was a good fighter. Ororo had known that from her conversations with Scott, but he was faster than she’d expected. He dodged every attack with ease, and weaponized debris like he’d been doing this for years. He was smart enough to keep the explosions away from Ororo. More than that, he seemed to be enjoying himself.
Once or twice, he reached for a pocket that wasn’t there, though he recovered quickly enough. Ororo sent a gale of wind to knock out one turret.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
Gambit twisted his staff in his hands, breaking another turret. “Fine,” he said. “Missing my cards.” Then he bolted out of the way of a turret’s blast.
After about fifteen more minutes, Ororo decided she’d seen enough. She summoned a massive storm cloud and let lightning hit each turret. Forge would be annoyed at her for breaking the room again, but he’d forgive her.
At the sound of the thunder, Gambit tossed the staff to the side and dove for cover. Smart enough, Ororo supposed. Holding a large metal staff in the middle of a lightning storm was a bad idea. When he stood up, splattered with rain, he had a strange look in his eyes. She had seen it before, in Forge’s eyes when someone put popcorn in the microwave.
“Are you alright?” Ororo asked.
Gambit stretched out his limbs, quickly masking his expression again. “Gambit’s from New Orleans,” he said. Ororo frowned for a moment before the realization clicked into place.
There had been a hurricane in New Orleans a decade ago or so. It had been a bad one–she could remember feeling the changes in the weather all the way up in New York. Hurricane Bonnie. Gambit would’ve been…well, she wasn’t actually sure how old the man was exactly, but he would’ve been young. A teenager at most.
Ororo dismissed the storm cloud. “Will you be able to function?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” Gambit said. He glanced at her, something like respect on his face. “Just wasn’t expecting that.”
—+—
Four months in, Gambit’s probationary period ended, and he went on his first mission. Scott kept a close eye on him, but he seemed fine. It was a simple mission, all things considered. Go into an MRD base, get out the captives, blow the whole thing up. Easy. They hadn’t even needed the full team.
Logan made short work of the guards, and Ororo summoned a massive storm to block out their communication systems. That left Scott, Jean and Gambit to break in.
“The captives should be down on the left,” Jean said. She’d read the mind of a few guards before Logan shredded them.
Gambit scanned the walls. “I don’t see any traps.”
Scott nodded. “Good.”
“No, not good,” Gambit said. “It’s a mouse trap. Places like these, they either focus on keeping things in, or keeping things out. If there’s no traps to stop us from getting in, that means there’s gonna be traps to keep us from getting out.”
“We’ll handle that when we get there,” Jean said. She tilted her head. “Down that hall.”
They pushed their way into a holding room. A few guards tried to shoot at them, but one good optic blast knocked them on their asses. Gambit got to work breaking the locks on the holding cells. Most of the captives were on the younger side, but Scott didn’t see a lot of injuries.
“It’s alright,” he said when they got the cells open. “You’re safe now.”
One of the captives blinked at him. “Kiyes ou ye?”
Oh, no. Scott frowned, trying to make sense of the words. He turned to the crowd. “Do any of you speak English?”
There was some muttering, but it was clear that the resounding answer was no. He looked to Jean for help, but she shook her head.
“I don’t even know what language that is,” she said.
“Haitian Creole," Gambit said. He clapped, then put his hands over his mouth like a bullhorn. Scott didn’t understand a single word that came out of his mouth, but the effect was instant. The crowd followed after them. No, not them. The crowd followed Gambit.
—+—
Five months into Gambit joining the team, Rogue still hadn’t asked him out. Part of it was insecurity. He was a bit of a flirt, and definitely knew how handsome he was. If he could have anyone, why would he want a girl he couldn’t touch?
The other part was Kurt. He’d made his opinion on Gambit crystal clear to Rogue.
“You don’t know where he’s been,” he said. “You don’t know his last name, you don’t know anything about him, really.”
“I want to learn,” Rogue said in response. She thought maybe Kurt would’ve liked Gambit if she wasn’t interested in him. Neither of them had a father, so the trouble of being overprotective when it came to Rogue’s love life fell to him.
Still, when Gambit found her one day after class and said, “I’ve been thinking about you. I want to talk to you,” she didn’t object.
—+—
Six months in, and Gambit hasn’t taken so much as a sick day. Ororo half expected the man to get bored and burn out, but he seemed to genuinely enjoy his job.
She asked him about it one day during training. They’d keep up training in the Danger Room, just so that Gambit can get a bit more acclimated to her powers. The last thing they need is for him to have a panic attack during a brawl.
When she asked, Gambit shrugged.
“Haven’t been ‘round mutants a lot in my life,” he said. “First time being part of the community and all.”
“What do you think?” Ororo asked.
He flashed her a smile. She’d gotten better at figuring out when his smiles were fake or not. This one was all real.
“I like it.”
—+—
The first real injury Gambit got came nearly seven months in, during a fight with Mister Sinister. He’d gotten captured alongside Scott.
“It’s okay,” Scott said. They were chained in the back of a van, arms stretched behind their backs, power-suppression collars around their necks. It was not okay, but as far as he knew, this was the first time Gambit had been kidnapped. They couldn’t have him freaking out.
“Gambit knows,” Gambit said. He inhaled deeply. “The others will find us.”
But they didn’t find them before they were dragged into a base and thrown onto the floor. Scott hit the ground wrong, and his shoulder screamed at him. From the noise Gambit made, he’d broken something. Probably his nose.
Footsteps echoed off the steel floors. Scott didn’t need to look up to know who it was.
“It is not often that gifts like this fall into my lap, but here you are.” Mister Sinister’s voice was like a knife. Scott kept his expression carefully blank, trying desperately not to react. Inside, he was panicking.
He raised his head to glare at the man. “Sinister.”
“Oh, great,” Gambit said. His voice was nasally, all but confirming he’d broken his nose. “A Brit.”
Mister Sinister’s gaze swept towards Gambit. His eyes widened, and he grinned. “Oh. Oh, look at you.” He reached out a hand, grasping Gambit’s chin. Gambit jerked, trying to scramble away, but Scott knew Sinister. His grip was like iron. There was no getting out of it.
“Let him go,” Scott said. He didn’t like Gambit, barely trusted Gambit, but no one deserved to be the object of Sinister’s attention.
Mister Sinister didn’t pay him one bit of attention. He examined Gambit’s face, his grin stretching wider. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
Before Scott could process whatever that meant, Sinister dropped Gambit. He stood, turning to his goons. Clones, probably.
“Take Summers to a cell,” he said. He pointed to Gambit. “Get this one to the operating theater.”
Panic shot through Scott. He lunged, trying to bash his head into Sinister’s, but the clones grabbed him and dragged him away. Gambit started shouting in French, a death threat from the sound of it, but Sinister was unswayed. Scott watched as the goons grabbed him before the doors shut, and he was thrown into a cell.
Scott wasn’t good at measuring time. He never had been. But he knew that hours passed before Logan came and ripped the cell door open.
“Gambit,” Scott said.
“Alive,” Logan said, cutting off the restraints and the collar. His arms were caked in blood up to the elbow, and he was sweating. He’d gone through a fight to get here.
“Is he hurt?” The skin on his neck stung where the collar had been.
Logan’s face twisted into a scowl. “We already flew him back to the mansion. Forge’s coming with the backup plane.”
“How bad?”
Scott knew the expression on Logan’s face. It was the look he got when someone was half dead.
“Bad,” he said. He helped Scott up, supporting his weight like he was injured. “But right now, you need to focus on yourself.”
—+—
Remy stayed in the medical bay for nearly two days. Rogue visited daily, sitting by his bedside.
He’d gotten incredibly lucky, according to Hank. Sinister had been about to start a dissection when they charged in, and the moment he saw them, he stabbed him in the side with the scalpel.
“I still don’t understand why he went for him,” Kurt said on the way back. His opinion of Gambit had softened after he almost died, but he still had questions. “Isn’t Sinister obsessed with Scott? Why would he just ignore him to go after Remy?”
“I don’t know,” Rogue had said miserably. “I don’t know.”
Remy stirred in the bed. He looked so small somehow, lying there. So pale against the white sheets. The only spot of color in the room was a little painting the students had made for him, left on his bedside.
All at once, his eyes flew open, and he jerked up.
“You’re okay,” Rogue said immediately. She reached out, taking his hand. “It’s okay. You’re fine, you’re back in the manor.”
Remy blinked at her. For a moment, she wasn’t sure he saw her. Then, in a small, weak voice, he said, “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” then passed out cold.
—+—
Logan had to hand it to the Cajun–he didn’t give up easy. He’d half expected him to run off after his injury, but within two weeks, he was back to teaching the kids about art.
Charles was happy about that, at least. He liked that he had another soldier that didn’t go down easy.
Logan was just happy he didn’t have to go cover the art class again.
—+—
Remy and Anna Marie moved in together. At first, it was just because he needed someone to stay with him, just in case his injury caused some complications. After a few days, they stopped pretending that was the reason.
Anna Marie liked Remy. The more she learned about him, the more she liked it. She liked that he hummed Cajun drinking songs under his breath when he was working on something. She liked the way his accent got thicker when he was talking to someone he was comfortable with. She liked his smile.
He didn’t tell her much about his past, but things slipped out occasionally. It didn’t matter much to her. She liked him. That was enough for the moment.
—+—
Gambit’s first mission back, he almost died. Bobby wasn’t entirely sure how he didn’t die, given that he’d been surrounded by a dozen robots in an empty room with no cards to use. He half thought he was going to be carrying Gambit’s corpse out.
But when he kicked the door open, Gambit was still standing, and the robots were gone. No, not gone–cut to pieces. Spare parts were tossed around the room, and Gambit was standing in the center, perfectly fine and entirely uninjured. He didn’t even look winded.
Bobby stared at him for a second. Then Jean yelled for backup, and the two of them went running.
It wasn’t until he was on the Blackbird headed home that he started to wonder how Gambit had managed to cut them apart with a blunt staff.
—+—
Remy had a tattoo. It was a small thing, right behind his left ear, half hidden by his hair. A little X surrounded by markings.
Anna Marie found it one night and traced a gloved hand over the mark. “Oh, are you already on board?” she teased. He’d been with the team for close to a year, but it was still funny to her that he’d get a tattoo about it.
Remy laughed and kissed the back of her hand. “It’s an old thing, chere. From before I joined up. Y’don’t need to worry ‘bout it.”
—+—
Gambit’s first all-team mission came around the one year mark. Apocalypse woke up again, and Charles drafted him onto the team to go handle it.
“What even is this guy?” he asked, sitting on the plane next to Bobby.
Bobby shrugged. “No idea. Something about being an Internal.”
“External,” Jean corrected. “He thinks he’s a god.”
Bobby didn’t think Apocalypse was a god. He was powerful, sure. Dangerous too. But calling him a god would be like calling Jean a god.
They landed in a field in Egypt, far enough away from civilization that they could fight without worry. The sun beat down on them as they approached the Horsemen. Bobby had no idea who they were. Some poor mutants roped into this, most likely. There were only three of them, though.
“Guess he didn’t have time to make a whole team,” Logan said. That was all the prelude they got before all of them dove into the fight.
Bobby didn’t keep track of Gambit during the fight. He was too focused on slightly more important things, like not dying and not passing out from heatstroke.
The fight dragged on, and too soon, they were pushing into a town. Scott shouted, and Bobby and Ororo separated from the team to keep them safe. Half the town was already evacuated, but a caravan of news crews had shown up, cameras pointed at the fight.
“Back up,” Bobby yelled.
Ororo rose in the air above his head. “اطلع من هنا!”
They listened to her, but not to him. The cameras backed up a few yards, ducking behind a fence in what might’ve been a park. It wouldn’t protect them.
Bobby opened his mouth to yell again, but before anything could come out, he heard Rogue scream Gambit’s name. Shouting came from the battlefield, harsh and loud, a mixture of English and a language he didn’t know. He spun, arms raised to fight, then froze.
Apocalypse was there. Bobby had no idea when he’d gotten there, but there he was, his golden armor gleaming in the sun, a range of daggers on his belt. He held Gambit by the throat, a large blue fist closed tightly around his neck. Wolverine was already there, stabbing into his side, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was screaming like a child throwing a temper tantrum.
“T’cha holec crete’honadi-ko erlep hose en tyo jokel f’ri!” he shouted, shaking Gambit like a ragdoll. Bobby couldn’t even begin to understand what language he was speaking.
Gambit jerked, grabbing onto Apocalypse’s armor. The gold turned pink, and that was the only warning Bobby got before the god-man’s arm exploded. The force of the explosion tossed Gambit backwards, but he landed with the same grace Bobby had come to expect.
The fight resumed, but they might as well have been gnats for all the attention Apocalypse paid to them. He was focused entirely on Gambit, still yelling in that strange language of his. Gambit never replied. He ducked and dodged and wove, strangely silent. He let Apocalypse get in close, then lunged. Bobby didn’t have time to do anything before he’d grabbed a knife from Apocalypse’s belt and stabbed it into his chest.
Most wounds did nothing to Apocalypse. Bobby had fought him enough times to know that. But whatever the dagger was made out of, it must have been stronger than anything they’d used before. Apocalypse screamed, a gut wrenching, agonizing scream. He dropped like a stone, fumbling to get the dagger out. Gambit froze, horror on his face. Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t this.
Wolverine lunged, launching himself at Apocalypse. He wrenched the knife from his chest and brought it down again and again. The god-man fell still, and Gambit walked away.
—+—
The day after Apocalypse died, Gambit took his first day off. No one objected, but Ororo couldn’t help from going to check on him.
He was in his old room, alone, sitting on the bare bed, staring at the floor. He said nothing when she entered, and didn’t look at her when she sat next to him.
“Do you need anything?” Ororo asked. She didn’t bother asking if he was okay. The answer to that was obviously no.
Gambit was silent for a moment. He raised a hand to rub his throat. Purple marks covered the skin on his neck, forming a handprint. Finally, he spoke. “I think I need to call my mom.”
—+—
It took Hank nearly a month of pestering to finally get Gambit to agree to a checkup.
“This is just so I know your baseline,” Hank said. Gambit had been very good at avoiding him, and he hadn’t gotten a chance to get any medical information since he joined the team. He’d tried, of course. After Gambit had been injured by Sinister, Hank had asked him about setting up an appointment. Gambit had waved him off.
Gambit shifted on the examination table. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Let’s get it over with.”
Hank settled in front of the computer, pulling up Gambit’s empty form. “How old are you?”
“Twenty four or so.” He tilted his head. “You keep all your records on that computer?”
“Hasn’t failed me yet,” Hank said. He went to the next question. “When’s your birthday?”
“No idea.” Gambit shrugged. “Never knew my parents. Birth certificate got destroyed during Hurricane Bonnie.”
“Alright,” Hank said. He wrote a little note on the computer. “Next of kin?”
On, and on, and on, the questions went. Gambit didn’t have any living family members that he knew of. No history of mental illness, no history of diseases. When it came time for the physical examination, Gambit winced.
“That necessary?” he said.
“It won’t be invasive,” Hank assured him.
Gambit frowned at him, but nodded.
Hank had been prepared to see scars, but he wasn’t prepared for the sheer amount of scars on Gambit’s body. Cigarette burns on his arms and legs, old cuts on his back. The worst was on his stomach. A gunshot wound, not especially large. The skin around it was discolored, a black spot that stuck out against his tan skin.
“It got infected,” Gambit said as an explanation.
Hank sighed. “I’m sorry.” He squinted at the wound. “Whatever doctor treated it did a good job. I can’t even see where they stitched it up.”
—+—
At the year and a half mark, things got strange. Not bad, necessarily. Scott had started to trust Remy, even if he didn’t really like him. He wasn’t a friend, exactly, but he was a teammate. He was a part of his life. A very annoying part, but a part.
It started on a mission to Alaska. Gambit wasn’t even on the mission. He’d been assigned to stay behind with the students. Instead, Scott, Rogue, Logan and Ororo were sent out on the plane.
The mission went bad almost instantly. They hadn’t even touched down when they got attacked. Between Scott’s flying and Ororo’s powers, they were able to keep the plane in one piece, but not in the air. They slammed into the snow, alarms blaring across the Blackbird.
Their attackers made the mistake of landing, and Logan practically ripped them apart. Unfortunately, they did enough damage. The Blackbird was destroyed, and their comms weren’t working this far from the manor. They didn’t have a telepath.
“We’ll head for the nearest town,” Scott decided.
“There’s a blizzard coming,” Ororo warned. “I can hold it off while I’m awake, but if we can’t reach a town within a day…”
“I know,” Scott said. He motioned to Logan. “Lead the way. Rogue, Storm, try to stay in the sky, see if you can spot anything.”
But they didn’t find anything. Logan couldn’t smell anything for miles, and Rogue and Storm found nothing. Hours passed, and frostbite was starting to set in. Scott had grown up in Alaska. He knew how bad it could get. He knew how deadly it could be.
“Just keep moving,” he said, teeth chattering. He blasted the snow ahead of them, but the heat that produced only lingered for a few seconds.
The sun went down at some point, and the world got a whole lot colder. Scott shuddered, rubbing his arms. Rogue had stopped flying, trying to save a bit of energy. Even Logan was looking a little worse for wear.
“There’s nothing out here,” Logan said.
Scott grimaced. “Storm, Rogue, start flying. Go. Go find someone who can help.”
“No,” Rogue said immediately. “No, if I leave you two out here, you’ll freeze.”
Not the two of them. Logan’s healing factor would keep him alive. Scott, on the other hand…
“It’s fine,” Scott said. “We’ll be fine. You’re our best chance now. Go.”
A shout echoed across the snowy plains. “Mes amis!”
Scott’s head swung to the side. Sure enough, there was Gambit, wearing his usual trench coat, a backpack slung around his shoulders. He half thought that he was hallucinating from the cold, but then Rogue cried out Gambit’s name and threw herself towards him.
“How’d you get here?” Logan demanded, though he seemed more relieved than angry.
Gambit shrugged, wrapping an arm around Rogue in a quick hug before he opened his backpack, revealing four thermoses. “Stole a plane. ‘Bout a two minute walk to the south. I’ve got cocoa too.”
Scott never liked Gambit more than he had in that moment. He accepted a thermos without hesitation, downing the hot liquid.
Gambit’s plane was small, but they managed to fit in just fine. He’d brought blankets too, and a portable space heater kept the interior warm. Scott knew it was strange, but he was so focused on not dying from frostbite that he paid it no mind.
“Gambit’s gonna be honest, he shouldn’t be flying this plane,” Gambit said. “Nearly fell out of the sky on the way here, smashing buttons.”
Scott let out a slow exhale, moving his fingers until he got feeling back in them. “I’ll handle it. You just make sure everyone’s okay.”
—+—
“Are you okay?” Anna Marie whispered to him one night. It had been nearly two months since Apocalypse died, but he still seemed off.
Remy shook his head. “I’m fine, chere,” he said. “Just thinking about some stuff back home.”
A little while later, when Anna Marie woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, she heard Remy talking on the phone. He was speaking in french, and she didn’t understand exactly what he was saying, but he didn’t sound happy. Later, when he crawled back into bed, she asked about it.
“‘S nothing,” he said. He kissed a spot on her head where her hair covered her skin. “I love you,” he said suddenly. “Y’know that, right?”
“Of course,” Anna Marie said. The urgency in his tone surprised her. “Is everything alright?”
“Yeah. Just makin’ sure.”
—+—
The shoe dropped in October. It was Art Week. Earlier in the year, Gambit had lobbied Xavier to have a week for the art students to put up their paintings and drawings all around the mansion. He’d relented after a while, and now the hallways were filled with color.
Gambit called in sick the first day. Scott thought at first that Rogue had something to do with that, but he saw her at lunch.
“He caught a flu from one of the students,” she said when he asked. “He’s fine, but he’s gonna sleep it off.”
“Oh, no,” Jean said, frowning. “Let us know if there’s anything we can do for him.”
They didn’t hear anything more on it for the rest of the day. The kids kept them busy, and by the time school ended, Scott was too tired to ask about Gambit. Jean shared the gossip as usual.
“He’s moved into his old room,” she said. “He doesn’t want to risk getting Rogue sick. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Sure,” Scott said. He frowned. “Do you think he’ll need to see Hank?”
“Only if it goes on for another day,” Jean said with a shrug.
The next day, they woke up to shouting and pounding on their door. Scott jerked up, hand raising to touch his visor. If they were under attack again–
“It’s Logan,” Jean said, grabbing his hand to stop him. “It’s Logan, don’t fire.” She pried herself out of bed, dragging him with him. Sure enough, Logan was standing outside the door, his expression bright red and furious. He was still in his pajamas.
Scott stared at him, somewhere between half asleep and ready for a fight. “What happened?” he demanded.
“Cajun’s a traitor,” Logan said.
It took Scott a moment to process what he’d just said. “Are you serious?”
“Wait, what?” Jean said, frowning deeply. “Remy’s as loyal as any of us.”
“Apparently not.” Logan’s voice was little more than a growl. He sounded half feral. “Rogue went to check his room to see if he was alright. He wasn’t there. All his things were gone. The Blackbird’s gone too.”
The situation finally registered with Scott. He swore. “Shit. Go check to make sure the students are alright.”
“Are we sure he did anything wrong?” Jean asked. “He might’ve been kidnapped.”
“Maybe,” Scott said. He turned to Jean. “Go make sure Rogue’s okay.”
The three of them parted ways, all headed to complete their own tasks. No one was missing but Gambit, and he’d only taken his belongings from his room. The school was undisturbed, even the art room hadn't been touched.
The basement was a different story. Forge was already down there when Scott found him, looking furious in a way he’d never seen. Ororo was with him, her tone calm and consoling.
“He broke the security system,” Forge said to Scott when he saw him. “The entire security system! All the weapons in the armory are gone, I don’t even know what he did to Hank’s computer, and he took the collars that we got from Sinister.”
Scott’s mind was spinning. “How bad is it?” he asked.
“He left us without a defense system,” Forge said. He seemed to be shaking with rage. “He ripped out the tracking system on the Blackbird. He broke the Danger Room. He even destroyed the WiFi router. Almost nothing’s operational.”
“And what is operational?” Charles’s voice cut through the room, sharp and clear. Scott turned to see him wheeling his way over.
Forge shook his head. “Our phones are good, but the WiFi’s dead. I don’t know what he did to the computers, but they’re basically bricks. It’s going to take me hours to get them working again.”
“Daniel,” Charles said, anger creeping into his tone. “What’s working?”
Forge grimaced, thinking. “Cerebro should still be functional. We never showed him how to use it, so he didn’t know how to shut it down.”
Charles nodded. “Excellent. Start working on repairing the security system. Scott, Ororo, with me.”
Scott obeyed immediately, trailing after him into Cerebro’s designated rooms. Sure enough, the silvery walls were entirely untouched. Gambit apparently hadn’t even bothered to try to break the machine.
Scott had seen Charles use Cerebro before, but it was always strange to witness. Psychic shockwaves rolled off of him, turning the air around his head into a halo of static. Charles closed his eyes, focusing intently.
“He’s got a three hour start on us,” he said after a moment. The anger in his voice had cooled into neutrality. “He’s approaching the New Orleans area.”
“He mentioned he’s from there,” Ororo said. Her voice sounded hollow. “He lived through Hurricane Bonnie.”
Charles opened his mouth to speak, but stopped suddenly. He shivered. “I can’t sense him.”
Scott and Ororo exchanged a glance. Cerebro was built to sense any living mutant. If he couldn’t sense Gambit, that meant he was dead.
“Do you think he was kidnapped?” Ororo asked.
“Maybe,” Scott said. “He might’ve crashed. He said he doesn’t know how to fly a plane.”
“He got it to take off.”
Charles shushed them, waving a hand. His eyes closed in concentration, and he pressed his lips into a frown. “I can’t sense any mutants in New Orleans.”
That caught Scott’s attention. New Orleans was a big city, and it wasn’t particularly hostile to mutants, from what he knew. There was no reason for there to be no mutants at all.
“None?” Ororo said.
Charles pulled off the headset. “None. Get everyone down here, and cancel classes. We need to go to New Orleans.”