Disclaimer: Characters belong to Marvel. I think.
Warning: Sex, language.
A/N: The Other Side of Dance is chapters 4-7 of Arrow of Time told entirely from Gambit's POV. Throughout the original chapters Gambit's intentions are pretty much shielded, both from Rogue and from the reader, and in this short story I wanted to capture something of the conflict he is going through on the inside, as well as give voice to his motivations and his true feelings for Rogue. If I have to be honest - I prefer writing from Gambit's perspective. Rogue is great and has a 'pure', righteous, determined voice; but Gambit is muddier, murkier, more conflicted, and he makes for an interesting narrator. I hope you all enjoy this exploration of his character as much as I did writing it. And once again, a huge thank you to jpraner for her stellar beta-reading and for 'getting' my characters more than I do. ;) Read her, guys. She's good. ;)
This is the first in several vignettes to be set in the HoC universe.
The Other Side of Dance
. I .
There were two lists.
One on the left, one on the right, both shining up at him in the faint glow from the tablet screen, black on white and dancing, reflected, on the surface of his eyes.
On the left was a roll of names, the names of all the many mutants incarcerated throughout the New York state area. And on the right were the names of all those that had once been in the list on the left, but were now in a room a couple of floors below and several rooms across.
The right hand list was considerably shorter than the left; but it was long enough, and he felt an odd pride in the vertical column of names because they were the culmination of several years' worth of work, and he was proud of it in the way a man would take pride in his achievements, however much he happened to despise his choice of career.
A flick of a forefinger, and the left hand list went scrolling downward in a monochrome blur. He stopped it when it got to the letters highlighted in a garish neon yellow. KAPOOR, RASHIDA, it read. CODENAME: HAVEN.
He knew the name, but not the face that belonged to it.
He was fairly sure she'd never been an X-Man… that he'd heard her name only in the context of someone who had been brought forward in one of Professor Xavier's very few recruitment drives. She'd never signed up. But Xavier had kept her name on file, just in case. He'd read it one day on the Cerebro database, during one of his many illicit data-mining sessions at the mansion.
"Rashida Kapoor, Rashida Kapoor," he muttered to himself, just to keep her name fresh in his mind. He set the tablet carefully down on the desk and swivelled round to his laptop, tapped on one of the many icons cluttering his desktop.
CEREBRO DATABASE, read the flashy loading screen that opened up.
It was one of the first things he'd stolen from the X-Men, and it had turned out to be one of the best investments he'd ever made in his life. He'd installed the database onto every new system he possessed. In fact, he was pretty much never without it. The endless list of names seemed to follow him wherever he went, and even in the night they haunted his dreams. He knew the names of each and every one he had come into contact with. He knew the names of every one he had sold.
The database loaded.
KAPOOR, RASHIDA, he typed in.
And there she was. His next target, the next name on his hit list.
A sullen-faced Indian woman looked out at him from a decade-old photo.
Forty-two years old; nationality, Indian; height, 5'5"; weight, 153 lbs; religion, Hindi; marital status, widowed.
He did a quick mental calculation in his head, adding 10 years to her age, trying to imagine what she might look like now, aged and scarred and probably emaciated. However he pictured her, it wasn't attractive.
He took in a breath – the sigh of a man already weary of the monotonous task that lay before him. He settled himself in the swivel chair at his desk, sat at the laptop and stared at the sullen face wishing he didn't have to see it again.
"C'mon, LeBeau," he murmured to himself. "Time t' do your homework."
Because going after a target without knowing anything about them would be the kind of elementary mistake even a novice wouldn't make. He just wished that this research didn't have to make his marks so damn human.
Remy LeBeau gave another sigh, ran a hand through his still-damp auburn hair, feeling the tiredness begin to pulse behind his eyes. The shower that morning had taken the edge off of his hangover, but not that much; and now that he was sitting here doing this, facing another reason to drown his guilt in a pint of beer, he was beginning to feel it again. Instinctively he reached for the half empty pack of cigarettes hiding under the general mass of papers at his right-hand-side; and almost as instinctively, he drew his hand back. He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and rubbed his face with both palms. Damn, he thought, and he stared at Rashida Kapoor's face through the gaps between his fingers, her lips thin and her gaze accusatory.
Don't be like dat, chere, he thought to himself. Dis ain't my fault.
But at least half of it was.
And he didn't even bother hiding it from himself anymore.
Self-justification had always been the weak-link in his chain of logic and so he'd dispensed with it altogether. Don't think. Just do.
And that's why he leaned forward, put his mind to the task in hand, and finally scrolled down to read the rest of her file.
His cell phone buzzed under the sheaf of printouts he'd slapped on his desk before stepping into the shower this morning, the vibration growling at him to take notice.
"Go 'way," he muttered, hitting the 'Page Dn' key and scrolling down to the next paragraph.
He had an inkling it might be the girl he'd met at the bar last night. He'd been drunk then, but he had a feeling he'd given her his number at some point between his fourth drink and making out with her in the alley.
Fuckin' idiot, he mentally scolded himself.
As a rule he never gave a girl his number. The fact that he had told him he was getting more desperate than he cared to admit. It didn't matter that he'd been drunk when he'd given it away. He didn't give his number to girls. Period. They gave theirs to him. If he needed a lay, he called them. And if he didn't, well… …
But he knew what this was all about, really.
He'd wanted her to call him so that he didn't have to open up the invitation and end up feeling guilty because he'd be the one to initiate sex with her and… …
He snorted irritably to himself.
Guilty? Why should he feel guilty?
He was a single man who had his urges and who hadn't had sex in… well. Weeks now.
Remy quickly slid his hand under the small pile of printouts and retrieved his phone.
It wasn't some girl whose name he couldn't even remember.
It was Rogue.
He almost fell out of his chair when he saw her name right there on the screen. For a long moment he couldn't even read the short message lined out in small type beneath. He didn't often get that feeling, not these days. The feeling of being slammed in the gut with a baseball, of having all the wind taken out of him, the headrush of adrenaline, that involuntary quickening of the heart. But he felt it then.
He felt it when he saw her name.
Rogue.
His heart was still thumping hard when he opened up the message. He read it again and again like a foolish pup reading his first love letter.
Remy need 2 talk, was all it said. Black womb.
Two short sentences, short and straight and to the point.
So carefully crafted, so meticulously constructed that he felt sure she had spent an age figuring out exactly how to phrase it.
The words danced before his eyes, performing a macabre waltz in his head.
Black womb.
Okay. So she knew about the Black Womb project. No big deal. He'd already told her something about it, months ago. But something had obviously happened, for her to suddenly text him like this. She'd obviously found something out. Just how much he wasn't ready or willing to speculate on. Whatever it was, it was the reason she wanted to talk.
His teeth pulled at his lower lip. Hm. How to play this? His mind skimmed over a hundred possible outcomes in a few short seconds. He tried not to think about what she knew, or what she thought she knew. If he was going to worry about anything, it was how exactly he was going to manipulate the initiative she had taken into a scenario he could actually work. And as usual, a plan was beginning to form in his mind mere seconds into the opening scene.
A smile began to play across Remy LeBeau's lips.
He'd waited months for this opening. Months and months. And now the game… it had begun.
Finally.
He slipped the phone into the back pocket of his jeans, snapped shut his laptop.
"Sorry, Rashida," he murmured without a trace of regret. "Looks like I got a better offer t'night."
He stood and crossed the room, opened the door and flicked the light switch out.
"Don't wait up," he added to the machine sleeping on his desk, and with a grin he turned and left.
-oOo-
Click, clack, click, clack.
Clarity's fingers danced across the keyboard in an almost languorous sweep. His movements were poetic, but the noise they made was all staccato.
He didn't look up when Remy walked in, but then he rarely did. Especially not these days, when the two had barely exchanged two words at all.
Remy had learned to live with the not being friends anymore. He knew he was to blame for it, and because he was to blame for it, there was no point in being sentimental about the whole thing. He still felt the sting the loss of that friendship caused him; but he didn't dwell on it. He didn't like making mistakes, but he was the kind of man that admitted them readily when he made them.
"Clarity," he greeted the man from the doorway, when the little hunched figure at the computer screens made no sign of halting his mechanical dance.
"Rems."
The word was short and stiff and cold. The small, gnarled black man named Clarity didn't even look over as he said it. It was, nevertheless, greeting enough for Remy to take a step forward. He didn't bother with niceties; he knew they weren't welcome anymore.
"Got a job for you," he said instead, and the man at the monitors nodded ruefully.
"Yeah. Figured you would." He continued clack, clack, clacking at his keyboard. "Well? Whaddaya want?"
Remy took it as an invitation to approach his former friend. He did so with all the insouciance born in him, slipping the phone out of his back pocket as he did so.
"Gotta text," he explained, laying the phone on the small desk next to Clarity's arm. "I need you to get a location on it."
He'd made sure the text was open and on-screen as he'd laid it on the table. Clarity glanced at it, never once halting in the elegant sweep of his fingers, read the few short words with disinterest. Then he did a double-take. The clack, clack, clacking stopped. He turned his head and looked fully at the message, his fingers poised over the keys as if frozen in time.
When he looked up at Remy his face had gone very still.
Remy read the accusation in his eyes with all the calm of a man who had long been expecting it.
"Essex'll want a position on her," he spoke dispassionately. "Find out where dis was sent from, and report de coordinates to him. We get a lock on her, we can reel her in."
Clarity's expression darkened. He stared at Remy with the steely glare of someone who disagreed wholeheartedly but didn't dare mutiny. After a long moment during which Remy felt the full force of his old friend's disapproval, Clarity picked up the phone and, tight-lipped, jabbed a USB cable that was already linked to one of his computers into its side. One of the monitors nearest to him flickered into life, code spilling down its screen as the program ran its trace.
"T'anks," was all Remy said, and he turned to go.
When he got to the door, that was when Clarity chose to speak to him.
"You're a shit, you know that Rems?" he spat at him in barely disguised disgust.
Sticks and stones.
Remy walked out the door and didn't look back.
-oOo-
Sinister was in his lab, dissecting something that was still alive.
It was hairless and pink and human-sized.
It was still twitching there on the table as Sinister's flunkies wheeled his tools away and the good doctor removed the latex gloves from his lily-white hands with a sharp snap, snap.
"You say she contacted you?" Essex asked him in that soft voice that was all at once mellifluous and dangerous at the same time, pulling the surgical mask from his face. Remy stood and nodded, not looking at the half-dead thing on the table as it, too, was wheeled out.
"By text," he explained. "She wanted to talk."
"Hm." Essex's expression was amused, interested. "And did you reply to her?" he asked, moving to a nearby sink and washing his hands in the usual manner. The scent of chemicals wafted round Remy in a short burst of gag-inducing pungency.
"Of course not," he replied matter-of-factly. "I gave de phone to Clarity. He's workin' on a trace as we speak."
"Good." Essex's tone was brusque, efficient; he wiped his hands on a towel and threw it into a nearby bio-waste can. "It means we can finally put our plan into action. I admit, I had thought she would contact you sooner. I was not expecting to have to wait this long for my little prize. But at last, our best laid plans will come to fruition."
Remy said nothing. There was rarely any point in adding commentary to Sinister's self-congratulatory monologues.
"How long will it be before we get a location?" Essex asked, turning away and removing his bloodied apron. Remy shrugged.
"He didn't say. But he works fast. So soon, I guess."
Essex nodded absently.
"And he will report the necessary details to me?"
"Already told him to."
"Excellent." The small smile Sinister passed him was appreciative. "Then we put our plan into action tomorrow, at the earliest opportunity." He paused, looked fully at Remy with narrowed eyes, said; "Are you sure—"
"Yes," Remy answered, not even waiting for the question to be finished. And Essex's smile widened into something that was altogether malicious.
"Good. One does want to be certain, you see. You do understand that, don't you, my son?"
-oOo-
Rashida Kapoor was firmly on hold.
Remy made no detours, heading straight back to his room for his trench and his bike keys. Wallet, cigs, cards. Check. All he needed now was his phone back.
He stepped back down to the basement level, finding Clarity in much the same attitude as he had before. There was a hard look on the man's face as he heard Remy enter his little domain and approach him, still sitting at the wall of monitors.
"Didja get it?" he asked.
Clarity swivelled in his chair, that same mutinous disdain for everything Remy appeared to stand for apparent on his face. He slapped the phone back into Remy's palm harder than was necessary, turning only to bring up a nearby screen with a satellite map of New York City centred on it. A beacon was flashing in an area of town he didn't recognise.
"Traced the message to here," Clarity explained belligerently, tapping the beacon with a finger. Remy leaned in to take a closer look.
"Where's dis again?" he asked, squinting at the screen and trying to familiarise himself with the surroundings.
"Old subway station that was converted into a bunker during the Sentinel wars," Clarity returned. He pressed a button, zooming out then zooming back in, giving Remy a better feel of the area. Remy studied what he was shown quickly, carefully.
"Ah, okay," he nodded to himself after a moment. "I got my bearings now." He tilted his head slightly, looked at the map from another angle. "Where's de nearest landmark?" he queried in a lighter tone of voice. Clarity looked at him sharply, his brow furrowing in sudden confusion.
"The docks," he replied presently. "Why?"
Remy didn't answer. He figured Clarity was smart enough to figure it out by himself.
"Can you get de coordinates?"
The other man stared a while, watching as Remy opened up Rogue's message on his phone, finally ready to punch in a reply, his thumb poised over the virtual keypad.
"You're arrangin' a meet?" Clarity spoke incredulously, and Remy glared at him over the top of his phone.
"What does it look like? Get me those coordinates."
The peremptory tone finally got Clarity to do as he was told, but there was still doubt in his expression. He read out the coordinates of the pier almost hesitantly, and Remy copied them down faithfully into the reply box, digit by precious digit.
When Clarity's voice fell silent, he tapped SEND.
He slipped the phone back into his trench pocket and saw that his erstwhile friend was looking up at him with a countenance that had now lost all of its previous hostility.
"You goin' to warn her?" he quizzed, and there was a strain of hope – no, relief – in his voice.
"I dunno yet," Remy mused. "You t'ink I could get away wit' it wit'out Essex noticin'? He's already suspicious of me, mon ami. He's waitin' for me to slip up. I can't."
The words made Clarity's brow crumple again; he shook his head slowly, disdainfully.
"I get it." And his tone was back to cold once more. "Y'wanna taste the goods again before they get passed on. Shit, Rems," he exclaimed indignantly. "You cold, man. Real cold. It ain't what she deserves. And here I was thinkin' you cared about her."
Remy's smile was small, taut.
"If Rogue is de only t'ing to get me what I want from Essex," he answered evenly, "den he'll get her. All I'm doin' is smoothin' a path of least resistance, mon ami. Essex is all rearin' and ready to get her by brute force. I'm just showin' him dat force ain't needed."
He turned, ready to leave; stopping only when he heard Clarity say; "I don't get you, man. What could Essex possibly have to give you that's better than her?"
And Remy didn't answer, couldn't answer.
He couldn't risk everything he'd planned, even to someone who was a potential ally in this whole sorry mess. The only person he could trust with the truth was himself. So he walked out the door and left Clarity hating him, thinking to himself not without a hint of irony that de answer's real simple, mon ami. What could Essex possibly have t' give me dat's better den Rogue?
And a bitter smile twisted his lips as he thought of the answer.
Her life.
-oOo-
Continued in chapter 2.