This idea is the spawn of a nightmare I had (no, it had nothing to do with the X-Men, I'm not so far gone that I live, breathe, and dream Romy, heh) and listening to Leo Moracchioli's cover of 'Heathens'. Just a little thing I spit out before (finally!) getting the time to write up 'She's Up Under My Skin Now', hope you enjoy, I actually had fun writing Remy as such a rotten person. Also, this is my very first attempt at a fight scene, so please let me know what you think
One would say that today started out like just about any other for one Remy LeBeau. After all, he'd awakened in bed with a beautiful woman, had gently roused her to wakefulness with cunning fingers, a skilled tongue, and a round of intense lovemaking, and then after she'd curled up into his side and gone back to sleep, he'd slipped out from under her and out of bed.
But it wasn't at all like any other day. Today, he wasn't leaving a one-night stand, and today was a very big day, with a very big job, and one hell of a challenge. He always did love a challenge, the bigger, the better, and today was perhaps the biggest challenge he'd ever face in his twenty-six years of life.
It wouldn't go down as his hardest challenge, though. He paused, looking down at the woman in his bed, curled up in his sheets, her hair a wild toss over her shoulder, her fine-featured face almost angelic in sleep. No, his hardest challenge had been her, Rogue.
He smiled down at her, reaching out to gently trace the curls of her hair with his fingers. Over the past several months, he'd stolen many things from her: her affection, her heart, then her name, and finally, her virginity. And she'd been incredible, took his damn breath away with all that passion, all those beautiful emotions, all those sweet words and even sweeter sounds, all of it his, and never to be anyone else's.
He thought he loved her.
Love? What a foreign notion! But what else could've caused the lurch in his chest every time he'd watched her in battle, the wash of relief when she'd come out swinging, body seething with temper, and mouth fired up with taunts and insults toward her attacker? What else could've softened him up a little when she'd opened up to him, softened him up even more when she'd let him in? And then there was the fact that she'd never, ever been far from his mind.
Remy momentarily wondered if perhaps his attachment was more of an obsession. He did have that tendency, always going back to anything that offered up a pleasant memory, always thinking about it, always wanting it, always plucking those past times out of his memory banks, dusting them off, polishing them up, and basking in them.
Love, obsession, it didn't matter what it was. She was his in the end game, and part of the payment Essex owed him for this job.
A buzz in the pocket of his ever trusty leather duster shook him from his thoughts, and he silently walked over to where it was neatly laid over the chair in front of his desk, quickly retrieving his phone. It was a text, a short, simple line that stretched a grin of anticipation across his mouth.
We're ready.
Very good. He quickly fired off his response and headed for the shower. This was it, the culmination of months of meticulously watching, observing, learning strengths, weaknesses, digging up pasts and even futures. His planning was flawless, no detail missed, every possible known scenario accounted for, a solution for every possible known problem.
And Gambit was ready.
It was exactly two hours later, and they'd just finished an intense Danger Room session. It had been Gambit's turn to man the controls, and after throwing up the necessary shielding around the control room to keep Jean's mind out (pure serendipity there, that the Phoenix had happened, necessitating the Shi'ar upgrades turning the Danger Room into her confinement and deprivation chamber), he'd taken out the professor with a quick snap of his neck, and ran a new and particularly brutal simulation that he'd designed and programmed with Shadowcat's help. Gambit now laughed to himself, the humor of the situation getting to him. How amusing it was, to pit them up against Sinister and the Marauders in a training sequence with Kitty's stamp all over it, only to have them stack up against the real deal immediately after.
When the internal alarms sounded, signaling the response to Scrambler's hit on the main security, the simulation ended, and the Danger Room and mansion as a whole locked down. Gambit efficiently cracked into the system, smiled a joker's smile as he stole all the information on the grounds' Shi'ar construct, and patiently waited on the show.
Watching the rapid play of alarmed, then resigned, and finally determined expressions play across the faces of his teammates, Gambit chuckled when Cyclops attempted to override standard lockdown by opening up the Danger Room to let them all out. After all, with the heroes in the basement, that left all the kiddies upstairs wide open and vulnerable to attack. When the Danger Room's oh-so polite, robotic voice rang out, "request denied, authorization overriden', Gambit chuckled again at the absolutely horrified expressions of his teammates as the full realization of the current situation set in.
The students, all of them - the babies and toddlers in the nursery, the children in preschool and kindergarten, the older ones in grade school all the way up to high school - all of them were trapped in the mansion, with no means of protection, and they, the X-Men, were all trapped down here, with no means of escaping to do the protecting.
The X-Men immediately leaped into action with renewed frenzy, throwing out everything they had to escape. Especially Jean and Scott, and Stormy and Logan, they had babies in the nursery. Remy couldn't help the sudden, vicious kick of sympathy for the young parents. He didn't enjoy killing children, but it was a sop to his guilt knowing Sinister's plans with all that genetic material. Those kids weren't dead forever.
Of course, with that line of thinking, neither were the X-Men, technically. His eyes went to Rogue, trailing her as she screamed through the air and flung her fist into the weakest part of the Danger Room doors. He cringed at the thought of her reaction to his part in all this. He wasn't looking forward to the shade of pain and betrayal in those damn eyes, not after she'd cried out his name and then smiled up at him, and smiled again after he'd said he loved her.
" 'S only temporary, homme," he reminded himself. She would be his again, and she wouldn't have a stitch of this memory to hold her back.
Remy felt the brush of Sinister's mind, a slick, cold swipe telling him that they were done, that the slaughter upstairs was over. Pulled away from his thoughts of Rogue, Gambit leaned back in his chair, propped his feet up on the control console, and laced his fingers behind his head, prepared to watch his job complete itself. He rarely kept himself out of a good, rousing fight, but he'd planned this one time to be a special occasion. Watching the X-Men get their asses handed to them offered up a satisfaction that he wasn't inclined to pass up.
Assholes never liked him, anyway.
Gambit briefly wondered if he'd have gone through with this if they'd ever accepted him. Though he certainly was accustomed to distance and isolation, going clear back to his first memories as a kid on the street, there'd always been that part of him that had craved more. That craving, that need, it'd been what Jean-Luc had lured him in with promises to fulfill, only it'd been a lie. It'd been what the X-Men had in each other, what Xavier had also promised him in the beginning. But that'd been a lie, too.
Come to think of it, the only person that Gambit hadn't yet caught in a lie was Essex. He snorted to himself over that. A man might say he was a fucked up kind of guy, and he wouldn't be lying. Gambit's reply would be that he was only a product of a fucked up world in which the only person who never lied to him or tried to kill him outright was his true father, a single minded psychopath, a butcher in the name of mutant evolution, a man who had abandoned his son to the streets of New Orleans due to flawed genetics.
A buzz and a loud clang grabbed everyone's attention, Gambit's, too, and he smiled with a nod. That would be Scrambler yet again, killing the security shutdown on the doors. Said doors screeched as they slowly opened, and a sudden whirl of Riptide whipped through the room and back out, screams and curses filling the Danger Room in his wake as his shurikens hit their marks.
"Two points for Team Marauders," Gambit commented with satisfaction. Their opening salvo had killed Cyclops and Beast. "Maybe two and a half points?" He wondered aloud, noting the several others already injured, too.
Hot on Riptide's heels was Vertigo, flinging her power far and wide, bringing Archangel, Storm, and Rogue crashing to the ground, and bringing everyone already there to their knees. Some passed out unconscious; Jubilee and Shadowcat vomited, their nausea was so intense; the rest were simply left on all fours, bleary eyed and completely incapacitated under the spell of one green-haired slip of a girl.
After that, the Marauders quickly pressed their advantage. Malice slid into Rogue, snapping the stripe-haired mutant alert, and went for Phoenix first, slapping her bare hand on the other woman's face and yanking hard with her absorption. Then she reached over for nearby Storm, smiling into the weather witch's eyes as she began sucking her dry, too, letting both women fall after she'd taken everything. And on she went, dropping Iceman and then both Shadowcat and Jubilee together like flies with a saccharine smile and flint for eyes as she left a dead trail behind her.
Meanwhile, Sabretooth predictably took on Wolverine, both men intent on ripping the other to shreds and seemingly doing a damn find job of it. Gambit actually hated Sabretooth more than he did Wolverine, and had been loath to pull him in on the job, but since Wolverine was well nigh impossible to kill, he had to be distracted.
A glance back to Vertigo, and Gambit saw her focusing her power at high intensity on Psylock and Archangel, shifting it all over to Archangel just as Scalphunter stepped up to cave in a barely conscious Psylock's chest with a super-punch to the sternum. Archangel screamed in horror at watching his lover's death, and actually roused from his misery enough to flex his wings and release a series of razor-sharp flechettes at both Marauders. It was a kill shot to Scalphunter, several spears hitting major organs, but Vertigo dodged hard and came away with only a nasty rip across her bicep.
Harpoon, ever the opportunist, stepped in and tore out several of the metal spears from Scalphunter's body, gave them all a zap, and let them sing all the way into Archangel's throat, chest, and abdomen just as the blue-skinned devil took aim at him.
Watching Malice leave Rogue in a lurch that left his woman on her knees, Gambit rose from his chair and exited the control room. Time to clean up.
By the time Gambit entered the Danger Room, Scrambler had just neutralized the powers of both Rogue and Wolverine, and Sabretooth gleefully flexed his fingers before jumping at Rogue with a vicious swipe that laid open five fatal gashes across her gut. Not even slowing down, he tackled Wolverine, and with a series of feline yowls and snarls, completely gave into his feral side, tearing his victim open from throat to navel.
All in all, the slaughter of the X-Men had happened in only a matter of minutes. They hadn't stood a chance, already rung out by an intense training sequence and the enormous emotional toll of the attack. And now that they were all gone, the Marauders set about collecting the bodies, efficiently clearing out the room and preparing the corpses for transport. Essex had been explicit in his instructions that all of the dead was prime genetic material, and he'd promised all of them the slowest and most painful deaths imaginable if they dared mishandle his prize in transit.
Gambit ignored the others as he bee-lined for the woman curled over on her side, clutching her midsection in agony. Dropping to one knee beside Rogue, he slid one hand under her head and used the other to push her hair out of her eyes. She was already too pale, her skin too clammy, and Gambit readily recognized the later stage of shock. She still had enough spark in her that when her eyes found his, they lit up with the flare of emotions scraping across his empathy: fury, hate, hurt, and complete devastation. Love, too. She still loved him, hated herself for it.
He greedily soaked it all up.
"Ah, chere," he crooned, gathering her up into his chest. She was too far gone to speak or really even move, hell, she was barely responsive now. "Dis be over soon, yeah? An' it be better next time, I promise y' dat." He kissed the top of her head.
Tears stung his eyes. He hadn't expected this to hurt so damn much. " 'M sorry it hadda go like dis, girl," he murmured into fluffy curls, and held her like that til she breathed her last.
"It be better next time, sweet," Remy repeated his promise, scooping her up and carrying her to the rest of the bodies ready for transport.
Six months later...
Remy found himself once more standing in front of a large, cylindrical tank. In it, behind thick glass, she was suspended in a thin, clear fluid. A thick, pulsating cord strung out from her navel to a large mass of tissue lumped up at the bottom of the tank, into which a line below fed all the essential nutritional support to her ten hour gestational period.
A jerky flutter of her limbs, and she was moving closer to him, hands pressing against the glass as she blinked and squinted, trying to see him. Her vision was still poor, as she'd only just opened her eyes twenty minutes ago.
She was beautiful, took his damn breath away. But then, she'd always done that, from the original all the way through every one of her clones.
All four of them.
Remy flattened his lips at that thought, and firmly shied away from it, instead letting his eyes slide over her, drinking in every detail as he stepped closer to the tank, reaching out to cover the glass against her hand. Her eyes widened, and she scowled, jerking back, as if afraid he'd actually touch her.
Another touch-me-not, and one who very clearly set her boundaries, even now.
Remy felt the beginnings of true excitement then. Unlike the others before her, this one already looked to be the firecracker that her original was, and he positively ached- burned –to have her, taste her, open up his power and feel her.
Little matter that he'd just had her predecessor, who called herself Ana, in his arms, in his mouth and wrapped around his body not even an hour ago. He'd left her dozing in his bed at home, completely satisfied and completely unaware that he was off to meet the next in line.
He tried to shy away from that thought, too, but it instead turned his mind six months back. Once they'd returned to base, after the 'X-termination', as Harpoon had laughingly dubbed it, the very first thing Essex had done was pay all of his men, and it'd been a mere matter of hours that he'd paid Remy with Rogue's first clone.
Of course, she hadn't been exactly like her original; she'd introduced herself as MaryAnn. And much like a lab-created diamond compared to its natural counterparts, MaryAnn had been Rogue, only quickly made by man's hands instead of in the wild, and was pure, genetic perfection. All the little flaws that Remy hadn't ever noticed, the tiny asymmetries that everyone has, the health pre-dispositions, certain epi-genetic factors... Essex had manipulated all of it so that she was as perfect as she could be. Essex had also given her Rogue's mind, heavily edited and...corrected...so as to give Remy the beautiful heart and soul that was Rogue, but none of shade she'd experienced.
At first, everything had gone well. Remy had charmed MaryAnn even more easily than the original, and she'd fallen hard into a whirlwind romance with him. Unfortunately, about three weeks into their affair, certain memory fragments had resurfaced, and those brought on the nightmares. Remy hadn't counted on her eventually realizing the dreams were really memories, and he certainly hadn't counted on her eventually regaining enough of them to know what he'd done. The fight that'd ensued had left them both bruised and bloodied, and him unconscious in Essex's lab for several hours.
When Remy had learned that it'd be easier, not to mention considerably less messy and likely far more successful, to start over rather than try to fix MaryAnn, he'd realized he couldn't let the first clone walk about with the second. And if he'd felt a crack in his heart while holding her as she slipped away after Sabertooth had gutted her? Doing so after he had killed her flat broke it.
The next two, Marie and Ana, had gone much the same way, with Essex trying a different change in her memory patterns to wall off troublesome ones, each change more sophisticated than the last. And both times, the memories had returned, though they'd held back for a longer period of time, and the flood that'd happened to MaryAnn had slowed to a mere trickle for Ana.
Naturally, Remy had made Marie his, Ana, too, and both times, when the memories triggered, he'd immediately had the next clone started, knowing he'd discard the current for the new as soon as she was ready.
Killing her the second time had been... Well. Suffice it to say, he really wasn't looking forward to killing Ana, and he hoped to hell, even prayed to a god he was sure never listened to him anyway, that he wouldn't have to kill this one...
But he'd been careful this time. He'd taken every precaution he could think of with this clone. She came de-powered to prevent accidental absorptions and with her mind completely missing those rotten memories. Lucky for Remy, Essex, ever patient with the entire shitshow in the interest of experimentation, had complied with both risky procedures, delicately carving chunks out of her memories and blurring out the gaps, and completely blanketing her x gene, with stunning results. This one, she had no white streak, and Remy could now see that those brilliant green eyes had come tinged with blue, a sea-green color that already swung more one color than the other depending on her moods.
Remy watched her frown soften into a curious expression, and she squinted at him again before hesitantly moving closer. He didn't move a bit, just smiled and let her come to him. Once again, she flattened her hands against the glass, fingers splayed out to match his.
Remy felt his smile soften and dim just a bit as he remembered his promise to Rogue six months earlier. "Je vous ai promis avant qu'il ne serait mieux la prochaine fois." He let his forehead rest against the glass, and felt a skip in his chest as she blinked, smiled, and did the same. "Maintenant, je promets il sera parfait cette fois." He pulled back and kissed the glass where her forehead pressed, adding, "je t'aime, ma chérie, mon coeur."
And he hoped, fuck, how he hoped, that he could keep that promise, that what he'd done was buried so deep, that she'd never, ever know.
Je vous ai promis avant qu'il ne serait mieux la prochaine fois. Maintenant, je promets il sera parfait cette fois. = I promised you before that it would better next time. Now, I promise it will be perfect this time.