All characters owned by Marvel Comics
Author's notes: So feel free to begin hating me as of this chapter, just please give me until about Chapter six-ish to redeem myself.
Thanks everybody for the interest so far!
Chapter Four
"Merde," Jean-Luc breathed out in a murmur. "You sure about this?" He turned his head towards me in the shadows.
I leaned back against cold, corrugated steel and met his eyes with a fierce glare. "I'm sure. They're smuggling Remy out of Spain on one of Garcia's cargo ships, the Veritas, tonight." I leaned around Jean-Luc to peep past the corner of the semi-trailer sized shipping container we were hiding behind. "If we don't find him…"
My heart sank. The Port of Valencia was massive, one of the largest along the Mediterranean Sea, and Garcia's real estate was mind-blowing. A Naval base's worth of barges and cargo ships lined up along the docks, their bellies open and ready for goods. A swarm of men and trucks were hard at work under the night sky, a crane lifting the crates high into the air and depositing them into each ship in turn. A mountain range of the steep shipping containers, piled two or three stories high, twisted into a maze along the edge of the water. Finding Remy wasn't going to be quite like the proverbial needle in the haystack, but it would be close.
"This is impossible," he muttered over my head.
"Impossible should be right up your alley, sugar."
He laughed softly. "Even I have my limits, petite."
I peeled myself away from the spectacle and stood up to meet his eyes. "We can't let them just take him! We got us the name of the ship they're smuggling him out on. We split up, start searching the containers closest to it. It may seem impossible, but we gotta try!"
He nodded, his expression grim. He pulled me against his chest and my anxious heart thudded loudly. "If we have to split up, you better borrow some of my special talents. You may need a little help breaking into those containers."
I could have taken his hand, or touched his cheek, but without a thought we moved together and closed the breath of distance between us, our lips coming together in a panicked heat. I stayed away from his thoughts, too scared of what I would find, but took a piece of his agility, his speed, and most importantly, his thieving skills.
"Magnifique," he whispered when we parted. We were still playing our dangerous game, still dancing our tango. What was wrong with me? Was it the stress, the adrenaline turning us on?
There had been no time to call for backup or reinforcements during our getaway from the museum. I had sifted my way through the leftovers of Garcia's thoughts and managed to uncover our where and when, just not the who. Garcia and his goons had Remy socked away in a shipping container and were smuggling him out of the city via the Mediterranean, but I still couldn't get my brain wrapped around who was doin' this, around who was responsible. It didn't seem like Hydra's handiwork and Garcia was just a local thug despite his world-wide ambitions.
We had to find Remy and we had to find him fast, but I had no idea how we were gonna do that. There were hundreds of shipping containers piled higgledy piggledy and we were gonna have to open each one in our search. Thankfully we had liberated a couple flashlights from the car Jean-Luc had "borrowed" to get us here, but I wished Logan could have been here, his nose would have made the hunt a snap.
"Pop your tracker when you find him, or if you find trouble." He handed me a lock pick.
I nodded and kicked off my ridiculous shoes again, setting off for my first row. I was starting in the outer perimeter while Jean-Luc made his way to the belly of the ship and searched any containers already loaded. I kept to the shadows created by the jagged outlines stacked together like Legos. For a very dangerous while, I painstakingly searched each trailer, dodging broken glass, rats, and the ship's crew, when inspiration hit. Why was I dodging the crew? If I could get one of them alone in the dark, I could find out everything I needed. Instead of running from them, I changed tactics and stalked them.
The sound of voices drove me flat against a chilly, darkened wall. Their words were foreign to me again, but the men, two of them, were gruff, hardened. They were arguing, that much was apparent in any language, and I held my breath when they stopped just beyond my reach. One of the men began gesturing wildly and ran a hand through his thick hair while he raged. The other merely shrugged and lit a cigarette, walking casually away from his companion. The angry man muttered to himself and stepped towards my shadow, reaching my way to check the crate's locks. I stretched out and grasped his bare forearm with my hand and pulled with my powers before he could even make a sound. His brown eyes went wide, but I caught his heavy body before he crashed unconscious to the ground, and drug him the rest of the way into the darkness.
My Spanish was back, but more importantly, I saw what had made this man so angry. He wasn't such a bad guy, Tomas, my new unconscious friend. He was just your average working Joe that had gotten pulled into a rich man's troubles, and he was worried about the unscheduled cargo he had just found, a strange man with red eyes…I had to stop myself from sprinting for the shipping container I saw in his memories, its steel a faded blue, the number 1439 etched in peeling black paint, one row off the docks and in line to be loaded. I found it within a couple breathless minutes, piled on top of another container as a second story. I took a deep breath to calm myself when the coast was clear and hauled me and my too short dress up onto the second level to wrench open the creaky doors. There was barely a ledge for me to stand on, and Jean-Luc and his mad skills were fading fast. Keeping an eye out, I wrapped one shaking arm around a handle and worked the lock with the other, my toes digging desperately into the metal railing beneath me. The tumblers finally clicked into place and I inched open the groaning door, falling inside the inky blackness with a thud.
"Who's there?"
Remy! My heart swelled into my throat at the sound of his voice. I started shaking, but managed to get the door closed behind me before I switched my flashlight on.
"We gotta stop meeting like this, sugar." The beam of light found him on the floor against the back wall with his hands and feet tied behind him.
His battered face broke into a pained grin. "Mon Dieu, please don't let me be dreamin'."
My hand brushed his cheek and I knelt to look him over. He had been beaten, badly, his face a bruised and bloody mess. His t-shirt was ripped in several places, revealing deep gashes on the skin beneath. His wrists were bound by handcuffs so tight the flesh was cut nearly to the bone, and I gasped in horror as I realized the bastards had savagely broken most of his fingers.
I smiled back at him through a blur of tears. "You're not dreamin, Swamp Rat. Your daddy thought you might need a hand." I kissed him gently and my fingertips rested on the reason he hadn't escaped from this little prison. A Genoshan inhibitor collar circled his neck.
"You sure, chere? Seems like a dream I had once…"
Jokes, even through what had to be an incredible amount of pain, but that was Remy LeBeau and I loved him for it.
I shined the flashlight onto the collar and scrutinized it with what was left of Jean-Luc's brain. "One of your dreams? Was the wig involved, or just the handcuffs?"
He laughed softly and nuzzled against my neck. "I think you been hangin' around Jean-Luc too long, Anna."
I wanted to hold him, to pretend there was nothing wrong between us, but we needed to move. I popped the ring on my homing beacon to signal Jean-Luc and leaned over Remy's wrists for a closer look at the handcuffs. Pretty standard issue, but even a master thief would have had trouble with crippled fingers and tied up feet. I pulled out my lock pick and stopped.
"Shit," I cussed. I was losing Jean-Luc. The lock pick, just a few minutes ago as comfortable to me as my own hand, looked foreign and clumsy, unusable.
"Let me see."
I held my palm under the glow of the flashlight.
"Too big for the tumblers in the handcuffs. You got any bobby pins under that wig?" I whipped off my brunette bob and the cap beneath it, dislodging small hair pins and freeing my frizzy tresses. "Those'll work better." He smiled and winced at the same time. "You need a little help?"
Our lips met over the faint heat of the flashlight. My pull got me the comforting warmth of him, of the love he still felt for me despite everything we had been through, but I got a whole lot of everything else. Fear, anger, pain, enough I had to stifle a scream and ball my hands into fists to assure myself that they weren't broken to pieces. He had spent untold hours alone in the dark after they had tortured and beaten him senseless, but even Remy didn't know who had ultimately been responsible for his kidnapping.
"You get any of my powers?" he asked when I backed away.
The pin in my hand stayed just a pin when I tried to charge it and I shook my head. "Guess the power has to be there for me to borrow it."
The lock on the cuffs was easy thanks to Remy's help, but the locks on the collar were another story. The Remy inside my head was gleeful for the challenge, but the power inhibitor was a beast. Two locks, one on each side, that had to be turned simultaneously, each lock a nightmare in of itself, difficult bitting, tight tolerances, spring return, and they looked to be wired, maybe even booby-trapped.
"This collar may have to wait, sugar. We gotta get out of here. Do you think you can walk?"
His body was a screaming ball of pain. Those assholes hadn't managed to break his ankles, but they had given it their best shot. I helped him to stand and he staggered and leaned heavily against me. I didn't know how the hell I was going to get him down from the upper level and get him out of here without attracting attention. The ruby on my wrist was getting hotter and hotter, Jean-Luc was comin', just not fast enough.
We hadn't hobbled more than two steps towards the doors when something heavy thunked onto the roof and our container shuddered violently. I held Remy tight around the waist and the whole room pitched and rocketed into the air. Our container was being loaded! We toppled to our knees and my flashlight skittered off with a scrape of metal. Remy grunted in pain when we hit the floor. Jean-Luc was gonna be too late. I dove for the flashlight and crashed back into him, unable to keep my balance as our crate dangled high above the docks.
"Remy, are you…?" My hands lit on him the split second the staccato rip of gunfire echoed off the outside walls. We both threw ourselves flat and tried to shield each other, the ruby blazin' red hot on my wrist. Fuck! Our container lurched to a stop and swung back and forth like the car stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel. The deafening roar of an explosion tossed the crate into space like it was nothing, and we ping-ponged against the roof and sides as we plunged, landing in the sea with the hard slap of a swimming pool cannonball.
I was bleeding and bruised, but Remy was barely conscious. "Remy, sugar, can you hear me?" Our flashlight flickered and died somewhere across the floor. The container bobbed on the water for only a moment before I heard the rush of water split and crack the seams. I dove for the door, but the force of the sea against the outside held it fast.
"Anna…" Remy moaned from a heap on the floor. I sloshed through water already ankle deep and rising to prop him up. "No, choice, cherie, we gotta get this collar off."
Those Genoshans had a pretty sick sense of humor. The power inhibitors were designed never to be removed, part of the defunct and destroyed country's solution to the mutant problem.
"Remy, I can't…"
He pressed his forehead against mine. "Yes, you can, chere. We can."
I drew a little more from him, enough to feel how wrecked he was. If we didn't get him out of here soon, he was going to go into shock. In the pitch black I ignored the shouts and gunfire outside, ignored the water tickling and climbing my body, ignored everything but his voice in my head, kept our skin touching and my power flowing, and let his mind slide into mine and guide my fingers. The smell of the sea filled in around us too quickly. I was scared of what failure could bring, of how much he was hurting himself and his twisted, broken fingers, but sensed him feeling his way around the complicated mechanisms, my powers linking me to him better than a psychic rapport.
"Ready?" he whispered in my ear. The seawater was shoulder high and we were shaking and sinking. We turned the last tumblers together and the collar splashed harmlessly into the water surrounding us. Remy slumped against the wall but I caught him before he went under, and laid a hand on his cheek, this time coming back with a great big helping of his mutant power. With one arm, I got him around the waist and started treading water, with the other I fished the inhibitor collar out and charged it with kinetic energy. In the magenta glow I caught sight of Remy's weary face.
"Careful, chere. Think 'fore you let that thing fly…" He was circling the drain, but he was right. Any hole I blew was gonna let in a big gush of water that could screw us. Just like the experts told you if you crashed your car into a lake, we were gonna have to wait and let the damn thing fill more before we rolled down a window and swam out. The liquid was cold and I was losing feeling in my bare feet, Remy was a block of ice in my arms.
"Stay with me, sugar. Come on…" He was heavy and I almost lost my grip. "Remy!" I bit his earlobe and he jerked in my arms.
"Ow…"
Our airspace was closin' fast. We were at the top of the crate, kissing the steel of the roof. Just about there, but Remy was numb.
"Sugar," I cried over the gurgling rush of water and the sounds of shots and shouts outside, "You gotta kick! I can't hold you!"
Somehow, through the pain, he managed a few driving strokes. Just as we lost our breathing room, I whispered in his ear fiercely. "Deep breath!"
Charging the collar, I winged it through the water. The glowing ring swirled in a blur of bubbles and exploded against the far wall in a fiery blast, shredding one end of the crate. The heat from the blast frothed over us like a cappuccino's milk, but I grabbed a limp Remy under his armpit and swam us through the gaping hole.
I was runnin' out of air fast and I knew Remy hadn't been conscious enough to catch a decent lungful, but from the sounds of the ruckus above I needed to get us further away before we surfaced. What the hell trouble had Jean-Luc run into? Unfortunately, we couldn't wait any longer to come up or we would drown. I was exhausted, but I shot us towards the light, sucking in a breath when I broke the surface of the water. Remy was dead weight in my arms, and I slapped him lightly with my free hand while I kept us floating.
"Remy! Remy!" His head lolled against mine but I felt the stirring of air on my cheek. Thank fucking god…
Shouts in Spanish reached my ears and I struggled to swim us away from the burning hulk that appeared to be all that was left of the Veritas. I hadn't had a chance to register what had happened while we were trapped, but the heat and smoke of a massive fire rose into the night sky. The colossal cargo ship was a flaming wreck, and though I didn't know how the hell it had happened, I silently prayed that Jean-Luc had made it to safety. The air around us was blisteringly hot, too hot for me to distinguish the heat of the homing device still somehow strapped to my wrist.
More shouting, this time closer, and the explosive strafing of machinegun fire sliced towards us. I dodged us the best I could, but lost my hold on Remy. He sank into the murky water and I dove after him. My frantic grasping fingers missed his arm when another volley of shots pierced the strangely glowing depths, hitting Remy squarely in the chest. His floating body twitched an electric shock dance with each bullet and I screamed a scream no one would hear and lunged for him desperately. Another explosion above rocked the underwater world, and hunks of debris cannonballed into my arms, legs, finally my head.
The last horrible thing I saw as the darkness claimed me was Remy, his beautiful eyes wide and unseeing, slipping soundlessly into the deep.