AN: Sorry if the spaces between words get deleted. I hate it when that happens.
I woke up briefly to my dad's voice out in the hall. He was screaming, possibly at the top of his lungs.
Still drunk? Definitely.
"You betta get the fuck outta my way, Cyke! Ain' no one gonna stand between me and my child!" Pop boomed, just about rattling the floorboards with his volume. Doubtful there was anyone in the house who hadn't heard that, if nothing else before it.
"She's sick, Remy. You can see her in the morning. Right now you're drunk, and there's still a woman in your room none of us knows. If I let you see her now, it might only make it worse. She's sleeping comfortably, and now that she has her inhaler, she's going to be fine. Go take care of things with the girl, get some sleep, and I promise you'll be the first person Sadi sees when she wakes up in the morning," came Scott's measured, calm reply. He was out there playing mediator, that was obvious enough. The question was, would Pop listen?
Ha, stupid question. I should've known better than that. After all, he was drunk.
"Bullshit! If she sick, then Gambit needs t' be with her! Last chance, Cyclopes, get de fuck out of Gambit's way!" Cold this time, threatening. Yet somehow not much quieter.
I hugged my pillow as I felt the ominous tightening in my chest, the tingling around my lips, the fuzzy vision. No matter how mad I got at dad, hearing him yell like that always was the worst thing for me. I hoped they didn't relent, didn't let him in. Pop scared me when he got out of control like that. He could become so argumentative, so violent at the tip of a hat. That's why he'd given up booze years before, after struggling for a long time with being a near-alcoholic. He liked drinking, a lot, but it didn't always like him. Besides, I was still so mad at him I was bound to start something, even if he didn't.
I hoped they knew, remembered how it absolutely drove me up the wall to see him like that.
I looked over at Kitty, who stood by the door with her back to me. She phased her arm through, pulling Jean Grey back in with it. Almost as soon as Jean entered the room, all noise from outside ceased passing through the walls. An unnatural silence fell as not even the normal sounds of pluming and creaking of the old mansion came through whatever barrier she'd constructed.
She came over to sit beside me, my inhaler in hand. She gave it to me, helping me sit up so I could take a puff off it. I knew what was coming next, why Jean had been the one they'd sent in. She was going to telepath me back to a calm, dreamless sleep. Normally that would've pissed me off to no end, but at the moment I had neither the strength nor the will to care.
"Don't let him in while he's like that," I whispered, coughing a little after taking a hit off my inhaler. "You know how he gets, and I don't think I could deal with that right now."
As it was, I wasn't dealing very well with him simply being outside Kitty's room, raving like a lunitic, even if I couldn't hear him anymore. Granted, he was raving about wanting to see me, but if it hadn't been that, it would've been something else. I loved Pop to death, but he did have a darker side to him. One that frightened me.
Jean nodded, rubbing my back slowly. She was fairly non-confrontational when it came to 'in-family' arguments, so I was pretty sure she'd be relaying my request to Cyclops telepathically, to make sure he knew he'd been right in assuming I wouldn't want to see my Pop, and should continue trying to keep him at bay. She probably wouldn't go back out there until the hall cleared, if she could help it. "If that's what you want, Sadi, then we won't let him in. Unfortunately I think Scott's getting a little impatient with him."
I shrugged, half panting to catch my breath, and never quite able to catch it. "So what else is new?" I asked in reference to Scott becoming impatient with Remy. That sort of thing happened all the time.
I just hoped Scott wouldn' have to hurt him. Even though I was mad, I knew by morning he'd be extremely apologetic. He'd treat me like a princess, and I'd have to reassure him I still loved him, even though he wasn't perfect. Sometimes he forgot that I would forgive him almost anything. Even after years of living a fairly calm and tranquil life, I suspected that my dad still had abandonment issues. He was honestly afraid that everyone who cared about him would see him for who he 'truly was,' and leave. The fact that family members didn't do that to each other was something he had trouble wrapping his head around.
I was also a little afraid that if Wolverine was sleeping, the yelling might wake him up.
If it did, there would be body bags to put out with the trash in the morning.
"Calm yourself, Remy," Ororo warned, her voice low, but hard.
Gambit would have none of it. He was nearly blind with rage at being kept away from his daughter while she needed him. He paced the hallway, his foggy brain unable to come up with a suitable method of moving the very solid Cyclopes out of his path without putting the infrastructure of the house at risk.
"Fuck!" he swore, still just as loud as he'd been ten minutes before, when he'd started yelling. He slammed his fist into the closest wall, busting a hole in it and nearly busting his hand. After all, what did he care if no one got any sleep that night? That was his baby girl in there, suffering. His child. Not theirs. He'd fathered her, after all. Didn't that give him some right to see her now?
She couldn't have been in too serious of a condition, or else Beast would've been summoned, not Jean Grey. But the only thing running through his mind at the moment was how he'd treated her that evening...all because he'd gotten sick of being lonely.
What if he didn't get a chance to hold her again, tell her he was drowning in guilt? Losing her would kill him.
He didn't even have his cards with him, to occupy his hands. All he had on was a pair of sweatpants. He'd been pulled rather suddenly from his bed by the news.
"Stormy, you tell him he better fucking move! I will take this whole goddamn house down if that's what it takes!"
"I am not going to allow you to upset her any further tonight, Remy. You are a raging drunk at the moment..."
"And you smell like sex," Wolverine growled, having appeared rather suddenly in his bedroom doorway. He leaned with his shoulder against the frame, his arms crossed over his chest in annoyance. "Trust me, Gumbo, if there's one thing any woman can pick up, it's the scent of another woman."
The Cajun's eyes narrowed, flashing red in Logan's direction. He pointed at Wolverine briefly, in accusatory fashion. "You stay outta this. Ain' none of your concern. You ain' her father!"
Wolverine tipped his head off to one side, studying Gambit with a frightening, cool intensity. "So I've noticed. Wasn't Jubilee's father, either. But sometimes when a kid like that doesn't have anyone they can depend on, they turn to the strangest people..."
"Shut up!" Gambit yelled back at him, taking two large, angry treads in Logan's direction.
A loud 'shnikt' sound was all that was heard in the hallway as the Wolverine popped his claws, studying them absently as though he were doing something as ordinary as examining his nails for dirt. "Don't make me gut you, Gumbo. Crazy as it sounds, your kid might actually miss you."
"Would take you with me, Logan," Remy threatened.
The shorter man smiled, and it wasn't kind. "Care to see if you're fast enough to kinetic me into oblivion, Slick? Or are you just out here screaming because you wanna wake up your girl, and get her all wound up again? In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd think you wanted to kill her off tonight. Do you think maybe it'd be easier to fuck strange girls in the room next to your daughter's easier if she wasn't around to hear it anymore? Because, you know, I'll just bet that's what got her all upset in the first place..."
"Remy? Are you coming back to bed?"
All eyes turned toward the timid voice. Gambit's young 'guest' had walked up during the worst of the fighting. She was clad only in a bathrobe that she kept tightly pulled around her slight body. With them all looking at her, she seemed to withdraw into herself, as though she wished she were somewhere else.
"Be there soon, Jen," Gambit replied, his rancor suddenly gone.
She nodded, turning to quickly disappear back around the corner, presumably to wait for her companion in his bedroom.
The Cajun looked back over his shoulder at Cyclopes just long enough to say, "Be back at dawn, homme. She wake up for then, make damn sure somebody calls me."
"We will, Remy," Cyclopes assured him.
Just as Gambit turned to go, Wolverine cleared his throat, stopping the tall redhead dead in his tracks. "Just a suggestion, Gumbo, but ya might wanna tell the broad to take a hike, and catch a shower before you pass out for the night. Unless you want to give the kid more reason to be pissed at you." When he was finished, Logan slammed his door on the small gathering, and soon after Gambit continued on his way, stalking off to his living quarters.
Cyclopes sighed, turning to Ororo, who still stood with her arms crossed defensively over her chest. It was the only indication she was still upset by her friend's irrational actions. As was typical, her features gave no hints as to what her mood might be like.
"Well, that was certainly exciting," he said tiredly, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand.
Storm raised one eyebrow slightly, still staring off into space. "We will be lucky if there aren't parents calling in the next few days with complaints--and threats to pull their children out of the school after they hear about the kinds of things that we allow our teachers to get away with in the middle of a school night."
He shrugged his half-agreement. "If they call, we'll deal with it. Honestly, I think you're mostly angry with him because he promised you he'd quit pulling this shit. The Professor told me how hard you worked, to make him realize how...confrontational...he gets. It must've been a real struggle, to get him to stop."
"I don't think he even knows how bad he can be. I would like to believe he's justifiably angry now, being kept away from his daughter, but how could we be sure? This was always the hardest part, keeping him away from Sadi while he might, or might not have control of his temper. I was never sure what to do, having seen the things he's capable of."
A heavy silence fell over them after the older woman finished sharing her memories with the younger team leader, one that drew out while they both became lost in a haze of their own thoughts.
"So," he ventured at last. "Do you think he's going to kick the girl out tonight?"
Storm huffed sardonically, glancing over at him out of the corner of her eye. "If he doesn't, we're going to have a funeral by the end of the week."
The tiniest of grins tugged at the corners of Scott's mouth. "Taking bets on who would kill him first? What kind of odds do you think I could get on Sadi and Wolverine?"
The African goddess at last cracked a smile. "I'll give you two to one that Sadi would do the dirty deed, and three to one that Logan would sit off to the side critiquing her on style."
Cyclopes nodded, pretending to be very serious about considering that information as he rubbed his rough jaw line with one hand. "Put me down for twenty on Sadi now, and then call me with an update on those odds in the morning. If there's money to be made, I'm all for it."
Ororo nodded absently, aware of Scott slowly trudging back to his quarters. "Cyclops" she called softly after him. He paused, looking back at her over his shoulder, slightly unnerved by how sad her eyes had suddenly become. "I trust you won't tell anyone, about how Remy was, back then? He left that life behind years ago, and I would never wish to resurrect it for him."
Scott nodded. "Of course," he said, his tone equally soft.
