Author's Note: Once again, Kori wasn't happy with where I was leaving things, so I had to write another part. It was her birthday, after all. I was gonna quit, so if you don't like it, you know who to blame...
All the pleasure had gone from the warm, lazy summer afternoon. Gambit's mind was whirling, too deeply buried in its inner musings for him to notice the golden sun, the sharp blue sky, or the caressing warmth that bathed over him. He had thought, had desperately hoped, that his strange visit from Rogue the night before had been nothing more than the sleepy wanderings of an over-tired mind. He had firmly convinced himself of that by the time he climbed wearily from sheets tangled by his restless night. His content denial was crushed when he discovered she wasn't in the mansion and no one knew where she had gone. It had suddenly become real then. He had to accept that she had come to him, said her ambiguous farewells, and drifted away without a word of explanation. Something about the situation kept nagging at him as the hours passed, forcing him to turn his contemplations from the languid day around him to instead chase tantalizing thoughts in maddeningly futile circles through the convoluted landscape of his mind.
The day wore on, and the sun continued in its blazing arc across a sky that faded from brilliant blue to fiery reds, a dusty lavender, and finally arrived at a deep velvety black. Still, Gambit's mind wrestled with itself. He was sure he was missing some vital detail of the previous night's encounter but couldn't imagine what it might be. He was unable to think back through the meeting with a detached, critical eye. His thoughts kept lingering on sentimental trivialities, the sadness in her eyes, her sweet perfume, the soft curve of her breasts, the way her hair caressed her neck and shoulders as he longed to, those final words he was certain she had said. He became caught up in elaborate daydreams and fancies, unable to force his mind into logical pathways. He tried again, remembering how she had looked when she had turned back to him and realized he was awake. His mind recalled in breath-stopping clarity the fall of her hair across her neck, the painful longing in her exquisite green eyes, her hand moving unbidden to reach for him, her rosy lips parting to speak and revealing something just the slightest bit wrong. He hadn't dwelt on it at the time, too captivated by her to notice, but now his mind seemed certain. The moonlight had been dim, her face had been shadowed into mystery, and she had barely even opened her mouth, so there was no way he should have seen and remembered her teeth distinctly. And yet he couldn't convince himself they had appeared normal. It was nothing drastic, a slight variation at most, barely enough to catch even in the subconscious memory of a trained thief. He focused his mental eye tightly, filtering out all the other perceptions, trying to picture her mouth exactly as he had seen it. No matter how he tried to convince himself that it sounded crazy, he firmly recalled seeing tiny delicate fangs in her mouth.
If he was right, and every instinct screamed that he was, he knew what he had to do. She obviously didn't mean to come back to him; that was the only thing made painfully clear by her visit. So he would have to go to her, and he knew just the place to start looking.
For a summer night, the air was especially chilled under the overhanging boughs that closed him in. The anxiously rustling leaves whispered with the hint of breeze that tried to stir the heavy air. Looking up, he faintly saw individual stars dimly twinkling in the shifting gaps between the foliage. He stopped walking, sensing a subtle change in his surroundings. The murmur of the leaves had stopped, and the air hung perfectly still around him, swallowing the sound of his very breath in its silence. Everything was frozen, waiting, but for what he couldn't tell. Not knowing how, he felt her. She was there, and the world was stilled in deference to her presence. Unable to stand the pregnant silence any longer, he shouted into the empty air. "Come out where I can see you! Don't leave me like this!" The anticipation continued, thickened even more by the words that were absorbed the instant they left him. Desperately, he cried out again. "Chere, don't do this. If you can't come back, at least come to me now. Please, Rogue, I need answers." His voice was strained by confusion and heart-break, and it must have touched something in her. There was no motion, no noise, but the atmosphere changed. The weight in the air lifted around him.
Slowly, as if coalescing and allowing him to see her where she had already been, her form took shape from among the trees in front of him. She was just as agonizingly beautiful as the last time he'd seen her, all human imperfections smoothed away by the force that immortalized her. Now that he suspected what she was, it was apparent in a hundred tiny details: the grace with which she moved, fluid and effortless; the pale luminescence of her flawless skin; the power, intensity, and depth beyond his comprehension that he read in her eyes. She was beyond human and more indescribably beautiful than she had ever been before. "You've changed, chere," he began, refusing to let her overwhelm him, drawing on the strength of his forlorn confusion to support his will. "How did it happen?"
"I can't tell you," she replied in that same vibrant voice that was hers and yet not. "Some things are forbidden mortals."
"Why'd you do it?" he tried next.
Her eyes lit up with a glow that was a strange mixture of awe and fear. "He came to me, offering everything I wanted but had never known to ask for. He was so perfect, so beyond human, beyond anything I had conceived of." Her head tilted back, chestnut hair shifting along the pale column of her neck, eyes closing as she savored the memories with a slight shiver of mingled delight and terror. "He overwhelmed me, and I couldn't imagine refusing him, couldn't consider even wanting to." Her eyes opened and slid back to latch their gaze on his own. "He was perfection embodied, and I was powerless to refuse."
"I understand completely," he whispered back, breaths coming quickly, heart pounding as his eyes slid longingly over every line of her face and every curve of her body. "You do the same thing to me without even trying." He paused for a moment, reining his thoughts back under his control. "You're never coming back."
It had been a painful statement, not really a question, but she answered anyway. "I can't. I'm not like you anymore."
"No, you're not," he agreed, staring again into her captivatingly powerful, despairingly regretful green eyes. "But you could make me like you."
A flicker of hopeful shock crossed her eyes before being replaced with a sadness deeper than anything he had seen there before. "You don't really want that," she told him softly, voice heavy with remorse. "It didn't matter for me; I was always a creature who spread death and misery. You're too full of life. You belong in life. To fix you into a single state and rob you of the mercurial spirit that makes you what you are would be a great disservice to the world. I could never take you." Her voice broke off, and her face became angry, her eyes filled with a bitter choler turned inwards. "You can't even think clearly. You said yourself I was overwhelming you; you don't even know what you want. You just think you want to be like this because I want you with me." She trailed off sadly into silence, her green eyes tight with yearning, her jaw set with determination.
"You want it, and I'm asking you for it," he pressed her desperately. "Do it. Make me a vampire." It was the first time either of them had actually said the word, and it hung in the air like a curse.
She shook her head firmly, a barely perceptible motion but enough for him to know she wouldn't change her mind. "I told you, you just think you want it because I'm here. Remy, someone with your love for life shouldn't court death. This is how it has to be." Not waiting for him to speak further, she faded back into the shadows, slipping away and leaving behind an emptiness so complete it was as if she'd never been there at all.
The sounds of the night resumed around him as her intense presence dispersed, the rustling leaves covering his final determined whisper. "No, it doesn't."