MY COMPUTER DIIIIIIEEEED!. DEAD. TAMARA KICKED THE BUCKET AND I HAD TO SHOCK HER BACK TO LIFE. (She's working again now.) Point is, I lost the chapter and had to rewrite this shite out of the fudge, Tamara? YOU'RE WORSE THAN PAT! 'S cool. 11:44, I still made it on time. :D.
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Sarah kept her fists balled up in the man's shirt for a few long moments after he gave her the answer to her question, mind reeling. She shook her head, sending her pink hair flying about her face as she tried to snap herself back into reality.
"Red on black." She muttered, tearing the fabric of the Wolverine's shirt accidentally with the bony plates that jutted out of the back of her hands as she wrenched herself away and sprinted back to the unconscious man laid out on the bed.
She knew his face. The hard line of his jaw. The smooth planes of his cheeks. A few things were different, though, making her unsure at first, inspiring her intense scrutiny.
His lips weren't twisted into any sort of grin or sneer. His brow wasn't set in any semblance of defiance. His fingers weren't busy cutting decks. His red on black eyes weren't alive with emotion.
It was that insolent glare and shit eating grin that had plagued her dreams for years. Those fingers that had pulled her away from her nightmares. The blood. The bodies. It was those demon eyes that had routinely and firmly told her that everything was going to be okay.
"Is he…" She choked. "Is he gonna be okay?"
"Listen," Logan stepped forward.
She took a step back.
Logan could tell that though he was physically speaking with an eight year old, the young girl was aged beyond her years. There were shadows deep in her brown eyes.
"Yes, he's gonna be fine."
Some of the weight lifted off of her eyes with this news, but still the dark brown pools dissected him. "What do you want?" She demanded.
"I just wanted to have a friendly little chat with Gumbo over there." Logan said sarcastically as he crossed his arms over his chest impressively, and at her continuing analyzing glare, snapped the claws out of his fist to make his point.
"Try it!" She snarled, placing herself in between Logan and the man on the bed.
"Look, kid," Logan grunted. "I don't know how you know Gambit-."
"He saved my life!" Sarah growled, stunning Logan. "You wanna touch him, you're gonna have to go through me!" The bones extended further out of her skin in an intimidating fashion.
"As I remember, petite," The smooth as honey voice filled in the rifts it had made in her life the first time Sarah had heard it. She turned heel as fast as physically possible to see the man on the bed struggle to sit up. "You wouldn' have been in any need of savin' if it hadn't been for me." He grunted out.
"Wouldn't have been saved if it weren't for you, neither." She responded with such a magnitude of sass and a mocking southern accent that both Remy and Logan were stunned into silence.
Remy was quick to recover.
"In case you've forgotten, if I hadn't been involved in that mess, everybody down there would still be livin'." He finished smugly.
"Mister," She cocked out one of her hips with a level of tenacity most women don't develop until their teen years. "If there's one thing I've learned in my life that if somebody wants someone dead bad enough, there ain't no way that that story's gonna have a happy ending."
"But-." Remy started again, but Sarah cut him off.
"You can try and martyr your way into the wrong here, Mr. I-never-got-your-name," She gave him a no-nonsense tone. "The way I see it, everyone would have died in those sewers with or without you. The only thing you added or took away from that situation was me." She crossed her arms. "And if bringing the smallest bit of life out of a deadly situation isn't enough to make you hero, nothing will."
Again, Logan and Remy were stunned into silence.
Remy was confused by this little girl's perspective on his for-shit situation. In every scenario he had run in his mind of any way he could have changed the outcome of those sewers he ended up as the villain. The man with the demon eyes who damned innocent people. But, this little girl had stumped him.
He wasn't the bad guy?
"I'm not the bad guy?" He repeated out loud.
"If you were the bad guy," The little girl grinned. "I'd be a dead girl." She held out her hand. "My name's Sarah."
He took the hand.
"Remy."
Sarah giggled and blushed. "That's a pretty name."
"Glad you think so," Remy snorted and then grunted with pain.
"Are you alright?" Sarah flew from amusement to panic at a speed that reminded Remy of someone he knew was supposed to be important to him. Pain meds were making his brain slow. He ripped the IV out of his skin with disgust.
"Fine. petite," He mumbled to her. "Jus' tryin' t' remember what the hell I'm supposed to remember."
"Did it have something to do with Rogue and why she hasn't spoken to anyone in two days?" Logan growled.
A fear of God was stirred within Remy as his eyes went doe.
Rogue.
"Merde, merde, merde!" He started pacing frantically. "Elle me déteste! Je ne vais jamais à être en mesure de faire de ce droit!"
"Calm down." Logan snapped. "I want you to stop, rewind, and translate whatever the hell you just said into a reason why Rogue nearly broke herself earlier today on a punching bag."
"Is she alright?" Remy demanded quickly in his pacings, but rapidly reminded himself that he'd already be dead if she wasn't.
"She's fine." Logan stressed. "What I'm here for is to know what the hell happened. Like, how you got the little scrape on your chest or why the entire building went down."
"She didn't tell you?" Remy sat back down on the bed, getting dizzy from all the movement. Sarah quickly took the liberty of plopping down next to him.
"The phrases 'manipulated bastard' and 'lying sonofabitch' were thrown around a few times, but she didn't really go into detail." Logan grunted.
Remy sighed heavily and looked down at Sarah. She smiled up at him softly. The proof of his past mistakes looking up at him with big brown eyes full of joy to have found him again.
So he told the whole story. All of it's gory details. All of the bits that made him look like a jackass.
Everything.
Logan stood still, arms crossed over his chest, face shadowed as he listened intently.
Sarah had somehow wormed her way under Remy's arm and was sitting in his lap when he finished, eyes mystified.
"It didn't sound like you did anything bad." She wrinkled her nose with confusion. "If I were Miss Rogue, I wouldn't be mad at you."
"Oui, mais, she feels like I lied to her up to that point and the only reason I told her anything was so that I could use her." Remy explained, brow set with determination.
"You should give her flowers." Sarah suggested.
"She'd probably light them on fire." Remy sighed. "I think if I can talk t' her, maybe I can make her undersan-."
"No good." Logan was pacing back and forth, speaking for the first time since Remy's tale began. "She's more stubborn than you are, Cajun, and that's saying something considering you got yourself into this mess by refusing to lose in a no-win situation." He stopped pacing and scrubbed at his forehead. "Unfortunately, I know exactly what's gonna get you back on her good side."
"Wait." Remy's eyebrows creased with confusion. "Y'r helping me?" He attempted to pull some form of clarity out of a situation in which Logan was on his side.
"There are two things a man shouldn't be blamed for," Logan grunted. "Telling the truth and keeping the people he cares about safe."
There was a pause before Logan continued.
"When those bastards broke into the mansion, they gave you a choice. They said it was you or her, and you said you." Logan put hand down on Remy's shoulder. "That was the right answer."
"So what's your big plan?" Sarah snorted.
Logan sighed heavily as he plopped down in a chair. "Something like this happened to me two years ago," He explained. "When the cure came around. Rogue wanted to go and get it, and I told her I wasn't going to stop her because I wasn't her father and let her leave. About five minutes later I dragged her ass back into the mansion and grounded her for a week for being about to do something stupid for a boy."
"I bet that went over well." Remy smirked.
"She didn't speak to me for a month."
"What did you do?" Sarah asked.
Logan sighed again. The sigh of man who was thankful of a healing factor.
"I let her beat the shit outta me."
Remy groaned and fell backwards onto the bed.
"It's alright, Cajun." Logan grinned again. "Like I said, I got a plan."
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Elle me déteste! Je ne vais jamais à être en mesure de faire de ce droit!" - She hates me! I will never be able to make this right!