Marvel owns the X-men, no profit is to be made from this work.
-=+=–=+=–=+=-
Fire scorched his throat and smoldered somewhere deep down in his gut, burning stronger than a belt of the strongest whiskey. Despite it all, Remy found himself with an unquenchable hunger for it the likes he hadn't known since he'd been a starving gutter rat scavenging for scraps in the back alleys of New Orleans.
"Get off of me!"
Searching for the voice, Remy struggled past the hunger that gnawed at his belly, that hunger he never wanted to know again. He was starving, ravenous for whatever it was that wet his lips and tasted so sweet as it ran across his tongue.
"I said...!"
For however distant that painful memory was, the memory of very really starving to death, there was another more recent one that assaulted him suddenly, a memory of being flung clean from his bike. His back again screamed at him in pain just as it had in that memory, the crisp crack of timber falling joining own harsh, pitiful cry. Tumbling, his hands clawed and scrabbled at the litter of leaves that covered the forest floor. Diseased deja vu plagued him, a fever dream filled with the stench of burnt rubber and the screech of tires skidding over pavement.
"...get off of me!"
The voice was little more than an echo now, sounding so quiet after the thunderous crash of a fallen tree. Struggling to find his footing, another voice fought to be heard, and how unsettling it was how much like his own it sounded. Having not the ears for it, this familiar voice was drowned out by his thirst.
"Whoa, is that what I look like when I get the mean kind of hangry? No wonder Logan's always joking about staking me if I don't simmer down, at least he better be joking..."
Opening his eyes to the night, his Devil Eyes, Remy searched for the voice that taunted him. Tempting nectar hung in the air, a scent so sweet it stole his stomach in the vise tight grip of insatiable, greedy need. Taking a step forward into the dark forest, a feral growl brought him short, made all the more fearsome as he realized it rumbled and rolled from his own chest. Merde...
"That's it, Remy dude. Just one step at a time."
Fighting past the hunger that robbed him of reason, he searched the silent standing trees that loomed over him in complete indifference. The crack of a branch drew his attention, finding only falling leaves and a tumble of snow to hint that he wasn't hearing voices, and nor was he alone. His eyes weren't fast enough to follow her passage, his maddening pixie that called to him from beyond the corner of his eye, but even that was a lie. It wasn't that his eyes weren't fast enough, no, he just wasn't focussed enough.
"How do you know Logan?!" The first and most important question tumbled past his lips.
A flash of yellow had him turn to find another empty branch rocking amongst the empty boughs of a tree, above which the aloof stars danced completely indifferent to him.
"Pretty, ain't they? I didn't know there were that many stars out there until I came up here..."
Closer now came this teasing voice that danced through the treetops, so close that he was sure she had to be just up there somewhere over his shoulder. Yet all he could do was stand there and stare up at the innumerable stars above, remembering a night with his Mississippi girl where she tried and failed to find the words to describe such a sky. He'd teased her then, Rogue, telling her he'd seen plenty enough stars out there in his wanderings.
But standing there under that same sky she had stared up at, imagining her awestruck and silent, she'd been right all along. Ya won't go believing me 'till ya see it for yourself, huh? Haunted by that memory of a night of stargazing from the rooftop of Xavier's, it brought with it her smile, her laughter, a reminder of why he'd come on up to Canada in the first place.
"I was dying..." Turning his red on black eyes away from the heavens, he found her at last, his secretive pixie.
Sitting up there on a branch, her shit kickers dangling loosely as she clicked her heels together with anxious energy, the girl from the diner sat looking down on him with eyes of a burning crimson so like his own. Pale as freshly fallen snow, he was sure she would have been dazzling in the blue light of a full moon.
"...you were." A quiet and hesitant admission that shied away from a lie if he'd ever heard it.
Save me, those had been his dying words. Save me so I can find him, Logan, the man who could save Rogue. A liar, a cheat, and a thief, she made him want to be a better man. To see her smile was enough to give up all his wicked ways and go straight. But his Rogue was a woman who lived up to her namesake, having in her a rebellious streak that tempted he misbehave. A man shouldn't be so lucky to be twice blessed...
Running a hand through his tussled and tangled hair, it came back stained in blood that had to be his own, as cold as a night sweat roused from a terrible dream. Searching, he couldn't find a single cut, a bruise, nor any ache to tell him where all the blood had come from.
Turning back to her, this tiny girl sitting up in a treat like a nymph, try as he might to look her straight in the eye, her gaze fled to the safety of the frosted leaf litter below.
"You did, sorta...it's complicated," she admitted.
"Complicated how?" Skirting the truth was something he knew like the back of his hand, and she sure enough looked like a girl trying to find the right way to fess up.
"Uh, like, how do you know Logan anyway?"
"He be a friend of a friend..." As close to the truth as he needed to admit at the moment.
"This friend of his, she different too? Different like Logan?" Her luminous crimson eyes looked down on him in anticipation of his answer.
"I never say that friend be a lady, did I?"
Answering her question with a question, he waited, only to have her surprise him once more. Digging into her hoodie, she pulled out his wallet, and damn if the thief in him couldn't respect her for it. A picture he held dear was pulled out, his favourite of Rogue, and another that was dear to her too, a picture of that grumpy Canuck she had stories to tell of. Flashed for him to see before being tucked right back where they belonged, she tossed it down to him.
"Catch." And with that, the space between them shrunk by the few steps forward it took to do just that.
A casual riffle though it found most everything where it should be, his credit cards included, just a little light of close to the fifty bucks cash he had on him after leaving the diner. Remembering the lint strewn change this mystery girl of his had paid her bill with, he let it go, thinking she could use it more than him. With a sigh that spoke to his need for a smoke, he looked up at her again, ready to see just what kind of good faith that bought him.
"You saved me, how? You different? Different like Logan?" A mutant? One that could heal?
Without another word she dropped from her perch to land in a crouch, bouncing up with a spring in her step that carried her forward. Just as tiny and petite as she had looked in the tree, he was sure she couldn't have been an inch over five feet, if even that. Looking down on her as she stood there staring back up at him, her sweet and innocent smile was that of a cat to a mouse, and in that moment he didn't know just which he was...
"P'tite?" As good a name as any for her until she told him it, "You don't got to be scared of ol' Remy here, I be not a man who will hurt..." ...you, the breath for even that was stolen from him with a fierce punch he hadn't even seen coming.
Again the thunder of a fell tree crashed, the splintering crack of timber falling to the forest floor echoing through the night. The pain awoke something in him, kindling to the burning hunger he remembered and feared from what felt like a lifetime ago. Spotting her just where he'd been but a second before, the space of inches between them had become yards as he climbed to his feet, stalking towards her with the thought of a good spanking running through his mind. Yet in the blink of an eye she was gone...
"Gotta be faster than that," her voice came, taunting and playful.
Jerking his head up, he felt like he was underwater, his limbs fighting against the unseen and oppressive pressure of the dark, unexplored depths. Above him she hovered, his petite kitten who had found herself a mouse in him, twisting as free and graceful as a bird. He saw the kick coming, helpless against it as he stood as good as frozen, his muscles answering him in the slow and sluggish reply of glaciers.
Forced to marvel at her form as she cartwheeled through the air, he was a nail to be hammered as she brought her foot down squarely on his head, jarring his every bone in his body that they rang with impact. The ground exploded beneath him. Faster he was on his feet this time, searching for her and wondering where she'd appear next. And all through this, some thought tugged for attention and begged to be heard. This is wrong...
The damage was there to see in the forest, the shattered trunk of the fallen tree, and most recently the heaved and cracked earthen crater he stood in. And for the second time that night he searched for a single cut, the tenderness of a bruise, or even a broken bone, only to find smooth skin and hard muscle beneath his ripped and torn clothes.
"Sorry," shyly she whispered, peeking out from behind a tree as if playing a game of hide and seek, "It's something ya kinda gotta see to believe, or...ya know, feel as the case may be."
"You changed me?" And into what he didn't know, that thought alone filling his heart with a tremor of fear.
But even that felt wrong, wondering where the skipped beat was as he ran a hand against his breast to search for it, finding to his horror how still and silent his heart really had fallen. Not even his chest heaved with the exertion he expected after that beating he'd been on the wrong end of, nor did his breath fog in the cold night.
"Do you believe in monsters," she asked, meek and quiet as she hid behind the tall trunk of a tree.
Any other night and she would have looked like a scared child fearful of what lurked under her bed, and yet there was something unnatural about her. It was in her sheepish smile that he saw something he hadn't noticed before, petite fangs peeking out past her pearly whites that so tenderly bit her bottom lip in a nervous grip.
If his heart hadn't already stopped, it surely would have then, because yes...he did believe in monsters. A N'awlins boy borne, bred, and raised, his tante had stories for him about all the things most everyone else swore wasn't real just so they could sleep at night.
"My Tante Mattie always had some stories to tell me, and my tante be not the kind of lady to lie." The first few steps were the worst, the crumbling and yielding earth falling out from beneath his feet as he climbed.
He'd been ready to make a deal with the Devil himself, back when he'd been lying there in the blood damp earth of what he thought was going to be his shallow grave, buried in time by the coming snow of a Canadian winter. Standing over her now, his P'tite, she was his tiny Angel of Death come to save his soul. A tear fell from her luminous crimson eyes, running red against her ivory cheeks as she looked up at him in a silent apology he felt he didn't deserve.
Catching it on his finger, he lapped at it, and sure enough it tasted of the sweet nectar he had so gluttonously drank.
"A vampire, oui? The Devil himself wouldn't have been so kind, and he take more than just the cash I have on me, no?"
To hear her hiccup and laugh soothed away the phantom pain of his still and quiet heart, paying that kindness forward with a hug he thought she needed just then.
"I'll take you to Logan, but we gotta stop for a bite first. I don't know about you, but I'm starving, and you don't wanna see me hangry. Oh, and I hope you don't mind hunting for your dinner, because I'm a vegetarian Vampire. I don't eat nothing with a face, blood bank Capri-sun style snack packs excluded..."
-=+=–=+=–=+=–=+=-
"Okay, like...I know it's an acquired taste and all, but trust me, deer is good eating. You're seriously not gonna make me get all Momma Bird, are you?"
Remy's disgust was worth a laugh to see, he was way picturing her feeding him some ABC worm with him playing the part of a baby bird. Again he tried, his fangs sharp and deadly in the dim light of the aurora lit sky, and again he jerked back from the bleating doe. Sighing as dramatically as any teen her own age, the thirteen years she looked anyways, Jubilee drank again from the doe and felt for the beating of the poor beast's heart even as she desperately avoided the terror in its eyes.
That was a trick that took some practice to learn, coming to know the limits of how deep she could drink without killing her prey. Not that the deer wouldn't be an easy hunt for an opportunistic predator, blood loss did that, but a fighting chance was better than being carrion.
"C'mere," Offering Remy her slender and thin wrist, he stood apart from her looking completely clueless to her intentions, "You seriously didn't think we were gonna swap spit, did you? I mean, yeah, you're hot. But that would just be weird seeing how we just met and all."
"P'tite?"
"God, do I got to spell it out for you? Am I really gonna have to cut myself again? You got fangs for a reason, now drink. Just don't make me..." ...thump ya this time.
Remy stole her breath as he fell on her, his deadly kiss on her wrist so sinfully seductive that she could forgive him for being greedy. Taken into his gentle arms, he held her close as he supped. Never had she ever before been on this end of the embrace, always the huntress, never the prey. She'd been too scared to even notice how good it felt when she'd turned him, a moment of panic fuelling a kick that sent him tumbling through a tree.
And just like that it was over, turning her heavily lidded eyes up at him in an unspoken question, begging to ask why he stopped only to see him play the part of a gentleman of old. A kiss to her wrist washed away the telling mark, two pin pricks ripe with her blood, the hallmark of Hollywood vampire attacks for generations.
"Merci," he whispered.
Her knees weak and her voice an incomprehensible mewling of want, Jubilee stumbled away from him, suddenly jealous of that girl...that woman of who he carried pictures of in his wallet.
"P'tite?"
To hear him call to her in that pet name he'd picked, she snatched the tiger by the tail and twisted that jealousy into something else, something good. She wouldn't have to be the one to call whoever that girl...that lady was, and tell her that he'd died. A lucky photo had saved his life...
"I'm good, just...whoa. Give me some space, okay?"
Alone in the night with just him, every fibre of her being screamed to surrender to his kiss, the moments pain his fangs brought one that came with a promise of unimaginable pleasure. To feel his lips again at her pale flesh, to feel herself made small against his lithe yet muscular frame, it was a need that rivalled her damned and cursed hunger.
"Are we ready to find Logan?"
Logan, her buddy, her pal. Her tempting visions of Remy twisted and turned to into him, remembering all the times that Logan had let her sup at his wrist just as she had let Remy. It was the cold shower she needed, complete with the icky echoes of his annoyed hisses and angry grunts as she fed, and none of them as sweet as the kiss Remy had placed upon her wrist. Shivering, her dinner date was well and done now.
"Yeah, c'mon. This time of night he should be done with the cage fights. Your friend of his, she told you about them, right? I'm just asking, cuz he's usually looking to wind down after them. Sometimes he gets lucky, other times...well, other times someone's stupid enough to look for a rematch." And there was no way in hell she wanted to be around for the either of them.
With eyes that looked back in time, Remy stood there lost to a thought, and it was the kind of thought she figured she knew the jist of. This friend of Logan's must have gone and told a few stories of him, the kind seen through rose-tinted glasses.
"Well, alright then. I'll take you to Logan, but you can have fun dealing with him. Word to the wise, cross your fingers that he's found himself some company of the bar slut variety, cuz he'll kick your ass otherwise. Just saying..."
-=+=–=+=–=+=–=+=-