Chapter 29

Rogue spent her afternoon in Chicago hunting down the last few names of people she hadn't been able to reach by phone. She made liberal use of taxis . . . even if she hadn't still been rattled from her aerial chase scene with the fighter planes, flying over a populated area in broad daylight was just plain stupid. And she wasn't eager to try hitchhiking again.

Even so, she was left kicking around MacCowell park by ten o'clock. There were a few other people in the park . . . homeless, like herself, huddled around fire barrels, their bodies wrapped in blankets or newspapers to try to keep warm. The cold didn't bother Rogue, so she stayed in the darkest shadows she could find under a couple of elm trees, arms wrapped around her backpack.

She didn't like waiting. Waiting meant she had to think, and thinking always took her straight back to Remy. He was in the darkness behind her eyelids, barely visible, his gleaming silver staff fluttering around his head and shoulders like the wings of a dragonfly. She could see his eyes gleaming in the dark. He looked—he felt—dangerous. The thought made her sick to her stomach. She hadn't been afraid of him for years and years, but she was afraid now . . . afraid of what he would become if he decided the world needed to be taken by force.

And yet, a treacherous voice whispered, how would you feel about him if he acted against his own conscience for your sake . . . if he just surrendered? What would he be then? Whipped, that's what. You don't want to see him whipped. Not Gambit LeBeau.

Gambit LeBeau was proud, and arrogant, and independent. That was what she loved about him. He made her feel free. If he gave in, if he walked up to Professor Xavier and said You have me do whatever you t'ink's best, I'll let you make de call, he would no longer be the man she'd fallen so fiercely in love with.

She wished he were here. She wished she had a copy of him to talk to, to try to sort out all these twisty, nauseating, miserable feelings, before she spoke to the real him again. She wished she could let him know that she wasn't just flat-out angry at him . . . though she was still angry, no use pretending that she wasn't.

She unzipped her backpack and fished inside. After a few moments of groping around inside the bag, she pulled out one of the pens and the page she'd torn from the phone book. Blank paper would have been better, but it was all she had.

She folded the sheet into quarters to give herself a decent writing surface, then laid it on the palm of her left hand and uncapped the pen with her teeth. When the tip was poised over the paper, she stopped, hesitating. What could she say? 'I'm sorry'? She wasn't. She was in the right, and she knew it. 'I love you'? It would be almost an insult to send him those words on a page torn from a phone book, when he'd had the nerve to say them aloud, to her face, in front of her teammates.

Finally, she pressed the pen into the paper and wrote blind,

A[spade],

I miss you.

Q[heart]

She folded the note again and tucked it into her leg pocket, between the contact list and the photograph.

When she looked up again, the park seemed more . . . occupied . . . than it had. Indistinct figures drifted at the edges of the glow from the fire barrel and the distant street lights, their postures hunched and their movements uncertain. Rogue swung her backpack onto her shoulder and stood up, moving out into the shallower darkness.

Up in the sky, stars blinked.

Rogue froze, then forced herself to breathe. If it were a jet up there, the roar of the engine would have given it away. The only aircraft she knew that moved that silently were herself, Jean, and Magneto. The little spot of blackness dropped towards the ground, into the darkness in the middle of the park.

She moved towards it. In the shadows, the uncertain figures followed her.

She felt, rather than heard, the dense, heavy thumps as the spheres buried themselves in the frozen ground. She sped up.

One of the spheres hissed as it depressurized. A lithe, black thing was silhouetted for a second against where the gleaming silver surface caught a distant reflection, then bounded toward her on all fours.

Kurt. "Kurt. Kurt!" Not until she saw his familiar silhouette did it hit her, all at once, how much she wanted her brother. In another second, she was nestled in his skinny arms, ducking her head a little so she could bury her face in his coat rather than the soft fur of his neck.

The hug went on longer than hugs were supposed to. Kurt, always sensitive, always there for his prickly, uncooperative sister, didn't let go until she did. Then he reached into his pocket and offered her both his hands. "Take one," he ordered. "Credit card or cell phone, you pick. But if ve get separated again, you vill have one of zese on you. You understand?"

Rogue almost laughed; bossiness did not come naturally to him. "Ah understand, Sir." She took the credit card and put it away.

Magneto's voice rumbled across the park. "Everyone into a sphere. We have very little time."

Rogue pointedly ignored him. "How's Amanda?"

"She's fine, she's fine. Gambit's looking out for her. Are you okay?"

"Had some close calls, but nothin' Ah couldn't handle," said Rogue, with more confidence than she felt. "Glad tuh see ya, though."

She felt something in her gut twang uneasily at the thought of Gambit 'looking out for' Amanda Sefton. She shoved it aside. She and Gambit were fighting, yes, but she trusted him. Or, at least, trusted him to not do something as un-classy as cheat on her. Or, at least, she trusted Amanda enough to not do something as un-classy as cheat on Kurt.

People were all around them now, loading bags into spheres and piling in themselves. The spheres seemed to be glowing a little, making it easier to see as much as anyone needed to. Rogue turned away from Kurt and looked through the crowd. "Hang on," she told him, "Ah gotta find somebody."

"Vhat do zey look like?"

Rogue didn't bother to answer; she'd already lifted herself about a foot into the air, and glimpsed the blonde head she was looking for.

"Alyssa!" Rogue zipped over to her; it felt good to fly after so many days on the ground. She let her feet drop into the snow. "Hey. You made it."

Alyssa nodded. "Yeah. Thank you."

Rogue fished the phone book page and the photograph out of her pocket. "Can you do me a favor?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You know Remy LeBeau?"

"I've heard of him."

"Ah need you to give him these." She handed over the paper and the plastic bag. "You're one of Delphine's girls, so Ah'm guessin' you know a little somethin' about bein' discreet. Don't read it, don't tell anybody, just give these straight to him. He's got red eyes on black, and red hair in a ponytail, and he wears a long brown coat. You do that for me?"

Delphine nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

"All right, go on. Get outta here."

The loading didn't take very long. Magneto caught her eye only once, and didn't speak to her. He was wearing civilian clothes. Rogue thought maliciously that, stupid as his red-and-purple costume was, trying to seem normal made him look even stupider. She and Kurt stood off to the side until the spheres lunged upwards again, taking the nearly fifty refugees to the safety . . . or at least the less immediate danger . . . of Avalon.

When they were out of sight, Kurt put an arm around her shoulders. "Let's find someplace zat's open, and get some hamburgers, and talk, okay?"

Rogue nodded, once again meekly submitting to his mild-mannered bossing. "Sounds like a plan."

"It's open, Logan!"

Logan obediently pushed open the door of the room across from his own, where Jean and Laura had been taken. Immediately, he could see why Jean had just TK unlocked the door, rather than standing up and walking over to open it. She and Laura were sitting in the middle of one of the beds, which they'd protected by laying a precautionary bath towel over the bedspread. Both were wrapped in thick white bathrobes, and each one was engrossed in one of the dreadlocks that surrounded Laura's head. Small bits of bracken, carefully picked out of the matted hair, were scattered on the towel. The smell of ginseng conditioner was almost stifling.

"Hi," Jean told him, sparing barely a glance from her engrossing work. "The good news is that so far we haven't found any lice."

"Fantastic," Logan agreed, still trying to work out how Jean could have convinced Laura to hold still and have her head yanked on for two hours with no end in sight. "You having fun, there, Kiddo?"

Laura looked up from the dreadlock she was working on to glare at him.

"I've got a faster way to do that," he offered, popping the claws of his right hand.

Laura went tense as a bowstring, but Jean put a steadying hand on her shoulder. "He's just teasing you. It's okay." She, too, glared at Logan, her bright blue eyes as fierce as Laura's dark ones. "If you wanted to actually make yourself useful, you could go find us more conditioner."

He pulled the claws back in, appropriately chastised. "I'll grab you the stuff out of my room to start with."

Ten minutes later, he too was seated on the bed, both hands slimy with conditioner, teasing loose the five months' worth of tangles from Laura's head. Her hair was thick and wiry, like his, which helped a lot; the strands were naturally ruler-straight, and hadn't dreaded easily.

"I'm surprised HYDRA even let you wear your hair this long. I'd have thought they'd keep you buzzed like a U.S. Marine, just to save trouble."

"They told me it was better for disguise and infiltration," Laura told him, as though this were a perfectly normal topic for casual chit-chat.

"I guess that makes sense. With the way you climb and jump, you wouldn't wanna be stuck in a wig. It'd fly right off."

"That'd be embarrassing," Jean observed.

"It helped to keep my head warm, this winter," Laura added, "so it was good that it was long. Insulation."

"That's one word for this stuff," Logan grumbled. "You sure you haven't found anything alive in here yet?"

"Almost positive," Jean assured him. "Just a lot of sticks and leaves."

"More 'insulation'."

"No one's making you help," Jean snipped back at him.

"Ow," Laura snapped, yanking her head away from Logan. "Quit yanking!"

"Oh, please. You've got an adamantium skeleton and you're whining about me pulling your hair?"

"In a minute, I'm gonna give you a popped lung to whine about," Laura grumbled, sounding for a moment unsettlingly like Logan himself.

Logan grinned. Was that her teasing him back? Of course, it could be an actual threat, but her claws were in and her body was relaxed. Underneath the filth and the violence and the trauma, there might actually be a human being, and that human being might, with a little imagination, even be a teenage girl.

"Nice to see you two are getting along so well," Jean murmured, half to herself. She was smiling faintly, but her attention was focused on a particularly thorny piece of dreadlock that she was teasing apart with her fingernails.

Logan went back to his work, too, being more careful not to pull against Laura's scalp. "I hate to sound crass, but do either of you want to tell me what you did with your clothes?"

"Drying on the shower curtain," said Laura.

"Apparently hand laundry is one of the things you get really good at living in the woods for five months," Jean elaborated.

"I'm surprised that rag bundle you were wearing survived being washed," Logan told Laura. "We're gonna have to find you something else to wear. I'll talk to Mariko."

"Who is Mariko?" Jean asked, glancing up from her work.

"Old friend," Logan told her.

"Oh, that was informative. Thanks."

"The Yashidas are . . . were . . . one of the biggest crime families in Japan. When Mariko's father and older brothers died, she took control of the business and got it phased from illegal to mostly-legal investments. I think they still tax dodge, but hey, nobody's perfect."

"Did you have something to do with the other Yashidas dying?"

"I had something to do with Mariko living."

"So she owes you this favor because you saved her life?"

"Something like that."

"You can just say 'yes,' you know."

"If the answer was just 'yes,' that's what I'd say."

Jean gave a little hmph of annoyance at him, and Logan smiled. Annoying Jean always had been way too much fun. And as long as she was annoyed at him, she wasn't worrying about Scott. She needed a break from the tension, and that was something Logan could still give her.

Jean belonged to Scott, and Logan knew it, and wouldn't challenge it, but the sparkle of amusement in her eyes right now belonged solely to him.

"Ha," announced Laura, triumphant, as the last tangles at the base of her dread came loose. She combed her fingers through the full length of her hair, stripping out conditioner peppered with leaf mould.

"One down," Jean announced with satisfaction. "Just all the rest to go."

Gambit headed downstairs to the kitchen, looking for Magneto and something to eat, not necessarily in that order. He found the public levels in another wave of incoming, semi-controlled chaos. People were everywhere. Many of them were teenagers or young adults like himself, the most common age range for X-gene carriers, but there were middle-aged people, too, and even a few who looked like they could be grandparents. And there were little kids.

The little kids nonplussed him. Why so young? No kids that young could possibly have already manifested, not without a massive infusion of rare, experimental drugs.

He found Magneto and Xavier in the dining room, sitting at one of the smaller tables and talking to a woman with one child nestled under her arm and another one distending her abdomen from the inside.

"Any day," she was telling them. "I just . . . I figured it was the lesser of two evils. I registered as soon as the database opened, because the law's the law, but last week I checked, and Tyler and Christina were suddenly on there, too. I never gave consent for them to be registered. That information's only in their private medical records."

"They're becoming bolder," said Charles. "Accessing medical records without a warrant . . ."

"Would that be more or less illegal than when they detonated explosives against the wall of your front room?" asked Magneto, his tone almost painfully dry.

Charles ignored him. "You have to be aware that our medical resources here are very, very limited. If you were to go into labor and something were to happen, we couldn't guarantee the safety of the baby."

The woman laughed, her voice shaky and a little panicked. "I've already had three kids without any problems. Right now, I'm a lot more scared of the U.S. Government than of labor."

Magneto looked up, acknowledging Gambit for the first time.

"Do you need something, Gambit?" asked Professor Xavier, not unkindly.

"I'll handle it, Charles," Magneto interrupted, standing up from the table. "Outside," he ordered Gambit, indicating the hallway.

As soon as they were well out of sight and hearing, Gambit asked, "Xavier's not in de loop, den?"

"I told you: I want to control the flow of information. And I don't trust Charles any more than he trusts me."

"Dat's rich."

"You've been training under him for some time now. Have you yet to encounter something that he won't do if he thinks it's right?"

Gambit thought for a moment, but didn't answer.

"What did you need?"

"A drop," said Gambit. " I'm gonna grab three hours' sleep and den I need t'be in Austin. C'est bon?"

"That can be arranged," Magneto told him. "I'll meet you in the hangar in three hours." He turned his back and returned to the cafeteria.

Gambit was heading off the other way when there was a footstep behind him, and something slipped into his hand.

He snapped his head around and saw a skinny blonde girl slinking away from him. He reached out and caught her by the shoulder. "Hey. Wha's dis?"

"The woman told me to give it to you, Monsieur LeBeau," said the girl under her breath. She reached up to her face and brushed her fingers from her forehead down to her cheek, tracing the path where Rogue's white stripe usually fell.

"Tu me connais le nom?" Gambit asked, switching fluidly into French.

She nodded. "Je suis de chez Delphine." Her own speech was shaky and thickly accented; English was obviously her first language.

"De chez Delphine?" Gambit repeated, bewildered. Delphine's place was back in New Orleans. This last pickup was supposed to be in Chicago, wasn't it?

He glanced down at the papers in his hand. One was a torn page from a phone book; the other a photograph in a ziploc bag.

He flipped it over. Christine LeBeau's steady gaze fixed on him from the yellowing portrait.

Remy felt his breath catch. He hadn't seen this picture in more than seven years. His father had locked it up in his private safe after the cancer took her. Only a member of his family could have laid hand on this picture. His family. Pere, Memere, and Bobby.

Rogue had seen them. Which meant she'd been in New Orleans. And the only reason she could have had for going to New Orleans . . . the only mutant she could have gone there to track down . . . was his assassin ex-wife.

She was angry enough at him to burn his soul with the touch of her mouth, but she still had gone to look after his people as though they were her own.

For the first time since he'd fallen asleep in his own bed on the night of the attack, just for a second, Remy felt warm. Warm and safe. He didn't deserve that girl.

He slipped the picture and the paper into his pocket, to look at again when he was sure of a moment of privacy. "Merci," he told the young woman from Delphine's, taking her hand and shaking it earnestly. Delphine's girls, he knew, rarely got handshakes. "You done me a great kindness, Miss."

"Glad to," she told him, finally working up the courage to smile. "The other girls say real good things about you, about how you was always a friend and never a client. Said you were the best Pincher the Big Easy ever spawned."

Gambit grinned. "Got dat right."

His mind flickered back for a second . . . to the assistant guildmaster in New York and his smart mouth, to the rumors the man had suggested were flying through the gossip chain about Remy's Mark and how much he deserved it.

"So if you'll 'scuse me, I gotta go prove it."

French Lessons:

C'est bon? Is that good?

Tu me connais le nom? You know my name?

Je suis de chez Delphine: I'm from Delphine's Place.

Okay, so the January deadline went flying by, it's true, but the splendid news is that my writing bug is back! My life is in order and I'm finding time to sit down with my GoogleDocs, and finally, finally, reward my readers' excellent patience. Hang in there, folks.

Seri