DIS-MOI CE QUE TU PENSES / DE MA VIE, DE MON ADOLESCENCE



“Why can the memories recalled to the one-armed man cause the phantom arm to appear? The phantom arm is not a recollection, it is a quasi-present and the patient feels it now, folded over his chest, with no hint of its belonging to the past. Nor can we suppose that the image of an arm, wandering through consciousness, has jointed itself to the stump: for then it would not be a ‘phantom,’ but a renascent perception. The phantom arm must be the same arm, lacerated by shell splinters, its visible substance burned or rotted somwhere, which appears to haunt the present without being absorbed into it. The imaginary arm is, then, like repressed experience, a former present which cannot decide to recede into the past…

“But it would not be memory if the object which it constructs were not still held by a few intentional threads to the horizon of the lived-through past, and to that past itself as we should rediscover it if we were to delve beyond these horizons and reopen time. In the same way, if we put back emotion into being-in-the-world, we can understand how it can be the origin of the phantom limb. To feel emotion is to be involved in a situation which one is not managing to face and from which, nevertheless, one does not want to escape…

Memory, emotion and phantom limb are equivalents in the context of being in the world.”

The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.


*


“Is it true you exploded Warren’s doorknob?” she demands when the rat opens his door.

He looks at her, innocently. “I don’t know what you talking about, minou. I never went near that man’s doorknob.”

“Oh, so it just spontaneously combusted,” she exclaims.

“Must have,” he says, the picture of angelhood.

“He could’ve died!” she shouts, and punches him in the stomach, so he flies backwards onto his ass.

“Gambit could’ve died just now,” he mutters, struggling to get up. “Is this how you show your love and affection to me, minou?”

“I’m not showing you either,” she says, standing in front of him and pulling her fist back to knock him another time around the head. But he grabs her legs, recovered already, and slides his hands up her tights, underneath her skirt.

“Want to show me something else?” he asks, smiling, already feeling the answer.

“Cocky Cajun,” she mutters, but pulls her skirt up.


*


“What do ‘minou’ and ‘minette’ mean,” she asks Gambit after he has just come in her mouth.

Still trying to catch his breath, he opens one eye. “Ah,” he says. “Thought you’d never ask, minou.”

“Well?” she asks. “It’s a pet name, right? Like chère?”

He grins, looking a little sheepish. “It’s a pet name,” he says slowly. “People use it. But it’s different from chère, more personal. Minou means little kitten.”

Then he looks as mischievous as a little boy, when he reaches between her legs, runs a gloved finger up her sex, and says, “But it also can mean—this here.”

She stares at him, and can feel herself blushing. “Are you kidding me?”

He laughs. “Minette is even dirtier, Gambit don’t use that one too often.”

“Wait, didn’t you call me that first?” she asks, mildly scandalized. He’s been going around, literally calling her pussy, this whole time. The thought offends her as much as it turns her on, turns her on as much as it offends her. What if she went around calling him cock?

Then she thinks, she does go around calling him—and plenty of other people—“dick,” but that’s an insult, not a pet name.

“Yes,” he says. He laughs. “It’s because the first time Gambit saw you, that student of mine had his head between your legs.”

And she remembers that, vaguely. “That was the first time you saw me?”

“Well, no,” he admits. “Gambit saw you around, a little bit; sneaking off with other boys or girls. Sometimes looking a little sad, on your own.”

“I never did that,” she says. “You did,” he insists. “Like this,” and he sticks his lower lip out, exaggeratedly. She elbows him in the stomach, hard, and he doubles over, coughing.

She jumps; she forgot that he doesn’t have a healing factor, she cannot just beat on him the way she does to Logan.

“Sorry!” she cries. “You okay?”

He looks up at her; she thinks he knows what he is thinking, why she apologized, whom she had just thought of, at that moment.

“Gambit’s more durable than your average homme, minou,” he says, his voice already back to normal. “I’m good.”

Then he raises an eyebrow. “‘Sorry,’ eh,” he repeats. “First time Gambit get an apology from you.”

He leans forward so his bare mouth is near hers. “You fell in love with this old thief, already?”

“Not a chance,” she says, bringing her gloved up hand between them and pushing him off.

“Quelle femme,” he moans. Then he smiles. “Anyway—so Gambit saw you around, but I think the real time I saw you was that time, in the Danger Room.”

“Getting eaten out,” she repeats, incredulously. “No wonder you’re such a pervert about me. First impressions, and all that.”

He laughs. “Maybe,” he says. “Gambit saw your face then. Looking happy, and powerful, and turned on, and vulnerable, and still sad—and—don’t know. Did something to me.”

“Gave you a hard-on, is what it did to you,” she mutters.

“Yep,” he says, and she cracks up, smacking him in the face. He continues, “But something else, too.”

“What?” she asks, skeptical—but then, at the look in his eyes, curious, too.

He looks at her and smiles. “You want to know?”

“No,” she says immediately, not curious at all, anymore.

His smile doesn’t falter, but it doesn’t stay the same, either. “Didn’t think so,” he says, and pulls a scarf over her sex again and settles himself between her legs.

“Eh, minette,” he murmurs, huskily, and the way he says the word makes her wet—

But she snaps to attention and says, “You can’t call me that in public anymore, then.”

“What? Minette?” he asks, staring up at her.

“Either one,” she says. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Why? Nobody know what it means,” he says. “That’s not like you, minou. To be embarrassed. Not about this.”

And he is right, she knows—it’s Mississippi Baptist morality, rolling up to bite her in the ass at the most unexpected time. Shame of your womanly body parts. Shame of your sex. Jesus, still? Well, fuck them.

“Okay, fine,” she says. Then a concession. “But not minette, if that’s the really dirty one.”

“Fine,” he says. “Gambit don’t call you that too often, anyway. It’s a little too rough, even for this old thief.”

Then he smirks and lowers his mouth again. “But sometimes you like rough, no? Minette,” and she shivers at the feel of his mouth.


*


That night, she thinks: Names. Names, names, names.

Names like James Howlett, Remy LeBeau, Harada Kenichiro, Yashida Mariko, Oyama Yuriko, Oyama Kenji. Names like Marie D’Ancanto.

Kid, minou. Anata, kisama.

Names and their heaviness. She wants to put them all down.


*


But names follow her, because one day, she is going down on Logan, and with his fist in her hair, he groans, “Oh, fuck—Marie—”

And she pulls away so fast, she nearly bursts out laughing at the panicked, begging sound that comes from his throat. But she is not in the mood for laughing.

She doesn’t want to hear that name; not that name, not its implied confidence. Not the name she gave to him when she was sixteen years old, then never gave anyone else again. She is not that girl.

“Yikes,” she says only. “I did say, ‘No cheesy lines,’ right?”

“It’s your fuckin’ name,” he practically whines, and it must be torture, but still, she keeps her head a good distance from where he would like it to be.

“You never call me it, so it’s kind of weird to hear it suddenly,” she tries to explain.

And it’s true—he has never naturally called her by her name. Only that one time, when she practically forced him to, right before getting the cure. When she had thought that the cure would make her more Marie, give Marie back to her. Not yet having realized that it wasn’t a distinction between human Marie and mutant Rogue that she had already made, but a previous life and the current one. She is old enough to know that Marie is and always was a fantasy; a young girl’s dream. Marie seems as much a ghost to her now as do any of the characters in Logan’s memories.

Although she might protest against some of them, she far prefers the pet names: the minou, the kid, Storm’s “honey.” They don’t seem less personal to her at all; but supple, fluid, tailored to just for her life in that moment, for her life in their lives. A single name is a box; and she knows no box is big enough for all the things that she alone has been, not to mention all the additional occupants now in her head. She wants names that live with her, that are faithful to her lack of fidelity, that change as she changes.

To Logan, she says only, “I like ‘kid’ from you. It’s cozy,” she says, suddenly remembers that she has said that before. Thinking about his camper. And she hasn’t thought about that in a long time.

But the word is right; the name ‘kid’ feels like that place: a total mess, a place she isn’t sure she wants to sleep, a place she isn’t sure she can really relax—but still, somehow, warm, sweet, lonely, a little forlorn.

“Sexy, too,” she adds, thinking about what it would be like to fuck him in that camper, now, blushing as she does. She hasn’t had that fantasy in a while.

“Okay,” he says, but it’s the voice she has heard from every man about to get a blowjob, and she knows he’s only half-listening, now. So she starts to suck him again, but he comes practically the minute she applies the slightest pressure with her tongue and mouth. She feels a little bad; he must really have been up for it.

Not bad enough to keep from teasing him about it, though. “And with a condom on, too. I think that must be a new record for you.”


*


She goes to Storm’s office to ask her a question about—she doesn’t even remember, now. Outside her door, she hears Storm arguing to someone, and she thinks it is Logan, until she notices the other person is too silent to even be Logan, and realizes she is on the phone.

“You’re being ridiculous,” Storm is saying. “Because you—no, no—you know just as well as I do what it’s like over there right now—Hank—we’re not arguing about this again—not this one—Hank—don’t—”

Then a pause, and Rogue can hear a receiver being slammed down. She thinks it isn’t the best time, and tries to walk away, but Storm opens the door just then, about to storm—storm, ha!—out.

“Rogue,” she says suddenly. “I didn’t see you out here.”

Her face is red, blotchy from tears she has not let herself cry. “What can I do for you?”

Rogue swallows, says, “It’s fine,” she says. “I’ll come back later.”

Storm nods, clears her throat, looks away. “Okay, then,” she says. “Hey—you’re doing a great job, honey. All the kids are talking about you.”

“Thanks,” Rogue says, her voice still careful, kind. “I’m really enjoying it.”

“Good, good,” Storm says. She wrings her hands together. “So, we’ll talk later. Oh, that’s right, I did want to talk to you about something, too.”

“All right,” Rogue says. “Later.”


*


But later doesn’t come, because Storm is distracted and busy; and then a few days later, Gambit, Kitty and Kurt are assigned to a mission to guard Hank during a UN conference on climate change, in Madrid. Apparently the mission has come so suddenly because Hank had attempted, evidently unsuccessfully, to keep Storm from knowing about it.

She sits on Gambit’s bed, watching him dress. Putting on his light ballistic vest, his black pants, his thin black socks, his silver kneepads and shin guards. Watching every movement, as if she has been permitted to view a holy ritual. He even makes a little sign of the cross to himself, before putting on his trench coat.

“What was that?” she teases. “You’re suddenly a believer in God?”

“Always a believer, minou,” he says, winking. “Not always in God.”

He hovers over her, leaning against the bed. “You got anything you want to say to this old thief before he leave?”

“Like what,” she asks, looking up at him.

“Like, ‘I’ll miss you, Remy,’” he supplies, “‘I be thinking about you and touching myself all the time, thinking ‘bout your beautiful face.’”

She kicks him in the shin guard; but they are actually quite hard, and she hurts herself, a little bit.

“I think you’re talking about yourself,” she says, rubbing her own shin.

He lowers his hand to rub her shin for her, and brings his face closer to hers.

“Okay, then, minou,” he murmurs. “What about, ‘I fell in love with you already, Remy,’ then?”

“You know, I’m not sure they can have someone on the mission who’s this sick in the head,” she replies calmly, meeting his gaze full on. “Maybe we should switch.”

His eyes change, she doesn’t quite know why. But he just pulls away from her face and stands up straight.

“Ah,” he sighs to himself. “You break this old thief’s heart, you.”

“I’m sure you’ll find lots of Spanish minettes in Madrid to make you feel better,” she says. “Come back and tell me all about it, and we can do role-play again.”

He smiles at her, and it’s the smile she cannot read, again. “Okay,” he says. “You be good, minou.”

He leans in to kiss her mouth, but he doesn’t have a scarf, and neither does she, so she leans back—without fear in her eyes, just a rueful reminder. She turns to pull up his bedsheet so he can kiss her, but he is already pulling back, and she thinks the feeling in her stomach is disappointment.

She looks up at him, and he turns to the side to pick up his staff—he kisses it hard, flicking his tongue over it. Then he touches the staff to her mouth, staring down at her. And the metal is warm as flesh.

She stares up at him, not moving, not speaking.

He pulls the staff away, picks up his bag, and walks to the door. “Later, minou,” he says, smiling again, easy as always.


*


And he comes back on a stretcher.

And if he weren’t already half-dead, she’d kill him; if only she could stop her hands from shaking.


*


Two bullets in his body; one in his upper chest, where his vest doesn’t protect him, and one in his stomach, straight through the vest.

After Storm tells her the news—her own voice shaken and full of uncried tears—she runs to the medbay. She sees his unconscious face, the blood still on his chest, his mouth slightly open because the muscles are too slack to keep them closed—and it’s not him, it’s not him, this is not him, and even as they are beginning surgery she cannot be made to move, so Kurt has to teleport her out.


*


“How, how, what happened, what happened, what happened,” she says over and over when she can finally speak again; hearing her voice, wondering who it is, unable to recognize herself in it.

“He was shot, kleine,” Kurt says, kindly, his arms still wrapped around her, and she doesn’t even have the presence of mind to push him away, to protect him from her skin.

“The shots were directed at Hank, and Kitty, who was next to him. None of us would have noticed in time. Only Gambit jumped in front of them. He saved our lives.”

And she shakes her head. “But he wears a vest,” she babbles, trying to pull her voice together, failing. “He wears a vest, he has guards, he, he.”

Kurt doesn’t say anything more, but holds her until the end of surgery, praying the whole time. She doesn’t ask him to be quiet.


*


After the surgery is finished, she walks into the medbay. He is not awake yet, but she looks down at him.

Thinking of saving people. Thinking of a hand on her lifeless and life-stealing face. Thinking of a woman and a jet and a wave of water and death above her and beneath her. Thinking of a man and body armor that fails him.

She remembers that in Manhattan, when he had come into the bathroom, she had felt tears coming down her face without the actual physical sensation of crying. Her body doing all the work for her.

It does it for her again, now—until she joins in the effort, and finds herself sobbing freely.

The surgeon had said, “He was lucky. They missed everything. Just a little bit to the left or right for either bullet, and we would’ve had a real problem.”

Thinking about what Gambit had said about Logan, and poker, and what you do with your bad luck.

Lucky, she thinks, crazily. You hear that, rat? You got good luck this time. This is good luck.


*


While he is unconscious, she doesn’t sleep in her room, but in the medbay. She goes to her room only to change into her clothes, go down to the Danger Room, teach ass-kicking with Logan, then go straight back to the medbay.

Logan is watching her, she knows; worried about her, she’s certain—but she can’t deal with Logan, or whatever’s in his eyes that she can’t read, whatever’s in his face that she can’t recognize. He doesn’t tell her that he’s sorry about what happened to the rat, and she doesn’t wait for him to; she doesn’t think it would be all that true, in any case. Thinking of Gambit saying, I don’t like him, he don’t like me.

She is there when Gambit awakens, and her entire body explodes in relief. She yells for the nurse, the surgeon, someone—that’s what they do in television shows when the unconscious patient wakes up, right?

He cracks a tiny smile that looks like it hurts. “So loud, minou,” he croaks.

“Sorry,” she says immediately, and takes his bare hand with her own gloved ones.

“Apology two,” he says. Looking up at her through half-open eyes, a mouth crusted over with dried saliva and cracked skin, his beard unkempt and grown even longer than he usually lets it go.

Then widens the tiny, painful smile and says, “So you in love with Gambit yet?”

She starts to squeeze the hand, harder. “When you get outta here, I’m gonna kill you,” she whispers.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow,” he says.


*


She is on her way to the medbay from class when she hears Storm, already there, talking; and once again she thinks she is arguing with Hank or Logan, until she remembers that Hank is not here, and Logan never, ever comes to the medbay.

“I shouldn’t have let you,” Storm is saying. “A good leader wouldn’t have let you switch.”

“No, Stormy. Gambit chose to go ‘cause of something like this.”

“But—there must have been—”

“No, no, petite,” he is saying. “Stop that now. You did a good thing. Everything all right now. Everything happened the way it’s supposed to happen.”

And Rogue doesn’t understand anything; but she doesn’t like the sound of it.

When Storm comes out of the medbay, she is waiting for her; and the older woman freezes in horror.

“What was that,” Rogue asks.

“Rogue,” the woman begins, hesitating.

Rogue repeats, “What was that?”

Storm covers her face—she is not quite crying, but her body is shaking, has been shaking more or less constantly since Gambit and the team returned.

Reluctantly, she tells Rogue that Gambit had asked specifically to be on this mission—that he had been aware of a recent spate of anti-mutant terrorist attacks in Western Europe, targeting mutant refugee hostels and poorer mutant communities, and that Hank’s presence in Madrid as the only mutant U.N. ambassador would be the perfect opportunity for an assassination attempt.

She says Gambit had said, very clearly, that because of his knowledge of the situation and his particular skills, he would be better equipped to handle unexpected occurrences.

Rogue thinks of Gambit, talking about Harada Kenichiro, about an old kumicho, about yakuza clans, about Yashida-gumi, Yamaguchi-gumi.

I keep informed, he had said to her nonchalantly.

“He was right,” Storm mutters, then says, “Shit,” and rubs her eyes again. She looks like hell, and her hands are still shaking.

Rogue stares at her. Then she remembers something else Gambit had said. “What did he mean by switch? Switch with who?”

Storm lowers her shaking hand, and Rogue thinks the tears that she has been holding in might actually come out now. They don’t, but still she can barely speak—yet Rogue hears her as if there is no other sound in the room.

“I was going to send you,” Storm says.


*


When she enters the medbay, to where Gambit’s bed is, she sits down in the adjacent chair without saying anything. He glances over at her, his face still paler than usual, making the dark beard he is growing look even darker. “Hey, minou,” he says. “You eat already?”

She nods, although she hasn’t. “Really?” he asks again. She nods again. He doesn’t believe her, but he doesn’t push the issue. He turns his head towards her, settling into the pillow comfortably, letting his sleepy eyes rest on her. She doesn’t say anything, but looks at him. Looks at him.

“Minou,” he says only, as he falls back asleep. “Minou.”


*


When he is better, at least better enough to be wheeled back to his room, though not better enough to begin teaching his own classes yet—“I recover pretty fast, minou,” he tells her—she stays in his room, watching as an orderly helps him into bed.

“Gambit prefer she be the one to do all this,” he mutters, gesturing towards Rogue.

“Behave,” she says.

When the orderly leaves, he looks over at her, then down at his stomach and crotch, grins, and says, “Think you’ll have to be on top this time, minou.”

“Your horniness is a fucking illness, swamp rat,” she says, suppressing the urge to punch him right in his chest wound.

But she stays, even when he falls asleep, in the padded chair next to his bed; and doesn’t move until the orderly comes back in the morning, awakening both of them with his brisk knock.

“Morning, minou,” Gambit says when he sees her. “Didn’t think the first time you stayed in Gambit’s room we wouldn’t even be in bed together.”


*


After his sponge bath—for which she will have to apologize to the orderly later, she should have known he would make all those filthy comments if she remained in the room—she asks, finally, what she has been wanting to ask: “Did you charm Storm to get her to put you on the mission instead of me?”

He looks at her. “Ah,” he says. “You did know.”

“I heard you talking,” she says.

“Thought so,” he says. “No, Gambit didn’t charm her, minou. I asked nicely, the right way and everything.”

She looks at him suspiciously. He is sitting up in bed, his top half naked except for the bandages around his chest. He looks back at her; a little weak, but calm. He is telling the truth, she thinks.

“Why did you even want to switch with me,” she says, not sure if she wants to know.

Gambit shrugs, scratches at the skin around one of his bandages. “I switched with you because I knew what was going on over there. Gambit told you he keep informed.”

“So you thought you would handle it better,” she says bitterly. “When your armor doesn’t even fucking protect you good enough.”

“It just didn’t protect me from those kind of bullets,” he says. “They got some new stuff, high-grade military stuff. That don’t come from people making bombs in the basement. They got resources, connections.” He frowns, but doesn't say anything else.

She sighs. “Fine. But it still means you thought you would be better than me. Stronger than me.”

“Yep,” he says, and once again she wants to punch him.

“I can take a bullet, no problem, at this point,” she points out. “I can fly, move fast. Storm would’ve been right to send me.”

“Nope,” he says. “You can’t shoot back.”

She blinks. Storm hadn’t mentioned that there had been a full-on fight. “Did you?”

He only nods.

“How many?”

“Just one shooter,” he says. “Less than Gambit expected.”

“What, with a card?”

He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “With my mind.”

She stares at him. “What the hell do you mean, your mind?”

He looks down at his hands. “At full power, I can charge things without touching them if they’re in my line of sight,” he says, and her eyes widen. “If I see it, and think about it, that’s enough. That’s why it was important to get hit; to know the line of the shot, where exactly it come from.”

She freezes—then her eyes widen, remembering how he had only said he hadn’t gone near Warren’s doorknob.

He seems to know what she is thinking, because he starts to laugh hoarsely. Then he adjusts himself on the bed, smiling. “But it still take a lot out of this old thief, though. Look at me. Healing so slow.”

She thinks he’s healing pretty fast, but what the hell does she know.

“Did you let yourself get shot on purpose?” she asks, not sure if she wants to know the answer.

He laughs. “Nobody like to get shot,” he says, but it’s not really an answer, and he doesn’t say anything else.

“Do the others know you have that power?” she asks.

He says, “Stormy knows. I told her that’s why I thought I’d be better for the job.”

She stares at him. “Did you plan all this from the beginning?”

He laughs again. “It was one of the plans.”

At the look on her face, he shrugs and says, “See, that’s why Gambit’s a better choice than you. You don’t go nowhere thinking, I’m gonna kill somebody today, so how am I gonna do it.

“You know that saying, one thief knows another thief—that’s true. You don’t look at everybody’s face, looking for the one you’re gonna steal from, the one who’s gonna steal from you. The one you’re gonna kill, the one who’s gonna kill you. None of you do,” he declares, folding his hands in his lap.

“Except maybe the Wolverine," he adds, and she cannot read the look on his face. "And this old thief.”

She is still staring at him. “I think you are a fucking assassin, thief,” she says.

He sighs. “A little bit of both, after all, eh,” he says, and now she cannot read his voice, either. Still looking down at his now-folded hands. “Thief and assassin.”

Every time he says these two words, they seem to open up a wound in him. She shakes her head at her own thoughts; she isn’t sure she wants to know this, either. But then—

“Go on,” she says softly, anyway. “Tell me about it.”

He looks up at her, puzzled. “What?”

“When you were a thief,” she says. “Back then.”

He looks surprised then, and he starts talking immediately, almost before he himself has even realized what he is saying, afraid she will still take it back.

“I was a thief in New Orleans,” he says, cautiously, waiting for her to stop him. “Jean-Luc LeBeau found me on the streets when I was ten years old. Trying to pick his pocket, not knowing this big man was the king of thieves, the head of the Thieves’ Guild. He took me in as his son.”

He sees that she is really listening, now, so he relaxes into his own voice.

“Thieves’ Guild and Assassins’ Guild was enemies, back then. But the first time I met the daughter of the Assassins’ Guild head, I was done, finished, like a fool. We were thirteen, sneaking around, feeling like Romeo and Juliet, making out everywhere.” He laughs. “Little horny Remy.”

“Not so different from big horny Remy,” she observes, and the look of surprise and pleasure on his face at the sound of his name in her mouth startles her into saying, hastily, “Go on.”

“When we were eighteen, we told everybody what was going on. They wasn’t too happy, but then they saw the good in it; we was supposed to get married, seal the alliance, that kinda thing. Told me about some prophecy they heard when Remy was little; that I was gonna unite the Thieves’ Guild and the Assassins’ Guild. They thought it meant the prophecy was coming true.

“I didn’t care about none of it; I was in love, I woulda married her when I was thirteen.”

Thinking of Gambit as a married man seems so strange to her she thinks he is talking about someone else.

“The morning of the wedding, her brother Julien comes and challenges Gambit to a duel. ‘To the death,’ he say, like a real man. I say, ‘Fine,’ because when I was eighteen, you couldn’t stop me from fighting nobody, I’d fight a trashcan if it looked at me funny. Plus, I was crazy in love. Had some idea that I was protecting my woman’s honor, or something.”

He is silent for a minute, thinking.

“And then,” she murmurs, wanting to know, not wanting to know.

“And then,” he says. “We was supposed to fight just hand-to-hand. But as he was losing, he took out a gun.”

She stares at him as he says, still looking at his hands, “I don’t even know what I did, really. Think it was the first time I did it with my mind. I made the gun explode in his hand just before he was gonna shoot me. Set off all the bullets inside, killed him immediately. Not just the gun; think I might have exploded the whole front of his body, too. It wasn’t so controlled, back then. It was hard to tell. Wasn’t much left of the body.”

He gives her a smile, and she clenches her own fists at the pain in it. “You see why Gambit said he don’t fight over girls no more.”

“After that, nobody know what to do. They knew it was Julien’s fault for wanting to duel in the first place, and then for bringing out that gun—but I had used my powers on him, and that wasn’t too forgivable, neither.

“Some of them wanted me dead; other people knew the alliance was too important to mess up. In the end, she was the one, made the decision. She said the alliance would continue, as long as she didn’t marry me. And I had to be exiled from New Orleans, forever.

“Jean-Luc tried to fight for me,” he says. “But he knew he had to do what was best for the guild. I knew it, too. So I left. She didn’t say goodbye to me—didn’t, or couldn’t, Gambit still don’t know. Been wandering around ever since, picking pockets.

“Probably picked your mama’s pocket sometime way back,” he finishes, trying to lighten the tone of the story again.

She stares at him. How old is he. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty? Over ten years of wandering around. She cannot help but think of someone else she knows, wandering around, having lost everything, living solely on the particular crime he was talented at.

“So she’s still there, in New Orleans,” she says. “Your fiancée.”

“Nope,” he says. “Almost all of them dead, now. ‘Cept for the few that left earlier, like me, scattered all over the world: now, no more Thieves’ Guild, no more Assassins’ Guild.”

She looks at him, perplexed. “Lot of them joined Magneto and the Brotherhood, right before Alcatraz, when the cure was coming out,” he explains. “The guilds been coming under police pressure for a while; government thought they was some kinda mutant criminal organization. Which was a little true, but not all true.

“But mercenaries was coming in the middle of the night, shooting mutant thieves in their sleep with the cure; hiring assassins for fake assassinations then throwing them in jail, and torturing them for information, confessions no one’d be able to believe.”

Gambit sighs. “So the ones left joined up with Magneto, to fight.” He looks at her, and adds, “At Alcatraz, they were part of the first wave to die.”

She knows so little about Alcatraz; about what happened there, about how they all fought. She has never asked anybody to tell her anything.

Then he rubs his palms, says, “That’s what Gambit heard, at least. I was in Québec City. When I came back, was too late. There was only dust left. The battle must’ve lasted an hour, at most.”

He smiles, and once again she clenches her fists for him. He says, “Now you know why this old thief try to keep better informed, from now on.”

“In San Francisco, Gambit saw Dr. McCoy, Storm and the Wolverine, with the soldiers, helping the clean-up. Found out how they fought Magneto, what they did, who they were. That the same thing happened to them, their house, their people.”

He shrugs. “So Gambit think, Now I don’t like the soldiers too much, but these guys seem okay. I’d heard of Xavier, and Jean Grey, the fight against the Mutant Registration Act, all his history and things with mutant rights. They legends. But then I heard they’d both been killed. And Gambit thought—maybe I go over there, maybe this old thief can do something to help.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You, helpful?” she teases. “That doesn’t sound very cool-loner-type, to me.”

“Gambit ain’t no kind of cool loner, minou,” he remarks. “That’s the Wolverine.”

She looks down, but he continues, “Gambit didn’t like being exiled. Didn’t like not having a home. Didn’t like leaving everybody behind. Wandering around the continent, everything seeming like it was made of shit. But then Gambit heard about Xavier’s death, and saw the three of them cleaning up that mess, and Gambit thought, maybe there’s a place that ain’t made of shit. So I talked to Stormy in San Francisco.”

“You met her there?” she asks. She’s never heard this before.

“Yep,” he says. “Asked how I could help. Told her my powers. She talked to me for a while, then said some guy from Germany was flying in to help, and she would have him evaluate me, and if it worked out, I could go back to the mansion to help, since he was gonna start teaching there, too.”

She wants to ask; she doesn’t want to ask.

He already knows the question in her mouth. “No, Gambit didn’t meet him, minou,” he says, and his voice sounds a little tired. He leans back against his bed’s headboard.

“Only met Stormy and Hank. He wasn’t nowhere. He didn’t even really talk to Storm and Hank. He helped with the tasks, then he disappeared. I saw him, once, wandering around Alcatraz after the clean-up. Looking like the world broke on his head.”

“He was the one who stopped Jean, at Alcatraz; but he was in love with her,” she tells him, and then regrets telling him.

“Ah,” he says, looking at her curiously. “That explains it. That was his look.”

She shifts her weight from foot to foot, realizing she has grown sore, standing for so long, while he tells this story. He beckons for her to climb into bed next to him, patting the space beside him. She obeys, sliding on top of the blanket, fully clothed and gloved.

“Then this old thief came here,” he says, pulling on one a lock of her white hair with his hand. “Met you.”

Then he seems to remember something. “Oh, yeah—Gambit bought you a souvenir from Madrid.”

He snickers. “Well, stole.” Then he nods to his trench coat, draped over a chair. “In the right pocket.”

She raises her eyebrows, stands from the bed and approaches the coat, reaches into a pocket. As she is searching with her hand, she sees a few splatters of blood on the collar, just as her fist is closing around the small object.

Gambit’s blood on his collar; and she thinks of Logan’s blood pouring from his jumpsuit after he had touched her on the Statue of Liberty—and when she turns around to face Gambit again, holding his gift in her hand, she is already crying.

“Minou,” he says, alarmed. “What?”

But she can’t speak, just keeps crying; she keeps moving through her crying, as if is a hiccup, or a fit of coughing. Walking towards him, climbing back onto the bed, still crying. She opens her fist to reveal a small, painted porcelain sculpture of a black bull with large horns.

On his flank, the words: I, then a red heart, then MADRID. And the crying doesn’t stop.

“It’s a bull, ‘cause they have lots of them there,” he says, a little frantically, trying to distract her from her crying. “See? It’s virile. Like me. Gambit think we should call it Remy. Eh? What you think, minou? Eh?”

She can’t stop the tears, so she nods, wipes her face, says, “Okay, okay. Thank you.”

“So what you think of him,” he says.

“I like it,” she says, running her thumb over the horns. “It’s cute.”

He picks up the bull and starts poking her face with it. “You like it? You like Remy? You sure you don’t love Remy, then?”

She glares at him through her tears. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“No,” he says, grinning, and she smacks him, right on the bandage. “Ruthless woman,” he says, wincing.

Then he positions the bull on her back, making it walk up and down. “You know what souvenir mean in French, minou?”

“No,” she says, sniffling. “What?”

“Both memory,” he says. “and to remember.” He looks at her. “Mes souvenirs; my memories. Je me souviens de toi; I remember you.”

Then he nods at the bull. “Though Gambit don’t know how much he wants to remember what happened in Madrid, eh.”

She closes her eyes. He doesn’t say anything else while she continues crying, just walking the bull up and down her back, over and over, back and forth.


*


Souvenirs, she thinks. Memory and to remember. Things to remember; things to bring back; things to give to others.

How many souvenirs has she been given, in her lifetime. Souvenirs from Mississippi, Canada, Japan, Germany, Poland, England. She can’t carry them all, has tried to leave them behind, but they hang on to her. His most of all.

And now, new ones: New Orleans, Madrid.

She thinks, What happened to against intimacy? And here she is, in this man’s room, listening to his life story, gaining another set of ghosts to make company with the ones already in her head.

She thinks, with a panic, that she may have forgotten the intention of this entire adventure in the first place.

Opening her eyes, she realizes she had fallen asleep for quite some time. Seeing Gambit sleeping, deeply, on his back next to her: looking at the bandages on his chest, his stomach, his hair mussed and a little sweaty from lack of proper showering.

Thinking, knowing: If he had come back dead, it would have ended me.

She has to get the hell out of here.

She crawls, slowly and quietly, backwards out of bed. Gambit doesn’t move, his breathing remains the same, with that bearded mouth slightly open, front teeth showing.

She finally manages to slip off the bed with only a slight creaking sound, then pads towards the door on her tiptoes, trying not to look at the tiny dark red stains on the trench coat as she passes.

She picks her shoes up in her hand, opens the door as little as possible, and slides out through it, locking and closing the door behind her. It is nearly morning anyway—the orderly will be there soon.


*


Still, she waits outside his door for another hour, listening for a sound of discomfort or pain from within the room, until she can hear the orderly’s soft footsteps in the hall, and sees him turning the corner. Then, finally, she lets herself leave.


*


And on her way back to her room, she sees Bobby, also slipping out of someone’s room, closing the door she now recognizes is Piotr’s, looking dazed and blissful.

He sees her coming, looks startled and panicked for a moment, then he smiles; gently and knowingly, like allies.


*


Lying in bed, thinking: Not that smile—I’m not like you two. I’m not like you two.


*


That night, she dreams of a teenage Harada, his older half-sister Yashida Mariko, an American soldier in love; a fight, a mistake.

Then she dreams of Harada as a young man, next to a young woman named Oyama Yuriko and her father, Oyama Kenji; a flight on an American army plane, from Japan to the Canadian Rockies; a man in a tank, his body being filled with metal; more fighting, more mistakes.

Then she dreams of a young man in love, blowing up the body of his future brother-in-law on the day of his wedding. Coming to Alcatraz too late, finding only ashes were people and places once were. Learning to be more informed, the next time.

And none of it makes sense, none of it hangs together. People she doesn’t understand, lives she doesn’t understand; but those people are her now, those lives are hers now.

At sixteen she had thought of all these things with a mixture of panic and obsession; with a desire to redeem, to save, to help—not knowing yet that she couldn’t do any of those things, that it wasn’t her place to do any of those things; that she had gained all these memories by accident, unjustly.

She had taken things from Logan he didn’t even know he owned anymore, things he didn’t even have the power to give to her, let alone to anyone else. And to be in love with someone for that reason alone—because some twist of evolution had monstrously given her a peek inside his head—seems terrible to her, the lowest low.

She wouldn’t forgive that if it happened to her. If someone knew things about her that she didn’t even know, that she wasn't even capable of knowing anymore. She doesn’t have a single right to the things she knows. The only thing she can do for him is to try, every day, not knowing them.

But she lately she feels as though she is failing miserably in this task—seeing Harada again, and now Gambit—she can’t help it, the things she knows are only growing and growing, and she cannot keep them apart from each other, or apart from her. They bleed out, spilling over everything; and she thinks again and again, I don’t want to know people anymore, it’s unbearable to know people at all.


*


The next day, she runs into Gambit in the hallway, and surprised, says, “What are you doing up?”

He says, gesturing down at himself. “Almost good as new, minou,” he says. “You must’ve done something to me when this old thief was sleeping, yeah?”

“You wish,” she shoots at him.

“Yep,” he agrees. “But not yet, eh?”

He pats his stomach, underneath his black shirt, and she can hear the bandages rustle against his hand. “Just a little bit longer.”

“Well, hurry up,” she says cheerfully, and winks.

“Minou—” he calls after her, and she turns around. He is holding the little bull between his fingers. “You forget Remy in my room.”

Her jaw tightens. “Thanks, rat,” she says, plucking it from his hand. Then she spin around and walks away, quickly.


*


She needs to get it together, she tells herself. She puts the bull in one of her nightstand’s empty drawers, one she doesn’t use for anything, and never ever has to open, at all.


*


When she finds Logan the next day, the sight of his face is so refreshing to her, she realizes for the first time that she hasn’t seen him in quite a while—spending all her time with the rat, in the medbay and in his room.

She sees his face, and before she can think about anything else—anything else, anything else, anyone else—she more or less jumps him, yanking the zipper of his jeans down with her gloved hand. But he doesn’t complain when she wraps him in a condom and starts to suck on him. This feels right; this feels feels familiar and safe and just the right distance between them. Sucking his cock or fucking him feels far less intimate than even thinking about Harada—so she fucks him twice.



*


She would like to keep fucking Bobby and Piotr as well, but now that they are nervously and piously and ecstatically fucking each other, she can’t go to them anymore. And the realization that it’s down to just Logan and Gambit now makes it hard for her to breathe.


*


And Logan still hasn’t totally shaken his habit of asking intrusive questions during sex.

She doesn’t understand it—he barely barks a word to her about anything else during the day, but the time around coitus seems to be his preferred interrogation period. Is it because he knows she can’t run away, or won’t want to run away? Or is it because this is the only time that he, too, lets down the massive guard he always carries around with him?

She doesn’t know, she doesn’t care, she doesn’t want to know—just let him stop asking these questions.

She has just come in the backseat of one of the cars in the garage, Logan’s face is still slick with his own saliva, and the scarf is still stuck to her sex, when he asks, a little short of breath, “How did you get your powers?”

And not now, not now, not while she is still trying to get everything back into order.

“I told you, I’m not telling,” she says, hoping she sounds calm. But the fact that she hasn’t punched him in the face is probably already an indication of how serious she actually feels.

“I want to know,” he says, and he looks determined and earnest, and no, no, no, he cannot ask her this, he cannot really ask her to be honest with him, when they have already so long ago arranged to ask nothing from each other.

“Well, sucks for you,” she says, making the deliberate double entendre. Grinning as widely and as slyly as she can, adding “Though, speaking of sucking and you—”

It takes him a little longer to come this time, though he seems aroused as ever—and when she looks up at him to check what the progress is on his orgasm, he is staring down at her with a look she cannot read and desperately does not want to.


*


Another time, Logan bites down on her breasts so hard she has to scream out the safe word, and hearing herself say the word “samurai” makes her voice tremble. Luckily, she can pass it off as pain.

So she exaggerates her reaction to hide her genuine panic, and asks him, “What the hell?”

“Sorry,” he says. “Went too far.”

“Thank god for safe words, you sadistic fuck,” she says, still being dramatic. “Or I would’ve had to touch you and grow my own tit back.”

Then she thinks, with a jolt: No. She will never do that. She will never do that. Never never never never never. She will never let herself be healed by him again.

Only later, in the bathroom after taking a shower, does she sees that there are three bite marks on her breasts: two little ones, and one big one, angry one above them; and she knows Logan only bit her once.

And she doesn’t like this. She doesn’t like this at all.


*


Passing by Storm’s office on the way back to her room after her class with Logan, she hears the woman arguing, and this time she knows exactly whom she is speaking to. Then Storm is silent, and Rogue thinks it must be Hank talking, now.

“Rogue,” Storm’s voice calls from inside the office. “I can see you there, honey.”

Shit. She pushes open the door slightly, her face apologetic. “Sorry—I didn’t mean to eavesdrop—”

“Sure you did,” Storm says, smiling, though Rogue can tell that she wants to do just the opposite. “Come in, have a seat.”

She obeys, not exactly sure what she is doing there. Behind her desk—still Xavier’s desk—Storm smiles. “So how you doing, honey,” she asks, exhaling. “Teaching going okay?”

“Great,” Rogue replies. “I’m still really loving it; it’s so weird to actually find something I’m good at.”

“Why weird?” Storm asks.

Rogue shrugs. “I never thought I’d be good at anything, I guess. Never thought I’d be able to do anything enough to get good at it. Sounds stupid now that I say it out loud, but I really thought that.”

“Hm,” Storm says. “No, I thought that, too, when I was younger.” Then she winces. “Actually I still think that way. Recently, a lot. Especially after this last mission.”

“What?” Rogue exclaims. “No way—Storm, you’re doing a great job. Everyone thinks so.”

Storm smiles. “Not quite everyone. But—thank you.”

Rogue looks down. “Hank’s not that happy about all the bodyguard stuff, huh,” she says.

Storm looks a little taken aback. “No,” she says. “He’s really not. How did you know?”

“He looked pretty uncomfortable at that gala we went to,” Rogue says. “I guess it was kind of embarrassing to be so protected at a party like that, with all those important people around.”

Storm sighs, rubs her right temple. “Yeah,” she says. “I know.”

“But I think it was the right thing to do,” Rogue says quickly, and Storm looks at her, with a hesitant encouraged smile, and the woman looks much, much younger, suddenly.

And Rogue thinks about how beautiful Storm is; how much she’s always wanted at least her approval, having always been too young to really ever be her friend—how much she’s always wanted to be like her, strong and calm and centered and fierce. Watching how she moves, how she carries herself—regally, with none of the suppressed sorrow of Jean; only her own confidence and frankness: angry when she angry, calm when she is calm.

In her own timid way, Rogue thinks she can admit that she loves Storm, at least; the only one she’ll admit that about.

Rogue goes on, “I would want to do anything to protect the people—” And then she stops. “The people important to me,” she finishes.

Something flashes in Storm’s eye, and in her smile Rogue thinks she can see something like recognition, knowing. “The people important to us,” she repeats, sighing. “Yeah.”

This seems like a serious conversation, so Rogue dares to ask, “Hank’s important to you, isn’t he?”

Storm sighs again, and then simply nods. “Yes, he is.”

“In that—way?” Rogue ventures. Storm smiles, and now she doesn’t look so young anymore.

She says, “Honey, I think you understand better than anyone that there are lots of ways for someone to be important.”

Rogue looks at her. “But why—” She looks down at her gloved hands, and thinks she wants to do for Storm what she couldn’t do for Bobby and Piotr; just because she doesn’t believe in or want certain things doesn’t mean others don’t, or shouldn’t.

“I think Hank feels the same way,” Rogue says quietly. “About you.”

Then she takes a breath and says, “It’s all over his face whenever anyone says your name.”

And Storm’s face fills with sadness, and Rogue thinks she must have said something wrong, something she didn’t want to hear, and she curses herself for not being old enough, after all, to be Storm’s friend.

“I,” Storm begins. “I—ah. It’s just—complicated. We were close when he lived at the mansion, and when he left, years ago, to take the position in the Cabinet, I—well. I couldn’t support it.”

Rogue thinks about Storm, furious at the idea that she would take the cure, that any of them would even think about it—that any of them would ever leave this mansion, abandon what it stood for, what it could do, what it had given to all of them. Fighting to protect this haven and everyone who lived there. Feeling like every parting was an abandonment, a betrayal.

And behind Xavier’s desk, the older woman looks small, anxious, fragile.

Storm looks down at her desk. “We never talked about it and eventually we went back to being close again, but, well.” Her jaw tenses slightly. “You can be close and still tell when things are just—different.

“And I—haven’t really been able to—” She sighs, grimaces. “I guess some part of me is still mad at him for leaving. For living some new life, somewhere else.” Storm sighs. “I guess I just drew a line,” she says.

Rogue thinks about Hank’s face, about his blue-furred figure at the gala, looking solitary and distant and stiff whenever he wasn’t being badgered by some senator or lobbyist. And all around him, for months now, his bodyguards; everyone sent by Storm, but never Storm. Her absence wrapped around him like an armor he hasn't chosen and doesn't want to wear.

“You don’t think you can get over it?” she asks softly.

Storm grimaces again. “I—it’s not that easy to let yourself—really be with people.”

Then she looks up and smiles wistfully. “But you know that, too.”

“Yeah,” Rogue says, nodding. Then she laughs. “But you don’t have skin that kills him, and neither does he. So—it should be a little easier, right?”

Storm laughs, too, but her laugh has no happiness in it. “Ah, well,” she says, running a hand through her hair. “Killer mutations aren’t the only reason someone might be afraid to get close to others.”

She smiles, and the smile has no happiness in it, either. “Even happens to normal-looking mutants. And actual normal people, too.”

Rogue doesn’t say anything, stunned at the idea that she and Storm might have something in common besides the two men they have both been fucking. That she and Storm might behave the same way when it comes to certain things; a single certain thing; one certain, important thing.

“It’s the hardest, isn’t it,” Storm says, looking at her. “Letting people in.”

She shakes her head, and the white hair shivers on her shoulders. “I don’t know how anyone does it.”

Rogue thinks she might cry, right here, right now—while Storm confides in her for the first time in her life. And she knows, with a keening joy that feels just like sorrow, that she is not sixteen anymore, at all.

“Me neither,” she says, instead.


*


She is sitting in the cafeteria alone, after nearly all the students have finished eating, as she prefers it, when Logan suddenly seats himself in front of her. She is so surprised at his presence that she pretends to be reaching for the newspaper that the table’s previous occupants had left there.

“Hey, Logan,” she says. He only grunts, but starts eating.

Is he aware of the fact that he has a very disconcerting, near-constant staring problem? She doesn’t like it.

To distract him, she pretends to laugh at the first movie advertisement she sees and says, “Oh, I’m definitely going to see this.”

“What,” he asks, and she turns the newspaper around to show it to him. She realizes it doesn’t exactly look like the most sophisticated film, and she feels the flicker of her age, coming back to her.

Sure enough, he has a skeptical, mocking look on his face. “Looks smart.” And she wants to kick him under the table.

“It looks fuckin’ amazing, is what it looks like,” she says, then looks at the newspaper. It does actually look like it would be fun. But the film is only showing a month from now, and she is genuinely disappointed.

Then Logan says, “We should go.”

And she thinks, Go, I just got here. “What?” she asks. “I’m still eating.”

He looks like he might want to kick her under the table himself. “No,” he says, his voice little more than a snarl. “To the movie. When it comes out.”

She stares at him. Is she being asked out on a date by Logan? The idea is so absurd she cannot help but burst into laughter; and the more she thinks about it, the more absurd it becomes, so her laughter only becomes more hysterical, until she thinks about its implications, and then her laughter has a note of panic in it, and she has to put her face down on the table, banging her fist, to hide the expression of dread that must be in her eyes now.

What is he doing—with the staring, and the questions, and the moaning of her old name, and the bite marks and now this, this date, this—whatever this was? If she didn’t have part of him in her head, she wouldn’t understand him at all—and the thought makes her bite down on her lip, still pretending to laugh.

She thinks of Gambit—and a bull named Remy—and two bullets—and Harada Kenichiro—no, no, no, no, no.

When she is composed again, she lifts her head and says, easily, “Yikes. What was that, you asking me out on a date?” She shakes her head. “Let’s keep the romantic comedies in the movies.”

“So that’s a no,” he mutters, and she thinks his face might be a little red, with his annoyance.

“That’s a no,” she affirms.

Then she smiles with all the mischief she can muster. “But if you give me five minutes to finish my salad, I’ll fuck your brains out in a supply closet.”


*


And when she fucks him, while he is sitting on a bucket and she sits astride him, he doesn’t look at her, but only breathes her hair in, deeply.

And she likes that, she likes that—and then she isn’t sure she likes that, she isn’t sure she likes that.