This Exquisite Dance - REVIEW THIS STORY

Written by CrystalWren
Last updated: 01/02/2007 02:01:11 AM

Chapter 2

It had been incredibly difficult to find them, but he had. After all, you didn't get to be as good as he was without being able to find one, small family. After that he had skitched* that private detective onto them, and now that she had found all that she was ever likely too, he was here to see them for himself.

Gambit was, give or take a level, the greatest thief in the world. Mainly he stole stuff, but occasionally he did small sidelines in extortion, smuggling, blackmail, and on rare occasions, assassination. This particular assignment had been difficult, but not impossible.

At the present moment he was playing 'shadow' on the rooftops. He was dressed in skin-tight clothing coloured in mottled grays and blues- ideal colours to sneak in, he should know, he had done it often enough. He was watching his targets through a second story window. Thank God there was a verandah roof just under the sill of this window. The red terracotta titles that he was crouching on were slippery with the sleet that the strong wind was blowing, it was cold as hell, and as dark as the inside of a coal mine. He was soaked tot eh skin, and he wasn't sure how he was doing it, but he was getting wetter. Nevertheless, if there had not been this roof, bad as it was, he'd be trying to perch in a tree. Or playing rock lizard with his fingers and toes wedged in between the gaps in the bricks. He shied away from that thought. Still, if he had any real sense he'd be a home (or at least in a warm, private room) not trying to keep his balance on a forty-five degree angled sloping roof that was slippery with ice, in a wind that felt as though it was blowing straight from the Antarctic, getting wet, and all in all courting pneumonia. If he had any sense, that is.

Drouge,# he thought. He edged closer to the window, glowing golden with warm light and showing a picture perfect family celebrating Christmas with all the cliched and well-loved trapping of the season. The family in question, a grandmother, a grandfather, their adult son and his daughter all looking disgustingly self satisfied with themselves. As he watched, Cat presented his father with the time honoured gift from someone has no idea of what to get for a relative. A packet of hand-embroidered, monogrammed hankies and a tie. The recipient of this gift not only accepted this pathetic offering, he seemed to be pleased with it. Just then his oh-so-pretty granddaughter climbed into his lap, and gave him a kiss with her rosebud mouth. Gambit could not hear what she said, over the sound of wind and rain pounding on the roof and glass (and his head) but he was good at lip reading. "I couldn't give you a Christmas present," said Angelique, radiating sincerity, "because I'm too young. So I'll give you a kiss instead."

What is this, the Bradey Bunch from Hell? Gambit wondered, trying not to gag at the Darrel Lee^ moment. Just then a particularly icy drop of water slipped past his collar and moved as slowly as possible down his shivering back. He snarled and edged a little bit closer. So sweet, they'd give me cavities. Smug, self-righteous bastards. He smirked, in a not particularly nice way. We'll have to see what we can do about that. Meanwhile Angele, a woman who seemed to have completely missed the feminist revolution when it came to assertiveness to your man, liberation, and leaving the kitchen for self-freedom, was handing out crystal glasses half filled with ruby wine. Even the child received received a tiny measure of the watered down stuff.

"A toast," said Bernard, standing up after removing Angelique from his lap, "to this family. May we gather here for many Christmases more."

He and his wife and their son drank the wine down in a single, distinctly impolite gulp. The little girl took a tiny sip of hers, wrinkled her forehead and twisted her mouth and very carefully placed the glass as far away from herself as possible. All this dissolved in embraces and kisses and murmurs of 'Happy Christmas'.

There was one who wasn't inclined to join in on the warm, mushy feeling. Gambit stared at the family with blazing eyes- literally, remember- looking for all the world like he was about to jump through the glass and slaughter the lot of them. He was seriously considering it, too. However, the whole 'blazing eyes' thing finally gave him away. He had chosen not to cover them as it was so dark and wet, and his distinctive, glowing red eyes were not so noticeable. The way they were now, it wasn't hard for the little girl to catch sight of them, scream, and point to the window and start babbling about 'monster eyes' watching them all. Gambit decided that it would be a prudent time to scat. He felt mildly humiliated to have been spotted by a rank amateur- a child of all beings- but mostly he was really, really pissed off.

He was incoherent with rage when he finally reached the slightly broken down hotel on the outskirts of town that he was staying at. He once again climbed in the rain, up an ash tree that was predicably slippery and an all-around mongrel to shimmy up, to his third floor room. He slipped in the window, and after stripping out of his sodden clothes, did a standard prowl around the shabby room he had rented. After satisfying himself that he had had no unwelcome visitors, spies, or snooping hotel managers poking through his things, he went to the shower and turning it on, hot and hard as the water could get. He stepped into it, trying not to wince as the hot water struck his chilled skin. He stayed under until he finally stopped shivering and he could feel his toes again. Then he stepped out and shook like a dog, and stepped carefully clear of any of the objects that surrounded him. He concentrated, and then appeared to glow like the sun (or at least a light bulb) and next thing the water was steaming off him as if he suddenly raised his body temperature very, very high. This wasn't what he had done, of course. He had simply kinetically charged every single dead skin cell on his own skin, until they exploded. He was very careful that he directed the energy of the explosions away from him, but other than that, the whole process was better than a loofah any day. He wrapped the single bath towel that the hotel had so generously granted him around his waist as a concession to modesty, and stepped into the shabby room that contained his bed, television, tiny refrigerator and equally tiny cupboard. He paused in the doorway and surveyed all this with a curled lip- he had stayed in much better places that this- must be getting soft, street rat, he thought. Time was when a place like this would be nothing but luxury. He dramatically leapt into the air, did a somersault and landed perfectly beside the bed draped in a rather tasteless brown quilt. The quilt matched the equally tasteless yellow wallpaper. I wonder if the bed's as bad as the room? Surprisingly it wasn't, and after an experimental bounce and then dismissed everything that had been occupying his mind with a wave of a mental hand, and got down to the business of what was really bothering him.

That family.

That smug, self-satisfied, hypocritical pack of Bradey Bunch wanna-be's.

He ground his teeth, and carefully suppressed the urge to charge the bed he was lying on until it exploded, more for the fact he was lying on it than for any social niceties.

Not so much as a mention about the child they had abandoned when he was barely three days old.

Not so much as a flicker of guilt for or regret for the son, go on, admit it, it was him, that they abandoned in the hospital as soon as his glowing red eyes had opened and it was obvious that this child sure as hell wasn't normal. The child that they abandoned to Thieves Guilds and Antiquaries and Sinisters and anybody else that had cared to use him like a tool and then discard him. They left me and then they ran. Like little dogs, run away, run away, from New Orleans, to this no place little town, to speaking lesson to get rid of de accent, paper trails to change names and birth certificates, with their single, perfect normal son. He let out the breath that he had been holding, and it hissed between his teeth. He tried to get his shoulder and neck muscles to relax, but he didn't have much success. I have a brother. The thought echoed in his head, but it didn't seem quite real. He tried again. I have a brother. It didn't sound any better than the last. I have a father and a mother. Now this did seem real, but the pictures it evoked were just plain wrong to what he was looking for. 'Mother' to him was the creased and smiling dark face Tantie Mattie. 'Father' was the broad shoulders and the smell of leather and steel (or was it steal?) that belonged to Jean-Luc LeBeau, leader of the Thieves Guild. A man who had loved him and raised him, but had manipulated him since the very beginning when he had personally stolen him from the place where he had born.

Remy groaned, and rolled over onto his side. This was too confusing, even for him. He carefully avoided even thinking about his bro- no, Cats' child. Remy liked kids. He liked the idea of one who was related to him a little too much, so he stepped around that. So what was he going to do now? Kill them? No, that would not do. That wouldn't do at all. He was not a murderer by nature by any stretch of the imagination, and the thought of killing someone when not in defense of hide or clan was strangely repugnant. Remy was a logical sort of person. In his line of business he had to be, because if you worked with your emotions instead of your brain you quickly got dead, dead or captured very fast. And then you got dead. The way he saw it, after carefully testing and discarding options in his head for a while, he had three main choices: one, he could leave. Two, he could pretend to be their friend and get to know them a little better. Three, he could terrorize them. He liked three. He liked it a lot, but he had to admit that he had a fair amount of morbid curiosity about two. Abruptly, he can to a decision. He would go by three, but in the process do a lot of two, and if he got sick of them all he could fall back on one. He could leave. Forget them all and have a holiday at Easter Island. Scratch that, Kakadu. Remy smiled for the first time since he had discovered since he had discovered the existence and whereabouts of his long lost family. Maybe he really shouldn't, but he was going to enjoy this.

* 'Skitch' basically means the same as 'sic'- you 'skitch a dog onto someone, in other words you try to get it to attack or at least threaten an intended target.

# Loosely translated, Cajun for 'dope'.

^ Darrel Lee are a chocolate company. If something's sweet, you say that it's from Darrel Lee.