Home | Forum | Mailing List | Repository | Links | Gallery
 
 
Chapters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
 
 
 

If Ever - REVIEW THIS STORY

Written by Painted Eyes
Last updated: 01/02/2007 02:01:11 AM

Chapter 15

Ten Days Later

Soft snores came from one of the beds where Hank had finally succumbed to sleep. Ororo, lying beside Remy dozing, felt the change of rhythm in her friend's breathing and drew her hand in a gentle soothing caress down his shoulder and side. It had happened twice in the last half hour and this made three, always a propitious number to her superstitious friend. Monotonous beeping sped a moment, slowed again.

She and Jubilee, even Jean in the afternoons when Scott was engaged in working on Sinister's machine, had begun taking turns laying with Remy so he always had the warm presence of a living person with him. Jean said it kept at least part of him with them, as did the soft unobtrusive touch she maintained with his subconscious mind. That mind wandered, too content with the safe emptiness. Nothing could reach him, nothing threaten or take him, he was God of Nothing and liked it just fine, him.

Yesterday when Jean had been with him the beeps had slowed, and slowed again, and when Hanks ministrations had no effect and he had despaired, Jean pushed him aside and climbed up into the bed, taking Gambit's failing body into her arms with his tangle of tubes and wires ... Henry had been shocked to see her hand moving under the sheet between his long thighs, her eyes closed as she pressed her forehead against Remy's and reached for his mind using his body as a focus. Shocked embarrassment turned to interest, however, when that body reacted with a half-erection and the monitor steadied. He would never say so to anyone, but he had done it himself - outside the sheet, of course - in the dead of night when Remy again had tried to finally go.

The Acadian was the most tactile man he'd ever encountered and loved sex with a consuming passion, but Henry had thought that a byproduct of his sensitive spatial awareness and never guessed how much more vital touch was ... or how much more intimate Jean's knowledge of him was. Then he understood how the bond had been formed between Remy and Jean that he saw so clearly, and why Scott, for all his true regret, had never come to MedLab.

With the warmth of their bodies the three women held him to living, even Jubilee counted among them as an equal, understanding what and why with a new maturity. The paralyzing drugs had been withdrawn and Remy's wrists were braceleted in thick diffusers that Hank theorized might disperse weak kinetic charges before they reached the focal release point in his hands.

Under Ororo's cheek his chest hitched, and she lifted her head to look up into his face ... so pale under the violent marks and gaunt ... a flicker of eyebrows, the soft vibration of a nearly inaudible moan and her heart leapt.

"Remy? Can you hear me, mon ami?" Soft and quiet and calm around the sudden flare of hopeful excitement, "I wait, I am with you, Remy." Coaxing with her voice and her touch and rewarded when the dark lush sweep of lashes twitched.

"Come, Remy. I am lonely here beside you, come be with me, padnat." Pressing herself against his side so he would feel her and remember what living was.

Usually when Remy lost consciousness for any reason, no matter the length of time he was under, he came up out of it all at once, suddenly there and usually with great destructive violence. Accordingly, Ororo called Henry with quiet urgency to bring sedatives and rose to her knees beside Gambit on the bed, stroking his face with one warm hand. This time, however, his eyes took many long fluttering minutes to break open, lips parting around a ragged gasp like a drowned man still sinking.

"Yes, dear friend, mon ami, I am with you ..."

His fingers curled, as much as they could in the cast, in a dry hot slide around the wrist of the hand she had braced beside him on the blanket, and tears sprang to her pale eyes at this small sign of life. She brought her face down close to his, looking into his midnight eyes where the red was a thin slice nearly eclipsed by dilated black pupils, unfocused but aware of this world, and she needed to keep him there.

"Master LeBeau, this Thief has need of you, the fiddler is not ready to let your feet be still ... come dance with me, mon amis, l'vivant le bon temp ..."

Jean came in quietly, having known the instant Remy approached consciousness.

Warm fragrant breath faintly brushed his face, unexpected as a living touch in the grave. A warm voice broke the blank silence in his ears. All he could bear just then, he let the breath whisper on his skin remembering he had skin, let the sound chase the quiet without asking why it brought him comfort, or why he needed it.

*Stay, Remy ...* Encouragement sifted into the other emptiness, a sigh that echoed and echoed and became more real as the time, hours or moments meaningless, drifted.

Fearfully blind and slow his wandering eyes, but Jean and Ororo felt him listening, a faintly confused cant to his dark eyebrows.

Caressing touches without and within, though he couldn't distinguish between those two realms ... hardly caring but curious, ever curious. Blinking slowly, each time it seemed he would not bother to open his eyes again, but he did, although he recognized nothing, not himself or them or the concept of life itself...

Petal-soft lips touched the arch of his cheekbone, and the current of sound on his face, so friendly and welcoming, seemed like his name. A gentle warmth on his cheeks and in his mind, white hair curtaining him in diaphonous light and eyes a luminous and loving sky pulling him up from somewhere he was not sure he wanted to leave.

"He sees me ..." "He knows I'm with him ..."

Ororo and Jean murmured in the same moment, Henry watching the monitors anxiously, the three of them intertwined in the effort of bringing Remy up from death ... they watched the pupils of his eyes suddenly contract into pinpoints

*** realizing he was not dead then room for no thought other than how badly he hurt; hot bursting wetness flooded vision already only half-there, ran down his temples cold by the time it trickled through over his ears ***

and blow open again in recognition of pain and a life he did not want. His body jerked, a raw sound, and the grip on her wrist snapped shut with crushing strength, but Ororo never stopped stroking his cheek, holding his blind bewildered eyes with the force of her will for him

*** sensation rising and spreading in excruciating radiations and dizzy, suffocating, stomach knotting ***

In the next heartbeat he went twisting away from Ororo with startling speed over the side of the bed, only their grabbing hands kept him from going head-first to the floor as he vomited yellow bile onto the white tiles

*** fire in his mouth and nose and Dieu, mon Dieu, agonies struck him like hammer-blows, he couldn't breathe and needed to scream ***

Jean tried to overlook the choking cries of a man wishing himself dead rather than feel the act of retching on broken bones and damaged organs.

*** pain he could never experience again without dying if it didn't kill him right now, breathe and sight and hearing gone in the misery of living ***

Sweat broke clammy cold on his bare skin and he suddenly became a dead weight in their hands.

"Remy, stay with us!"

*Hold on!*

Henry's gently irrefutable grip on shoulder and hip took him up and back like he was weightless, eyes widening at the faint magenta glow the diffuser cuffs had begun to take on.

"I have to sedate him, now." Urgency in his uncharacteristic succinctness as he snatched the i.v. push up off the tray while Jean and Ororo tried to hold Remy down without hurting him.

*** Sacre mere, Dieu d'ciel, quel cd trouver? Quel ***

"happened? Should be dead, ev'body safe ... all dis over, all dis over!" Slurred and frantic without knowing he spoke aloud, hoarse rasping patois, fighting with what little he had before drugged lassitude crashed over him. But as his reeling brain collapsed backward, Ororo's arms settled warm around his body and Jean was inside his mind to hold him into the darkness there.

 

GambitGuild is neither an official fansite of nor affiliated with Marvel Enterprises, Inc.
Nonetheless, we do acknowledge our debt to them for creating such a wonderful character and would not dream of making any profit from him other than the enrichment of our imaginations.
X-Men and associated characters and Marvel images are © Marvel Enterprises, Inc.
The GambitGuild site itself is © 2006 - 2007; other elements may have copyrights held by their respective owners.