---
The Ante
Chapter XIX: Hooks
---

In a cloud of sulphur, accompanied by the sound of air splitting violently as two bodies teleported through the very fabric of space, the X-Men aliased Wolverine and Nightcrawler appeared on a small footpath in Lafayette Cemetery number one.

Wolverine, his mask covering half his face, hunched his shoulders and sniffed at the air with ferocious determination.

“Bingo,” he said gruffly.

Beside him, Nightcrawler narrowed his eyes. “Is she here?”

His prehensile tail flicked back and forth agitatedly as he took in his surroundings. The area of the graveyard they had appeared in was dark, but several yards away, men moved amidst the glow of security flares.

“We ain’t alone,” Logan groused, stalking off into the night. Nightcrawler followed two paces behind. “There are cops crawling all over this place. Stick to me, Elf. They see that blue mug of yours and it’ll turn into hunting season quicker than you can say ‘donut.’”

“How can you tell?” Kurt asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Smells like blood,” was the only reply offered. Instantaneously, Nightcrawler was on guard.

“Who’s?” he asked, a twinge of nervousness lacing the question. “Is it Rogue’s? Is she… was she hurt?”

“She ain’t here. Neither is the Cajun. But they were, and not too long ago. I’d know his stink anywhere. This is human – baseline, it smells dirty, and it’s strong. Come on.”

Logan ploughed forwards, his shoulder knocking into a crypt, though the slight buffer didn’t slow the stocky man down.

They emerged on the outskirts of a police line. It created an ugly, polygonal blockade around an even uglier hole in the ground. Worse, the place was crawling with feds who, for all they were concerned, would consider them either vigilantes or worse, suspects.

Logan sniffed again, thrusting an arm out to hold Kurt back to the shadows before they could be seen.

“Stay put,” Wolverine rumbled, his teeth bared.

He sniffed again, taking in a lungful of the sodden air, and grimaced just as quickly. Logan shook his head and Kurt hissed, “What is it?”

From Nightcrawler’s vantage point, blocked from the light and the milling officers by a thick arm, he couldn’t see what the problem was, though from Logan’s expression, he was beginning to form a pretty good idea.

“They were here,” Wolverine murmured in a decidedly grim tone. “I can smell them all over these two. That can’t be right.”

“What? What can’t be right? Wolverine!”

“You shouldn’t see this, kid,” he rumbled in a tone that left little room for argument and pushing him backwards. “The cops are going to be coming this way soon. There’s… another one… behind us. It’s downwind, but the scent’ll turn this way once the breeze picks up. It’s even nastier than this. We need to move.”

“What? Why?” Nightcrawler asked, trying to push past the firm barrier that blocked his view of the hole.

“Back up, Elf,” Wolverine warned. “I mean it. We need to get out of here. Now. Getting implicated in this mess will bring the roof down on us all.”

“But you just said Rogue was here. Aren’t we going to follow her?”

Wolverine rounded on him, picking him up by his uniform collar and dragging him. “I don’t know what the hell that punk got her mixed up in, but this ain’t right,” he said again, though this time, it sounded to Kurt as if Logan was trying to convince himself of some unspoken fact he didn’t want to voice. “Stripes wouldn’t… but Gumbo…”

“What are you talking about?” Kurt hissed.

Wolverine wagged his head. “Her scent is all over that poor bastard back there. He reeks of it. Gumbo’s fainter, but there’s only them two. I don’t smell anyone else – two others, maybe, but they didn’t touch the poor bastard.”

Wolverine was losing it, Kurt concluded, his toes barely dragging over the ground where Logan carried him back the way they’d came.

Whatever it was that he’d smelled, it had to be bad.

Incensed, Kurt moved instinctively and teleported out of Logan’s grasp, delivering himself into the shadows of an overhanging oak tree that looked down on the splintered blemish marring the earth below.

What Kurt saw there nearly made him fall out of the tree entirely.

A moment later, once he’d swallowed the rising bile at the back of his throat, he looked up to see Wolverine’s figure stalking away, a black dot blending into the shadows discreetly.

He said he’d smelled Rogue on the body. Her scent must have been strong, because even with the overpowering coppery tang lacing the air above the twisted, gutted form on the ground, Logan would have known if she’d been here.

Swallowing thickly, he considered what Wolverine had told him.

If Logan could only smell Rogue and Gambit on the body, that meant… no. It was impossible. Rogue wouldn’t harm anyone unless she had to – and this… the body… it was mutilated beyond recognition. Kurt’s stomach dropped as vividly, he recalled the ruthless, cold grimace Rogue had worn the day she pushed Mystique off a cliff at the Institute.

There was a side of Rogue he could not recognize, would not recognize as his own family.

She had been repentant, he tried to convince himself. She was repentant; she was sorry for acting impulsively. But being sorry didn’t bring back the dead. Rogue had wanted vengeance. She had sought it and claimed it. Mystique, Kurt’s birth mother and Rogue’s foster mother, had been destroyed. One terrible moment was all it took, and in Kurt’s eyes, no matter how much he’d embraced her afterwards – even after he’d said he’d forgiven Rogue and they had found Mystique was alive and well, a part of him still understood that it was the potential for great evil that he would remember more clearly than anything.

With Rogue’s abilities, her training, her mutation – there was great and terrible ability there, and in some ways, Kurt knew it was not an unfounded fear.

He loved her, but love didn’t erase the fact that in some ways, by being a mutant with her unique talents, Rogue was more dangerous than any of them.

But was it possible that Rogue was a killer? Instinctively, he knew it could be true.

Kurt was going to be ill.

“Mein schwester,” he choked under his breath, “what have you done?”

---

A whisper of something ephemeral lingered at the back of Rogue’s mind as she stalked across the estate lawns. The grass was dewy and left wet streaks across the toes of her boots.

She shuddered, reflecting on how easily her movements suddenly seemed to her. She felt changed, somehow – adapting to Remy’s absorption and knowing intrinsically the way to the bayou through the cover of trees that she ducked into a moment later. She knew the locations of the security cameras, the arc taken between two angled sweeps of the lenses, and the exact amount of time in between where she was afforded the cloak of stealth to pass beneath them undetected.

It was if the dream, the memory that had surfaced as she slept, had flicked an on switch in her head.

It had been second nature to slip into one of the side rooms and pull a spare bo from the mansion’s artillery. She hadn’t known the passcode to unlock the drawer in which the training weapons were stored, but she had picked the lock in under five seconds flat.

This was decidedly bad, she concluded, though not without some trepidation.

Worse, though she strained to find him, Remy’s psyche was simply not there, though a substantial amount of other indecipherable information was. It was patchy at best – a network of half-formed, foggy thoughts that meant little or nothing if she concentrated on them too hard.

Like faces in the mist, his memories rose to greet her. Women – hundreds of women, all nameless and indecipherable from one another beneath the grey veil of forgetting lined her thoughts. When Rogue tried to focus on any one of them, their features shifted – eyes turning blue and sad, hair shifting into silken blond. These were the ones he’d used to try and forget her, Bella Donna, and none could drown her out entirely.

Without his psyche, without Remy himself, there was no one there to see Rogue swipe at her dry eyes. They stung from crying, and after having looked in her bathroom mirror moments before, Rogue couldn’t bring herself to see what condition she was in since.

Dully, she reminded herself that even if her eyes were bloodshot, it wouldn’t be noticeable next to her red pupils.

She sniffed, yanking at her gloves, securing them to her hands to smother out the electric tingle she felt straight down to her bones. Her head hurt, her mouth tasted like ashes, and every thought that surfaced twisted itself into a grim reminder of what she had experienced in slumber.

It was all too hazy, and try as she might, Rogue was having a difficult time trying to pull out another clearer memory to block out the burden of Remy’s loss.

He had cared for Belle so much.

Rogue swallowed the defeated swell that accompanied the thought. Whether it was her own feelings for Remy, or Remy’s feelings for the woman he’d left behind, Rogue couldn’t tell. There was no clear mental line to distinguish between the two.

It hurt; it burned in her chest like an old fire that refused to be stomped out. Little embers, like searing spots of self-reprimand, lingered in the aftermath of the blaze. You couldn’t snuff that sort of emotion out.

That was all she needed to know to keep moving.

At the Institute, whenever she’d had a particularly bad day, the Danger Room had always served as an outlet to blow off some steam. Running against enough mechs and dealing with the sore muscles and bruises after a hard training session was better than therapy.

Physical pain blunted the lingering emotional aches.

That was good. She could deal with that, she reasoned. She’d relish a sentinel or two. Hell, she’d take on a dozen sword wielding Assassins if she could. But all she had was Remy’s agility, a pack of cards, and an adamantium staff tucked into her belt – and nothing to defend herself against.

She’d make do with a gator. She’d satisfy belting out a few rounds with the warm body that followed her at a distance, providing it wasn’t Remy.

With her luck, Rogue thought morosely, it probably was.

Part of him constantly stoked the flame, blowing on those lingering coals of his memory. Why he did it, Rogue couldn’t even begin to understand – but she did know that it served as some sort of mortal penitence for what he’d done.

She drew a shaky breath. In those terms, she understood Remy in a way that no one else could. It made her heart ache.

And that gave her all the more reason to evade him. Empathy had never been her strong suit.

A low breeze from the southwest pushed his scent to the line of trees beyond the docks where she stilled, breathing deeply. It was a faint smell, but distinctive. How that boy managed to get out of so many tight spots in his line of work, wearing that much aftershave, was beyond her.

Keep moving, she told herself, breaking into a clipped jog over the protruding roots where the ground turned to muddy shoreline.

She’d been foolish to take what he’d said at face value. Heck, the Professor had told her explicitly that whatever changes Gambit had undergone might not be permanent, and yet she’d gone and kissed him anyway. She’d blamed him for trying to get away as quickly as possible, but he’d probably known the entire time that something had gone wrong. It didn’t mean it wasn’t her fault; he’d given her the bait, and she’d reacted. Who wouldn’t, she thought defensively, launching herself one-handed over a fallen tree trunk.

“Like a damned donkey with a carrot in front of its face,” she huffed.

It didn’t have to mean it was anything more than that, she thought defiantly. No strings attached, just the spectres in her head to remind her.

Rogue swore.

Perhaps there was more of him in her mind than she’d believed initially.

The thought chased her down, setting a prickle in her limbs she hadn’t noticed before. It was a nervous shiver, nipping at the back of her consciousness and making her fingers twitch. Accompanying it was the sudden, reflexive urge to test her strength, and just below that, the sharper craving for nicotine.

She grimaced, cursing the Cajun for being a smoker. She wasn’t about to humour him, she asserted herself, not with that filthy habit.

Bearing that in mind, Rogue broke into a run – darting into the thick twine of tree limbs and heavy mosses, leaping wide onto the first felled cypress that crossed her path, and extending her staff to vault into the trees.

For a moment, as she soared through the air, her heart lifted – savouring the ease of escape, if only for a moment.

---

Like a shadow, Remy tailed her through the cover of hanging vines and thick mosses that swayed lazily in the grey cover of the bayou. Despite his nimble leaps from branch to branch, banking over the deeper gullies that opened over the swamp, he felt clumsy, anxious.

He didn’t like it.

He paused a moment, fingers weaving through the tangles of Spanish moss that blocked his way, and listened hard.

It was still dark among the trees, though dawn was probably breaking in the East by now, lighting the plantation grounds and warming the windowpanes. The swamp, however, was as placid and rank as ever. Twenty feet below, the water was barely visible beneath the heavy overhang that concealed his position from view.

Either way, it was still too damned dark to really know where Rogue had gotten to so quickly.

She couldn’t move that fast, not without a little… help.

Remy grimaced.

His “help.”

He snorted at the irony, uncaring that the sound carried easier here. If Rogue had absorbed his powers, she undoubtedly knew that he was shadowing her. Hell, if Rogue had his powers, if she was thinking like he usually did, she was probably luring him out here to have her naughty way with him.

He’d be an alligator’s breakfast in no time.

It’d be a small sacrifice, he smirked. Just as quickly, the smile vanished. This was all getting way out of hand, and that was saying something given the fact that he usually enjoyed the element of surprise.

The plan had been simple. Straightforward. An easy pull. A quick draw. A little scrapping. Some peace of mind for him. A whole lot of gratitude from Rogue.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

But like most things that carried with them the potential for great payoff, nothing was ever quite so simple or so effortless. It was the entanglement that was causing the problem. Or perhaps, had he been less impulsive, less determined, and less infatuated with the whole idiotic, romantic notion that he was somehow fashioned for her at the most basic, and therefore the most complicated level, then he could forgive himself.

The fact of the matter was, he wanted her.

Badly.

The problem was that in the grand scheme of things, Rogue wasn’t willing to let herself fall into the roll of “the conquest,” and Remy, determined as ever, wasn’t entirely certain of what he thought of that.

He squatted on the tree branch, bracing an elbow against the pitted trunk, and scrubbed at his face. Things had been much simpler when they’d been fighting against one another — an Acolyte and an X-Man standing in the middle of a dockyard exchanging niceties by way of exploding playing cards.

Back then, the emotional baggage hadn’t quite weighed in so heavily for either of them.

The odds were evened up, so to speak. Rogue had her mental cargo, a head full of ghosts, and he had his skeletons tucked away neatly in his closet. In some ways, they were so alike it was unnerving.

Dieu, he deserved her.

The thought sobered him, bringing him back to his surroundings. The wood beneath his fingers as he pressed his palm into the tree was damp and mouldering. Pieces of the greyish bark peeled away as he peered at his fingers, clinging stubbornly to his palm in chipped flecks that would be difficult to pick off once they burrowed into the fabric.

“An’ isn’t dat an’ appropriate metaphor,” he hummed to himself, a touch sardonically.

Rogue had absorbed him, and while she was dealing with the consequences of his assimilated memories, he was subsequently dealing with her, dealing with his dirty laundry. What were they at now: two, three times in the span of a week? It’d be downright hilarious if, like a disease inoculation, he eventually found himself becoming immune to her touch – but that was too much to hope for.

In fact, it seemed that the exact opposite was happening.

Each time he touched her, she took a little edge off his powers. Whether it was permanent, or if she was just exhausting him because she’d already reached a formidable level of strength, Remy had yet to determine.

“Dunno how much I want t’ find out either,” he muttered under his breath, extending his staff with a muted click that he muffled with his palm and using it to peel apart some of the moss obscuring the view.

More disturbing still was the fact that he continued to mull it over, when clearly, he should have been making an active effort to prepare for endgame. The X-Men were in the city already, the Brotherhood would be close behind, no doubt, and the gemstone he only hoped Lapin could take care of.

He needed Rogue, but Rogue needed the stone. It was a pretty weighty catch fifty two, or was that twenty two? Whatever.

Instead of contemplating all that, Remy’s thoughts lingered on her.

Like the little bits of broken bark burrowing into his gloves, she had somehow managed to work her way under his skin. She was forcing him to develop a conscience, and that was a dangerous thing. In a time like this, with Jean Luc gnashing at the bit to level the playing field before the Assassins could attack, and Remy himself trying to delay the inevitable as long as possible, his defences were worn down, and Rogue had slid in.

It had probably been a bad idea altogether to pick the lock to her room and try to dismantle the surveillance camera positioned in the corner while she slept not ten feet away.

But that was part of the fun — not getting caught while appreciating her while she slept… or at least, it had been.

He’d heard everything as he stood at the foot of her bed, his toolkit clenched in his fist while he admired the pale curve of her bare shoulder; he could only stand by and listen. Exposed by the slipping blankets, as fragile and innocent in her slumber as she had ever been, even all those times when he’d perched on her balcony and peered through her window back in Bayville, Rogue spoke in her sleep.

She’d said the words that condemned him.

Worse, when she’d awoken shaken and sobbing, he hadn’t been able to comfort her.

Touching her skin again meant running the risk of getting absorbed again, and while he could live with the comforting abyss of unconsciousness, he doubted he wanted to find out what else she’d pull from his head.

“Cajun!”

Remy pivoted, dropping to a crouch on the branch and peering down through the woven branches.

“Ah know yo’ up there!” Rogue bellowed.

Over the solemn croon of bullfrogs, Remy heard her pacing, boot heels hitting wood at a fast clip, and the unmistakable sound of a deck of cards being shuffled.

Merde.

“Bon matin!” he called back tentatively, slipping his trench off his shoulders. Rogue didn’t reply. The silence stretched while Gambit waited. It thickened, growing in intensity with each moment that passed and she didn’t respond. He glanced at the garment a moment, contemplating, and with a heavy sigh, he dropped it through the tangle of tree limbs.

The explosion that followed was near deafening as a charged card hit the base of the tree in which he was perched. He moved sinuously, flipping off the branch backwards so that his shoulders took the brunt of the lashing branches on his freefall to the swamp.

A moment later, he twisted mid-air, landing in a crouch opposite Rogue. Beneath him, jutting over the swamp like a saggy bridge, a felled cypress trunk supported their shared weight. It sagged a little with the combined strain of both bodies, letting water slop over making the surface slippery. For the most part, it was still buoyant over the dark pool below them.

One misplaced step to the right, and he would have had his morning bath, though it was wide enough across to stand comfortably.

Remy chuckled. “Y’picked a good place f’ a fight.”

Behind him, the waning flames left by the detonated card petered, the wood too moist to sustain the fire.

Before him, Rogue shucked another card into her palm, toying with the edges. She cocked her head to the side, surveying him in a manner that left him edgy and excited despite the obvious threat she posed.

“Ah don’t want ta fight with ya anymore, Gambit,” she said evenly.

Remy stood, glancing behind him at the scorch marks left behind on the base of the tree. “Den what was dat?” He cocked his thumb over his shoulder. “A wake up call? Femme, I hope y’ didn’t ruin m’ favourite coat.”

Rogue smirked, brushing her hair out of her eyes. Remy stilled, his breath catching at the sight.

“N’inquiet pas, cher,” she murmured, favouring him with grin that was all too familiar. “Ah’d say it was best that it was yo’ coat and not you. Wouldn’t want ta damage the goods, now would we?”

Remy blinked away his surprise, though Rogue pursed her lips at him seductively, her eyes glimmering in the dappled shade offered by morning sun as it crept through the trees. Shining scarlet on black, her gaze reflected his sin back to him –if he could even call it that.

“Rogue,” he began tentatively, taking a ginger step forwards.

She appeared entirely unconcerned, placing a hand on her hip and thrusting it to the side indifferently as she sized him up.

“Surprised, cher?” she asked, taking in his full measure slowly. It made his stomach clench, being acknowledged by her properly. It was still wrong, of course, since she wasn’t enjoying the view of her own volition.

“Y’ not y’self right now, p’tit,” he continued. With each step forwards, the tree trunk sagged a little more, bouncing in the non-existent current and creating little ripples over the glasslike surface of the swamp. “An’ I t’ink dat’s partially m’ fault.”

“Ya think?” she scoffed. “If ya kept yo’ distance ta begin with like Ah’d asked, Ah wouldn’t have hurt ya ta begin with, and Ah wouldn’t know what Ah know now.”

“M’ not hurt,” he countered. “M’ just peachy. See?”

He held his arms out to the side, his staff compacted in one fist, though he managed to pry his fingers off of it long enough to show her his hands were otherwise empty and he posed no real threat.

“Oh, ya look just fine, sugah.” She lowered her lashes, peering at him with barely concealed suggestion. Swallowing hard, Remy tried to play it off nonchalantly. Less than a half hour before he’d seen her sobbing. It had been the desperate, hollowed out sound of someone who’d experienced an agony so acute that it felt like her heart was being shredded. He knew it; he’d lived it after all.

This was his first line of defence, and she was using it against him. Part of him wanted to indulge in it, seeing it played back to him so easily, and part of him wanted to dive into the swamp and swim as fast and far as he could.

She was dangerous like this because he knew he was too.