Part Eleven

Twenty minutes ago, Remy was enjoying one of the most wonderful dreams he had ever had. It was of himself, and his beautiful Rogue, together as they were always meant to be. A beautiful dream, about a beautiful woman, together with him on a beautiful day. Basking in the sun, playing in the water enjoying life together, just the two of them.

That, however, was twenty minutes ago.

Something had called to him, and told him to wake up. It was the sweet voice of a little girl, filled with fear. The sound of it had made his eyes fill with tears. Despite of this though, Remy did not want to leave his dream world. He was so happy there. Then his dream shattered, leaving nothing but a black abyss. He was floating in nothing, still listening to the voice.

What? He had whined at the nothing that had taken him out of his dream.

What do you mean What?

Remy was too disorientated to respond, so the voice continued to talk. Stupid fool! Wake up!

In the darkness Remy looked down at himself and blinked. I am awake, he returned in confusion.

You are not.

I am too.

Are not!

Am Too!

ARE... *sigh* Remy I am not going to play this game with you.

At this Remy smiled distantly, Are too.

Am... Remy! Would you get serious?

Oui. What you have to tell Gambit, li'le one?

Call me StarDust Gambit.

StarDust...? Something inside of him stirred at these words put together.

Remy? You're dying.

At this Remy blinked. He was about to say that he didn't think he was dying when his mind started aching real bad. What... What do I do? He managed to chock out.

Remy you need to wake up. Remy are you listening to me?

My head hurts.

I know carrot top, just... Just... I'm sorry...

Fifteen minutes ago Remy did his best to jack upright on a metal slab. He was held down, though, by some sort of restraint across his chest, which made it even harder for him to breath. As awareness hit so did realization. Terror filled him, and he started to convulse even harder.

A hand hovered over his face, holding a mask. Oxygen filled his lungs, allowing his mind to clear, but as it did, he wished that it wasn't.

"Breath LeBeau. I cannot have you die... Yet. That's it. Deep breaths."

Remy opened his eyes and glanced around the room, avoiding the man who was trying to save his life. There really wasn't much to see. On the other side, two teenagers hung limply by their arms from chains.

The first was a young girl with long blond hair that hung past her waist. As he looked at her, she looked up at him, her crystaline blue eyes glistening with tears in the dark lab. A name from the past floated inside his mind. Allegra. The Itallian name for Lively, or happy; he quickly pushed it away, and with it the image of a young girl who had been his friend.

Next to her was the short and stout strongman which Gambit had nicknamed Bull so long ago. His soft brown eyes used to light up so easily when he laughed. It looked to Gambit now that he hadn't laughed in a long time. His dark skin and bald head made him all but disappear in the darkness across the room. The white in his eyes was the only hint that there was someone there, if you weren't looking for him.

Remy's eyes travelled around the room until they came across a young girl of about sixteen years of age. She sat straight up in a chair about three metres away with her hands folded in her lap, avoiding his gaze. Her aqua lips and eyes stood out in perfect complement to her shoulder length aqua hair, lined in gold by her bangs. Gambit recognised this girl immediately as Celeste, the voice in his head, which had called herself StarDust.

He blinked remembering her last words to him in his mind. Why had she told him that she was sorry? He searched his memory, and remembered the battle in which they had lost Velosity. After it was all said and done, Gambit had spoke softly to her. He's one of de lucky ones petite, he had consoled, Given de choice, I'd die in a secon', if it ment gettin' outta dis place. She gave him a look, which said to him that she didn't understand where he was coming from.

In truth, none of them really had. Sinister had always kept Gambit close, waiting for the instances in which he could force him to do his bidding. He was also more discreet about it than he was with the others. Gambit was free to leave the complex, but Sinister always had him secretly tailed, so that he would not be lost. A tear fell down Remy's face as he remembered the time he had tried to end it all, and failed miserably. The ironic part of it all, was that the one who stopped him from taking his own life, wouldn't even have worked for Sinister, if it weren't for him.

"You did well child," Sinister gloated to Celeste, in an attempt to rub it in.

Tears filled her eyes as she whispered her reply, "Yes... sir."

At that, Remy lowered his eyes and looked away, suddenly losing all the faith he had ever had in her. Sinister removed the mask and put it away.

"You feel better now I assume."

Gambit barely felt strong enough to speak, but he tried anyhow. "Up Yours," he hissed at Essex.

"Celeste, bring me my tools, and then take your absence. I shall call upon you again some day. Do not deny yourself the truth girl. You belong to me, and someday, I shall reclaim you."

Celeste handed him a silver case and backed out the door. "Yes Master," she whispered, and then added under her breath, "I'm sorry," as she disappeared.

"You bitch..." Bull hissed.

"It's nice to see that your team has remained close, isn't it LeBeau?"

"Go to Hell."

"My, but you aren't very keen in your rejoinders today, are you?"

"Up Yours."

"Yes. You said that already," Sinister prattled, as he pulled his equipment out of the case.

As Sinister fussed over a few wires, Gambit attempted to free himself. His mind was moving faster then Pietro's fists, searching for some way out of this. To his dismay, he found none.

He was still searching for a way out, when a sudden pain to his temple called his attention. Refocusing on the world around him, Gambit found that an odd apparatus had been attached to his head.

From what he could tell, it was being held there by screws, drilled directly into his skull. The pain coursed through his head, and down his spine, making his entire body numb.

Gambit gasped as the entire complex started shaking. Looking around as best he could, Remy found that Sinister was no where to be seen.

"Gambit! Gambit can you hear me?"

Gambit looked up at the voice as best he could. Only seeing a blur of colour, he attempted to blink and clear the cobwebs. Finding that his eyelids were pried open, he grunted in pain.

"It's alright Gambit," came the voice of a quiet child. Slowly, the blur of colour turned into blue and gold, and the voice became more understandable, and recognizable to his ears.

"Celes...?"

"That's right. You just hang in there, I'm going to get the others free so they can help me get you out."

"You will do nothing of the sort!" A grating voice bellowed from behind her. In the instant following, there was a bright flash, and then Celeste was gone from Remy's sight.

"Leave him alone you bastard!"

"Haven't you done enough already?"

The coarse calls from the side of the room, pleading for his life, brought him back. "Sinister?"

"The pain must be excruciating for you LeBeau," He replied fidgeting with the wires. "You can scream if you wish. I am used to it by now."

"Won' give y' de pl'sure..." He grated in response.

"And what makes you think I take pleasure in your pain?"

"Y' wan' dat essay single o' double spaced?"

"You are so entertaining Remy. And you wonder why I enjoy experimenting on you so." His voice was dry, but Gambit wondered if he wasn't being serious.

"De 'sploson?"

"Ah. Yes. The explosion. It appears that a few of your friends have come to gather Angel, Marrow and yourself."

A smile crossed Gambit's face for a moment, but faded quickly with another wave of pain.

"Do not be so pleased with yourself. I will admit that you were correct in believing that the X-Men would fight to get you back, but you and I will be long gone by the time they find us."

"ANNNNNT! WRONG!" Celeste yelled, using her ability to control any metals near her to rip out some of the circuitry being attached to Gambit; Allegra and Bull were standing beside her.

"Word of advice Sinister: Next time you fire at me? Make sure that my shields are down."

"There is no chance that the three of you can defeat me alone." Sinister hissed, scowling at his destroyed work.

"No," Allegra mused, "I don't think we can."

"But we can hold you off until the X-People get here." Bull finished.

Sinister pondered this a moment. There weren't many of his henchmen in this complex, and the X-Men always made life difficult for him. He looked back at Gambit and started to move towards him.

"No. I don't THINK so," Celeste commanded, raising her arms.

"We aren't going to just let you take him."

"Not without one Hell of a fight!"

Sinister nodded, pulling his hand back. Gambit would rather die then come back to him. He knew it, and they knew it. They would kill Gambit before they let him take him. Gambit was more useful to him alive. He turned back to the others for a moment, and then vanished.

"Well that was easy!"

Allegra glared at Celeste. "A little too easy if you ask me."

"Which I didn't."

Bull sighed and moved to Gambit. "You okay Remy?" No answer. "Remy? Can you hear me?"

Gambit chocked and rolled his head slightly towards the voice, "Get Reyes..."

"Reyes? Who's Reyes?" Bull asked turning around.

Celeste shrugged, and Allegra rolled her eyes. "You guys really need to start paying attention to Donald when he's ranting. Reyes is one of the new X-Men."

Celeste folded her arms. If the situation wasn't so bad, Bull would have tried to cut the tension between them with an invisible knife, but instead he just let it go as the norm for those two. "What does she look like?"

"Donnie never knew. She's really new. He didn't even know her powers, but from what I can tell, she's a doctor."

"Cajun's actually askin' for a doctor? He must be bad."

"You should know! You set this up!" Allegra blasted at StarDust.

"Would you two shut up? Remy's hurt! Go find the X-Men!" Bull bellowed in anger and desperation.

"Don't bother!" Angel shouted, coming in a door on the far side.

Marrow shuddered as she ran past the three teenagers to Gambit. It was the type of feeling that told her that she had met these people somewhere before, but she couldn't quite place them.

"oh my..." She gasped upon arriving at Gambit's side.

She put one hand on his neck to feel for a pulse, and then used the other to idly smooth back his hair. "He's still alive..." She shook her head, "I don't know for how long that's gonna last."

"We need Reyes."

"Yeah we already covered that." Celeste retorted cynically.

Bull sighed deeply. "Allegra... I don't want to ask but...?"

"It's too much. If I tried, it would probably kill me, if not him."

"Celeste, you stay here with them, me an' Al' will go find the X-Men."

"Right."

Allegra and Bull took off out the door, without even waiting for Celeste's response.

Celeste looked between Marrow and Angel. She wanted to say something, but nowhere in her mind could she figure out what. Allegra's words crossed her mind, about it being her fault.

Her glance moved to the equipment coming out of his skull, and a tear slowly drizzled down her face. Allegra was right. She set it up. Not Sinister. Her. Sinister was just going to take him back. He would have been content with Gambit working for him again. But Celeste didn't want that to happen. She proposed an idea for how to make the procedure work. It was so half baked that there was no way it could work, right?

That's what she had thought. Sinister made her work on it though. He had worked on himself as well, and in the end, their theory was turning more and more into a reality. She tried so hard to push it off, to make Sinister believe that the experiment needed just a little more fine tuning. In the end, the experiment was perfected, and there was nothing she could do to put it off any longer.

Sinister started to believe that she was truly broken, and in truth, she almost was. But when she saw Gambit laying there, so pale, and already so close to the brink of death, something inside her snapped, and she remembered exactly why she hated this man, if he could be called a man.

She knew this experiment inside and out, now she just needed to do something about it. But what? The circuits were just about fried thanks to her damn powers, could she really do something about the equipment without the release? What about her powers? Could she use them for good, and push away all the evil that had accompanied them ever since the mutant gene showed in her DNA?

Without even thinking, she used her powers to push Angel and Marrow back from his body. Surrounded by the metal room, she could use the walls themselves to act as barriers against any intrusion.

Shields started to form around the walls, no one was getting in, or out so long as she was trying to help him. And she was sure as Hell not going to let anyone in the room try to stop her. She allowed her shields to flow around her, and pushed Marrow and Angel to the outer edge of the room. Then she started building shields around Gambit. In and around each of the tiny instruments.

She closed her eyes, and looked at it all with her powers. Slowly, she started pulling them out. All of the equipment in and on his head, as well as all of Sinister's monitors. Pulse, respiration, blood cell level, everything on the screens around them went blank.

Finally it was all out. There were a lot of cuts, and a lot of blood, and he looked even more pale then when he had arrived, but there were no wires. No machines and no devices that would change him, and in doing so truly kill him.

Celeste lowered her shields, and dropped to her knees. She opened her eyes and looked directly into Pix's. Pix held her glaze, if only for a second before heading off to Gambit's side.

"Cousin? Remy? C'n y' hear me Cher?" Pix stopped short of Gambit. She didn't want to touch him, for fear of breaking something.

Reyes was already checking his vitals. She looked so professional, but Pix could see the fear in her eyes. She'd seen it before, in Hope's eyes earlier that day. The love that Hope had felt for Blaze wasn't there, but the blatant love for life, and the need to save the dying and cure those in pain was nearly radiating off her.

"It... It's not good," Reyes stuttered, looking into Pix's eyes. Hope was right next to her. The look on her face terrifying her almost more then the look on Gambit's.

Pix knew how much life meant to Hope, and how much she fought for everyone's survival, be they human or bug. Now Gambit, one of her closest friends was dying, and due to the amount of energy she still had coursing through her, she couldn't go near him, or anyone else for that matter. There was nothing she could do to help him.

"We can't move him. Anything shakes him, and it could--"

Pix's eyes went dead set on Gambit's body, and suddenly but slowly, he started to lift, cutting off Reyes's words. "He has to be moved. We haven't got much of a choice here."

Hope smiled crookedly, seeing the determination in her best friends eyes. "He won't be shaken. Pix wouldn't let that happen. Neither will Essex."

"Hope's right. Let's out before something else goes wrong," Brian declared in a breath.

"Hi," a monotonous female voice came from the side. Everyone turned to see Essex, Midnight Massacre and Syphon coming from the shadows. "Just call us something else."