DISCLAIMER The X-Men are the property of Marvel Comics and are used without their
permission. Sikudhani McCoy is the property of Darqstar and is mentioned in this story with her
permission. This is a work of fanfiction, intended for entertainment purposes only.

The Reflection In The Mirror
Part Five
By ScarletLady

"Don't think Ah understand, Jean" Rogue said. "What'cha mean here among us? Wouldn't we have seen him?"

"No, not physically here. He's been...looking through our eyes, I guess is the best way to put it. I can't tell if he's doing it
consciously or not. I first felt him a couple of months ago, but I wasn't sure what it was that I was picking up. It felt like fog.
Well, not visible fog, but that's the impression I was getting. Sometimes it was like catching just a glimpse of something out of
the corner of your eye, but when you look, it's gone, or maybe was never there at all. That's what I kept telling myself at first.  Even a telepath can have a healthy imagination. But I couldn't convince myself that it was simple imagination."

Rogue asked, "What made ya' think it's Remy?"

"I began keeping much more alert, and a few weeks ago, I started feeling a definite presence. It felt familiar, like it was someone I knew, but at the same time it was like a total stranger. Occasionally I would feel faint echoes of emotion. Mostly sadness, some anger, regret, anxiety, loneliness, fear. All of the darker emotions, none of the lighter. I started watching the astral plane more closely, and began to catch glimpses of ...something."

"Everyone has an image of themselves, or how they see themselves. Often, it doesn't exactly match reality. On the astral plane, it usually reflects the person as they wish to be, but there is never any mistaking the identity. What I was seeing on the plane told me nothing about this person; only that someone was there. It was the first time 'd ever heard of that happening. It looked like a shadowy, reddish-brown cloud. Always in motion, turbulent. One minute it was here, the next it would be there, then gone, then back again. Often it would have small streaks of lightning running through it. The lightning was red and black. That's when I connected it to Gambit. The trace amounts of emotion I was catching were enough to make me intensely curious about what Gambit was up to."

"When he left, Gambit had every reason in the world to hate us, but fear? I didn't know why he was afraid, and that bothered me far more than the loneliness. Lonely was at least explainable. Actually, by rights Gambit should have consigned us all to the devil, and gone his merry way. Those emotional echoes I was finding didn't fit in with what the should haves of the situation. The echoes were ghostlike, but complete. Meaning that if I'd caught the full strength of them, I'd be either crying for months, or a homicidal maniac. I can't quite figure which. The fact that Gambit was leaking emotions at all was more than enough to convince me that something was seriously wrong."

"So, why can'tcha find him then?" Rogue asked.

"Believe me, I've tried. After realizing that I'd ...we'd... done Gambit an injustice, I knew ...someone... would have to speak to
him. I didn't know how to convince the others that we'd been wrong in condemning him so completely, and without knowing the
whole story, there was no way I could. We'd never really accepted him, only acknowledged him. He went his own way, we
went ours. We fought together, but never, I think, for the same reasons. So I started trying to piece the story together. I
searched as far as I could, then I was going to enlist Cerebro's aid. After looking at the original data, I again realized what an odd mutant signature Gambit had, and I began to do the research into why, that we should have done a long time ago."

"Gambit's gifts combine, and work together in a way that even Cerebro can't understand. Take one away, and the others are
gone as well. Enhance one, and the others are strengthened. Being multi-gifted as a mutant is rare enough, but each of his
abilities are alpha class. The way his gifts combine, he is potentially the most gifted Omega class on the planet. Except, I don't think he's aware of it. We know he spent time with Sinister. What happened during that time is something I don't think that I want to know. We admit that Sinister likes to manipulate mutant abilities. Based on Gambit's uniqueness, I would be forced to conclude that he was one of Sinister's ...experiments."

"So, if he's here, but not here, can we actually talk to him? Or can he talk to us?" Rogue asked.

"Truthfully, I don't know. We could try, I suppose. I'm very interested in this ability seems to Gambit have. I would also like to find an explanation for his knocking me out of bed about a year ago."

"What? What the hell ya talkin' about, sugah?" Rogue rounded on Jean, her jealousy center on full alert.

Jean blushed slightly and backed away a step from the angry southern belle. "Mentally, Rogue. Not physically. Not that I'd mind that terribly either..." Jean got a daydreamy look on her face and the corner of her mouth twitched upward.

"Jean!" Rogue was a little taken aback to realize she wasn't the only one who'd thought rather...interesting thoughts about the
Cajun charmer.

"Well, jeez Rogue, could anyone not think about it?" Jean still looked slightly amused. "This is Gambit we're talking about, after all."

Jean's eyes became serious again. "About a year ago, someone let out a mental cry that literally made me fall out of bed. It
stopped before I completely woke up, and I couldn't find any trace of it once I'd awoken fully. I had no idea who sent it out, or what I'd heard, other than a part of a word that cut off halfway through. I couldn't find anyone else who'd heard the same, and there wasn't anything I could do about it, so I filed it away, under H for hallucination. Until I started doing all this research on our Mr. LeBeau. That made me think it might be him, and that partial word I'd heard would seem to confirm it."

"Dang it all Jean! What, are you doin' this on purpose? Wouldja quit dancin' around and tell me what ya heard?" Rogue was
more than irritated. Jean seemed to be going out of her way to draw the storytelling out.

Jean apologized. "I'm sorry, Rogue. I'm too used to laying the groundwork so everyone can understand the basics. What I
heard was a voice saying "Rog-". I couldn't identify the voice as male or female, and without additional information, I made an assumption that either I'd imagined the whole thing, or whoever it was had gotten halfway through "Roger". If it was Gambit, as I think, the word was probably "Rogue".

"That still don't explain why ya can't find him now, Jean." Rogue pointed out.

"True. The why of that goes something like this. Cerebro originally found him because Gambit didn't know he could be tracked
by his abilities. Once he'd joined us, and learned how we'd found him, he disappeared. Well, to my abilities, anyway. It was one more oddity of his that we couldn't explain, though Henry would have loved to take him apart to find out how he did it. Cerebro could still find him, though, and so we didn't worry ourselves too much over it. It was just Gambit being Gambit. There's never been enough time to learn all we wanted to learn about our abilities. Every one of us can sometimes do something we'd never thought we were capable of."

"After he came back from Seattle, he looked and acted like the same man, but I knew how he felt about you. There was no
way he could have been totally unaffected, but because of the other things that were happening, I ignored it. Now, I've had to piece some of this together, because I don't have any kind of evidence, but I can't imagine how the particular situation we found ourselves in could have otherwise happened. We'll play "let's pretend" for a while. Gambit would have been desperately
unhappy, and any psychologist can tell you that bottling up those kinds of feelings can cause a lot of damage. With Storm gone, he wouldn't have had anyone at all he felt comfortable talking to about what was happening in his heart. Gambit being Gambit again, it compounded damage that was already there. I think this might be where the pressure of emotions kept inside found a vent to the outside."

"When Gambit left, we were angry with him. Noone wanted to know where he was going, what he was going to do. We trusted
him just enough to believe that he wasn't a security risk, but that was it. He was on his own. Most of us were quietly saying
"Good riddance, we never liked you anyway". That was something else that wasn't true."

"Remy's known ability was to take energy, and manipulate it for physical results. With his intertwined abilities, I think his other gifts may work along the same lines. He can take emotions, and produce physical results in others with them. To put it simply, he can make you feel what he feels, or wants you to feel. I truly don't believe he does anything like that on purpose, but again, I don't know how much he knows about his abilities."

"To get back to pretending, I think this is where his shields may have developed a crack. If that premise is true, he would have been leaking emotions, and we would have been picking up on them. We know he doesn't trust people, and that what we do know of his background isn't exactly a childhood dream. Normally, this would have a strong impact on a person's self-image, but we all knew that Gambit's confidence and ego were healthy enough for Hitler. Or we thought we knew. We had no idea that what Gambit was showing us was nothing more than a front. Admittedly, a very, very good one, but still, only for show. Again, this is conjecture on my part, but I suspect that behind his shields, and that outgoing appearance of his, Gambit was desperately lonely, and probably didn't realize his own worth as a person."

"You're more right than ya know, sugah," Rogue quietly admitted, her eyes taking on a haunted look. "Far more right than ya
know."

"A rejection from you was probably more than he could take. He's an exceptionally strong empath, and almost certainly knew
what you were feeling when you turned away from him. It would have totally devastated him. Frankly, I'm surprised he came
back at all. He's truly a strong soul. So, okay, we have him unhappy, convinced he's not worth anything, and it's more than a
little possible he hates himself. He'd be thinking that if he were a good person, good things would happen to him. All this would be sending out echoes through his slipping shields. We picked up on them, and didn't even question all his years of loyalty to the team. While we'd never admitted him to our "inner circle", so to speak, he was still one of the X-Men. Nevertheless, he automatically and without questions became the villain and the outcast. We hated him, because he hated himself. We were relieved when he was gone, because he believed we'd be happier if he weren't around, and made us feel it too. I keep asking myself why I didn't see it. How could he have knowingly or not manipulated our emotions, and a telepath of my caliber not known it? I don't have an answer for that, either."

"So, here we are with it now being imperative to find Remy LeBeau, and correct the situation we, the X-Men, abetted. We
reinforced his self-hatred, and his unhappiness. He's one of us, and we need to let him know that. Right now, I'm the only one
who knows the whole sorry mess. I finally recognized that his emotions were affecting me, and readjusted. Once I'd done that, I was repelled by what I'd done, and the part I'd played in his leaving."

Jean's voice was growing husky, both from upset, and from speaking so long. "His recent "appearance" on the astral plane
troubles me even more. There is no image at all reflected there. Just an amorphous shape with no identity attached to it. That is how Remy must be seeing himself these days. And that is not a good thing. His "appearances" here among us are unexpected,
but apparently one of his gifts. But the thing that troubles me most of all, is that Cerebro can no longer locate him. Which means leaking or not, his shields are now stronger than they were, and I have no idea what happened to make that so."