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."