Boris Slanski checked his watch, the round Indiglo face of the timepiece slowly ticking away the precious seconds. His eyes stared intently at it, his right hand thumb poised over a metal trigger of a remote detonator. Averting his eyes momentarily off his watch, he glanced up at the overhead monitor, which connected to a camera that kept a general eye over the crowd inside. There was a light tap on the side of his van door. Followed by three short raps, a pause and two more short ones. He reached over to the end of the van and opened the door. A man came inside, dressed in black to blend in with the night.

“Is it set?” Boris asked with a thick Russian accent.

The man gave a smart nod.

“Where are the others?”

“Outside,” the man said tersely.

“You can take off your mask. It’s a hot night, don’t you think?” Boris said, looking back up at the monitor then at his watch. Good, the bomb was planted and they were ahead of schedule. He looked back at his companion and narrowed his eyes. The man had not taken off his mask, the dark goggles he had suctioned over his eyes, reflecting Boris’ gaze. “You want a drink?” Boris asked, reaching down into his bag for his canteen of vodka.

But before the man could accept or refuse, there was a click as Boris whipped out a loaded PP7, trained accurately between the eyes of the masked man.

“Who are you?” Boris asked, his eyes like cold lead as he calmly held the gun up to the intruder. His left thumb was still ready and set over the trigger of the remote detonator, and his right forefinger teased back the trigger of the PP7 a little tighter. The man wasn’t forthcoming with any answers. “Take off the mask.”

“Rumor had it you were dead, mon ami,” the man finally said. “But den slime like you never stay dead when dey should, neh?”

Boris squinted, the voice sounding familiar. He kept his handgun steadily trained at the man, but his trigger finger gave a barely noticeable twitch as the man shed his mask and goggles, and red fiery eyes lit up the dark, interior of the van. “Le Diable Blanc,” Boris said, and gave him a toothy smile but didn’t remove the gun. “To whom do I owe this honor?”

“Who’s dis for?” he asked, indicating the van, the monitors, the detonator in Boris’ hand. “Unless you have some personal vendetta against dose nice people in dere?”

“A good thief never tells his motives, LeBeau. Or did you forget that already?” Boris sneered.

“Didn’t know y’still consider y’self a t’ief,” Gambit said, eyeing the nozzle of the gun.

“You’re in no place to judge me, LeBeau. As I hear, you were let go. The first man to be kicked out of the Guild in living form. Your father must be proud. Always knew he was running nepotism over his territory,” Boris spat.

“Apparently I’m not de first,” Gambit said, looking directly into Boris’ eyes. “You fake y’death, Slanski?”

“What does it matter now? Even if I did and betrayed the Guild, you have no agency to bring me in.”

“Who says I need agency?” Gambit asked and it was quick: a sudden jerk in his shoulder that flicked out a finger knocking the gun out of Boris’ hand. It clattered onto the floor. Boris jolted up from his seat and swung at Gambit who nimbly dodged the punch, and despite the cramped room in the van, flipped back from his seat, reached out and grabbed a fistful of Boris’ hair and violently slammed his head onto the computer console. Boris struggled as his face squished up against the buttons and dials. Gambit pressed his body weight down onto Boris’ back, still holding the latter by the hair, smothering his face into the plastic switches. “An’ who says I’m gon’ to bring you in?”

Boris focused his eyes to the side, the remote of the detonator a reach away from his left hand. As he kept his eyes on the detonator, and stretching his already extended arm for the remote, he couldn’t help but wonder what the youngest LeBeau might have against him. He didn’t know what Gambit was doing here if not to turn him into Guild authority.

“What do you want?” Boris managed to wheeze from where he was, his fingers fumbling at the remote.

“Who y’working for, Slanski?”

“It’s none of your business,” he spat.

“Wrong answer.” Gambit picked up Slanski by the hair and slammed his face down into the console again, and again and again until Boris’ nose broke and his teeth bled from his mouth. Boris cursed, but making a final lunge for the remote detonator, he grappled it tight into his left fist and depressed the button. There was a momentary silence until a loud rumble outside was heard. A deafening boom followed, causing the van to shake, toppling all the monitors over. The van began to veer on its left side, tilting back from the pressure of the explosion. Before the van fell, Gambit kicked open the doors and jumped out with Boris Slanski in tow.

Fire raged outside from the explosion and Boris looked around in confusion. Why did the bomb detonate from the outside? It was supposed to go off inside the building, where the people were. He spotted the people in the building already safely evacuated from the building and cursed. Spinning around, he saw Gambit, his eyes strangely reflecting the fire and glowing at the same time. The Diable part of his name was well deserved.

“T’ought de guests might appreciate seeing the fireworks from de outside,” Gambit shrugged, a crooked smile on his lips.

In answer, Boris quickly reached up his sleeve, pulling out a set of knives and flicked them at Gambit, one after another. Gambit ducked and evaded the sudden attack, and Boris took off running into the streets. Boris ran as fast as his legs could take him. He never saw Remy LeBeau fight with his own eyes, but if the rumors held true, then his best bet was to run for his life.

He blindly sprinted down the dark alleys, not really knowing where he was headed, but if he could get into an area more populated by people, then there was a chance that he could lose him in the crowd, or there was also the possibility that LeBeau might not risk fighting with that many eyes on him. The man was a mutant after all, and enough people would report him into the authorities. Boris took another turn into an even darker alley, spying a tall, brick wall ahead of him with lights extending from the other side. If his instincts were right, beyond the wall would lead him to the West gate of the International District, and that part of town was livelier at this hour than midday. Pumping his leg faster, he kept his eyes focused on jumping the wall ahead.

Suddenly the whole alley lit up in a bright, pink light and a high-pitched whine reverberated off the walls. Boris’ heart leapt, fearing what would happen next. Three cards whistled past him, each emitting pink, comet tails behind them and landed, edge-up, into the ground. The alley way erupted as the cards blew up in front of him. Boris was sent hurling back from the explosion and landed noisily onto the lid of a dumpster. Before he could recover, he was lifted up by the collar of his jacket and slammed against a brick wall.

“Jus’ make it easy on y’self an’ tell me who y’working for, Slanski,” Gambit chided, holding Boris almost a foot above the ground, and zoomed in on the man’s eyes, Gambit’s pupils aglow and dizzying to look at.

Boris wheezed something, blood, sweat and saliva intermixing out of all his orifices. Gambit eased the vice he had around Boris’ neck. “What was dat?”

“… Shaw,” he gasped.

Gambit narrowed his eyes. Then loosening his hold on Boris, he finally tossed him down onto the floor. “Be a good boy and stay out of trouble, hein?”

Boris groaned on the floor, doubled over in pain. Gambit turned around and headed out the alley, when suddenly, for some crazy suicidal desire, Boris felt the necessity to open his mouth again.

“Maybe you should take some of your own advice, LeBeau,” he called out, followed by a set of coughs. Gambit kept walking. “Heard you’ve been doing some freelance work after you got kicked out of the Guild… wonder how Henri might feel about the work you did for the Coroner –!” Boris stopped short as he found Gambit’s hand suddenly around his neck again. He was confronted with the demon eyes, blazing in all its hellish anger.

“Don’t y’even t’ink about Henri,” Gambit hissed. “I should kill y’on de spot f’what you did to him in Russia. If it wasn’t for Korovyev, de Guild would have taken care of you a long time ago.”

“Yes, but they took care of you first, didn’t they?”

Gambit’s eyes suddenly dimmed as his eyebrows arched menacingly over them, his lashes covering most of all his darkened irises. He brought his right hand in front of Boris’ face, and with a sudden flick of his wrist, a playing card appeared between his middle and index fingers. The fingers expertly played with the card, flipping it and twirling it. “Dere a reason why y’want t’piss me off, Homme?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous.

He ran the edge of the card down Boris’ neck, and at the command of his touch it burst into pink flames against Boris’ skin. The charged atoms constituting the fabric of the card excited and sizzled, and the sharp edge of the cardboard slowly cut into the flesh of his neck. Boris’ Adam’s apple dipped and gurgled in discomfort.

“Everyt’ing y’heard about what I did f’de Coroner?” Gambit continued in a sly, threatening tone. “It’s all true. De t’ing I did dat got me kicked off de Guild in de first place? Dat’s true, too.”

Gambit’s voice got very quiet, as he pressed the card deeper and deeper into Boris’ neck. “No surprise if I do it again, either. Now do y’really want to piss me off, Slanski?”

Boris let out a panicked yelp as more blood oozed down his neck and down his shirt.

“GAMBIT!” A loud voice warningly boomed at the end of the alleyway.

Gambit’s eyes didn’t leave Boris’. His lips curling into a cocky smile, Gambit removed and crumpled the bloodied card, disarming the kinetic charge.

“Give my regards to Korovyev,” Gambit whispered roughly, and his hand snapped over the vertex where Boris’ neck and shoulder met. Immediately Boris slumped down, his eyes rolling back into his sockets.

Nonchalantly wiping the blood off his fingers on the black tunic that he stole from Boris’ hired help, Gambit finally regarded the man who had called him. “Situation under control?” Gambit asked with lighthearted aloofness that starkly mismatched the blood-soaked body that lay at his feet.

“Gambit,” the man said with stern evenness, emphasizing each syllable with utter gravity as his eyes disgustedly looked at the deep cut in Boris’ neck from behind his unique red eyewear. “X-men don’t kill.”

“Relax, Cykes. He ain’t dead, jus’ sleeping,” Gambit replied and removed the black tunic altogether, exposing a tight navy-colored X-men uniform.

“What about that cut in his neck?” Cyclops asked incredulously.

“Just a flesh wound.”

“Was it necessary?” His voice tightened around the words.

“Tough question.” Gambit looked up at the sky, pinching his brows and rubbing his chin in mock contemplation. “T’ink I’m gon’ have t’get back t’you on dat one,” he concluded, and walking past Cyclops he slapped the tunic into his hands.

“Wait, what about him?” Cyclops asked, indicating the supposedly living prostrate form of Boris Slanski.

“Do what you want wit it,” Gambit shrugged and headed back to the Blackbird.

It wouldn’t make any difference whether Boris was turned into the cops or left in the alleyway, either way the man was as good as dead. Boris was right when he said that Gambit was the first man to legitimately sever ties with the Guild and not be hunted down and silenced later. There was a time in Russia when Henri, Gambit’s older brother, was ordered to bring back an original Czarist jewel-encrusted crown, dated into the late 1700’s, when Slanski double-crossed the American Guild at the rendezvous. Somewhere in the controversy, Alexei Korovyev, the leader of the Russian Thieves Guild lobbied on Slanski’s behalf, and in order to keep peace, they decided to bury the incident in the past. But with all business aside, Henri almost lost his life in the process, and even though Jean Luc had forbidden any retaliation, there was a personal distrust and hate among the LeBeau household for Boris Slanski and Korovyev’s Moscow guild.

A few months ago, there was rumor that Slanski died in a boating accent in South Africa, but there was no body that turned up and the $2.5 million dollars worth of stolen artifacts went missing as well. Needless to say, all eyes within the Guild turned to Korovyev for the answer, which forced the man to publicly declare a price on Slanski’s head if he wasn’t dead already. Although Slanski seems to have moved away from the thieving business, considering his part in today’s terrorist plot, the fact that he faked his death to distance himself from the Guild would not sit well with his former superiors. Even if Slanski went to prison, the Guild would post his bail and free him, only to punish him under Guild Law later. It might have been almost merciful in Gambit’s part if he killed him just now.

However, the fact that Boris Slanski was able to stay out of the Guild’s hair and survive for this long was a miracle. He was obviously working with someone with enough power to keep the Thieves Guild at bay.

Shaw. Gambit turned the name around, his eyes becoming heavy with thought.

“A penny for your thoughts.”

He looked up and saw Jean Grey smiling down at him from the entrance of the Blackbird.

“Only a penny? No deal,” he said, and as he climbed up into the jet, he slid his finger along the length of her thigh. “Care t’make a different offer?” he asked, his voice thick and sultry.

Jean rolled her eyes and tried to act unaffected. “Where’s Scott?” she asked, quickly averting her body away from him.

He shrugged. “Don’ know. Don’ care.”

“Why don’t you just keep tabs on your own boyfriend?!” a spiteful, bitter voice shot out from the back of the plane.

“What’s wit her?” Gambit asked Jean in a hushed volume.

“Don’t mind her, she’s just pissed that I wouldn’t let her go out of the plane.”

“It’s not just because of that!” Jubilee shot up from her seat in the back. “What’s the freakin’ point of dressing me up and bringing me out here, if I don’t get to do anything! You could at least let me fly the plane!”

“Jubilee, you just got your driver’s license, and you’re not experienced enough to fly the Blackbird yet.”

“Like hell I’m not! I already did it like twice before!”

“Those were special cases when we needed you to take control of it,” Jean quietly admonished. “Besides, you don’t have control over your power yet, and I don’t want to remind you what happened last time when we were at the Electronics Boutique.”

“Argh! I’m sick and tired of being treated like a ticking time bomb!” Jubilee yelled, throwing her hands up in exasperation.

“Jubes, the Professor just wants you to look and watch us for now, he knows that you’ll gain control of them eventually,” Jean persisted.

“Oh yes, I’m sure being part of the peanut gallery will bring me loads of practice,” Jubilee drawled caustically.

“I can understand how you feel-,”

“You don’t understand jack! No one understands me!” Jubilee interjected bitingly. Then flopping herself back into her seat, she sighed bitterly. “I wish Rogue was here,” she said quietly.

There was an eerie silence that followed after that. Gambit didn’t really understand it, but whenever the name of Rogue popped up, which wasn’t often, all of the X-men just became suddenly subdued. It was like letting the air out of the tires. He didn’t know too much about this Rogue, considering he only joined the X-men a couple months ago, but even when he tried to find out more regarding her, everybody just became tight-lipped. He saw a picture of her in the Professor’s study once, and he gathered she was one of those classic “problem children”, what with all the piercings, the Gothic make-up and short, choppy, jet-black hair that she gelled up in a way that would make a porcupine jealous. When he asked the Professor about her, he just sighed and said nothing. Whoever she was and whatever she did must have been pretty traumatic for the whole team.

Fortunately, the rest of the X-men began to file back into the Blackbird, breaking the tension. Sam and Amara came in first, looking exhausted, and they quietly buckled into their seats. The team had to split up in their efforts to contain all the violence surrounding mutant-human relations recently. It was Cyclops, Jean, Gambit, Jubilee, Cannonball and Magma who took the Blackbird out. The X-men had been trying to quell the sudden increase in terrorist activities that erupted practically overnight the past few days. Human and mutants still didn’t get along, but now there was a whole new undercurrent of vigilantism that was taking control of the nation. It seemed like a mostly domestic problem, the United States being the most skeptical against the mutant rights movement. In any case, Charles Xavier was doing everything in his power to put down any acts of humans attacking mutants and mutants attacking humans. And the more it drew on, it was looking like civil war.

Finally, Cyclops came in. He shot a disgruntled look at Gambit and moved to the pilot seat. Jean followed him, taking the co-pilot seat next to him. Gambit sat in one of the seats, fastening the safety belts around him as the vertical thrusters of the Blackbird activated and sent them into the sky. Outside the window, the police were headed towards the explosion site. Closing his eyes, Gambit thought about Shaw again.

Once he arrived at the mansion, sat through the debriefing, and took a shower, Gambit went out again, straddling the seat of his motorcycle and lighting up a cigarette.

“Where are you going?”

Gambit looked up and saw Scott, his hands folded before his chest in a superior pose, as he favored him with a disapproving glare. “M’sorry, jus’ put de dinner in de fridge, honey, an’ I promise I eat it later,” he said, winking, and blew out the smoke.

“I don’t think you appreciate the gravity of the situation we got here. We’re in a state of high-alert, and I can’t afford dealing with your behavior.”

“An’ what behavior is dat?”

“The fact that you always go out, skip Danger Room practices, and you never follow protocol when dealing with the enemy. You wear an X-men uniform, but you’re hardly that, you don’t even room here, and you’re so wrapped up in your own shady lifestyle, that honestly, I’m having a hard time trusting you with the lives of the other X-men.”

“Y’done?” Gambit asked, taking another drag. Scott, narrowed his eyes, and it looked like he could whip off those glasses any time. “Be back in a couple days, if somet’ing comes up, tell Logan. He always seems t’find me.”

Before Scott could say anything, the whole interior of the garage rumbled as the motorcycle revved up noisily. Then careening out of the garage, Gambit took off, his hair and jacket flapping in the wind behind him.

*

*

*

Professor Xavier looked out his window, watching Gambit’s form disappear out of the driveway. He closed his eyes in perplexed thought.

“What do you think of Remy?” he asked after awhile.

Logan leaned on the back wall, holding a beer. “He hasn’t let us down, yet,” he grunted.

The Professor opened his eyes, looking down the long stretch of the empty driveway. “He has changed a lot over the years,” he stated simply and didn’t elaborate further.

There was a soft knock on the door and Ororo entered. “Charles, did you call?”

“Yes, Ororo,” the Professor said. “I was wondering if you could prepare one of the guest rooms in the East Wing by tomorrow night.”

“Sure, are we expecting a visitor?”

The Professor nodded, and a faint smile wavered upon his lips. “Rogue.”

The expression on Logan’s face darkened and Ororo nervously looked from the Professor to Logan back to the Professor. “She wants to come back?” Ororo asked, tenderly phrasing the question.

“I’m not sure if it was her decision. But Sean Cassidy has requested she join the X-men for the time-being.”

“How is she?” Logan asked, not wanting to remember the state that she had left in.

“She’s been away so long, I’m not quite sure. But from the sound of Sean’s voice, he didn’t sound too concerned about her… mental health.”

Ororo nodded in an absentminded manner, finally she excused herself to go prepare the guest room. Logan remained and took a swig of his beer.

“You tell her about Gambit?”

The Professor shook his head slowly. “I didn’t get to speak with her,” he said in a weak, ponderous voice. “I’m not entirely sure what I ought to do.”

“If she comes here, she’s bound to meet him.”

“Yes, I know, but…” the Professor’s voice trailed off.

Logan didn’t push the subject any further. The Professor was always a little uncertain when it came to Rogue. She was the one student that he was never able to help. In a way, he had a complex about her. He also loved her, like a true father would, and seeing Rogue turn awry was especially hard for the Professor. He wanted to help her in any way possible, but as he witnessed her getting worse and worse under his watch, he realized with all the answers he possessed and all the wisdom he had gained, he didn’t have the power to mend a broken heart. Finally giving up on her was a torture that he kept to himself.

Logan’s hand thudded over the Professor’s shoulder as they both looked out the window. “She’s had a long time to think things through, Charles,” Logan said. “And if she’s survived so far, she’ll go on survivin’.”

The Professor remained quiet. He continued to look outside into the night, well after Logan left.

*

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*

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=) hee hee hee =) We met our boy, so let's meet our girl, shall we? Next chapter, please~!