Chapter Text
It’s like lucid dreaming. In fact, he reasons it all could be a dream: the days of being ripped apart and put back together, razor wire stripping his bones, the cold scent of death in his lungs. There’s a woman who smiles at him in his sleep. When he awakens, he reaches for her and instead rakes up fresh soil with his fingernails, already forgetting her name. Her voice. Her warmth.
He knows, without knowing how, that she is real.
In the mirror on the old stone wall in a small room in an empty place he doesn’t remember, he sees a face made ghostly by death, eyes red as blood, silver hair fallen loose over his shoulders. He strokes two fingers along the reflection’s ghastly jawline. Mine, he thinks, chasing the phantom sensation of a hand on his mouth. Then, Yours? Whose?
Something is wrong—someone is missing.
“Death. Come to me.”
The mirror ruptures. A stray shard of glass slices his cheek, drawing black blood. He thinks it’s supposed to hurt.
Down in the quiet foyer of the nameless place, he passes 3 faces that don’t belong to his memories, but they are like him: uprooted from their distinct timelines to serve a different purpose. The shadowy aura of whatever compels them makes their features dark like his, indistinguishable from the others in his mind except for their unusual outfits. It occurs to him distantly that he recognizes the X brandished on the belt securing his suit to his corpse. The thing that’s missing, he realizes: a coat.
But why?
“Enough with your pertinent questions, my horseman. Bow before me.”
The voice belongs to a figure built like a statue in a deity’s visage, broad and cloaked, but animated by a sentience beyond his understanding. The end bringer, he tells himself, and kneels. The one who took you here.
From where? For what?
“For your first task,” the deity answers. “Remove the X-men from my path.”
It’s a term that once meant something because an unidentifiable emotion knots within his stomach. Death thinks that’s supposed to hurt, too.
His master draws these X-Men out to an area surrounded by distractions—tall buildings that appear like jagged teeth against the evening skyline, screeching noises from car horns and revving engines and dogs snapping at each other through grated fences, and the radio static hum of each individual person swarming the streets. So much at stake. Apocalypse assures him the X-Men will respond within the hour.
Death slides into a dark patch behind a billboard and waits. Below him, tides of life scramble away from the smoldering crater left by his blast. Across the city, he senses the sharp interspersing of lives at their end, lifting into the sky before the static cuts out.
The X-Men arrive. Death doesn’t care to check the timing. He pries an antenna from the roof and lances it outwards, igniting a shockwave of energy that destabilizes the jet. That gets their attention.
It isn’t easy neutralizing them, one after another: they persist like ants, a constant influx of power and aggression swarming over him regardless of how many he puts down. He doesn’t kill them because—he isn’t sure, perhaps it’s the unfamiliarly familiar way they look and sound and fight? Perhaps it’s the terrible sadness in their voices as they name him Gambit, pleading for his surrender in-between spears of lightning, sprays of color, fists and dense crimson bursts of energy that knock him to his knees?
The one with claws of bone calls him Cajun and spears him through. (He thinks that’s supposed to hurt, too.)
But he is Death, and his master demands penance. He conjures his energy and easily disembowels structures, buildings, vehicles—sending ripples of dark power through the upper end of a city that has a name he’s spoken before. The X-Men disperse with the blast, smashing upon the shattered concrete in heaps.
“I am Death,” he declares. “I am Death, Herald of Apocalypse!”
A force barrels him over—it feels like being hit by a train, but his limbs remain firmly attached. He slams through a wall and becomes aware of a weight hammering him into the ground, over and over, a metronome of anger empowered by unstoppable strength.
“You!” the force screams. “What did you do to Remy?!”
“Remy?” he echoes. The drumming of her fists stops. He realizes, instinctively, he’s impaled his staff through the woman’s torso, puncturing cleanly out the other side. It’s the kind of wound she’ll endure.
How would I know dat? he wonders. Then, Why didn’t you go for her heart?
Shaking hands curl in his suit front. Water drips over his face, searing into his cold, gray skin.
He looks up.
“Remy?” she says. “Don’t you know who Ah am?”
He does as much as he doesn’t. But how, from where, from when? Blood mixes between them, black and red, the color of the suites on the cards he’d found in the soil of his grave.
The weight of her body over his ignites a small warmth in his chest.
“No, but I…” He draws his hand up to her cheek, holding her gaze. “I know I love you.”
The woman starts to weep. Blood dribbles from her mouth and runs dangerously warm over his hands. He sits up to hold her, but it startles him, how intimately she nuzzles her face to his neck. How softly she bends in his grasp. How easily they both unravel.
“Why you cryin’, chere?” he asks, uncertain why he’s called her that—why he’s comforting her when only a moment ago he’d been a few inches shy of fatally puncturing her lung.
“What happened to you, Remy?”
“I am Death,” he tells her.
“This’s mah punishment, ain’t it? For what Ah did to you on Genosha.”
He says, “Death’s no punishment, mon amour. Death only doin’ what he does.” Then, differently, while softly stroking his fingers through her hair to scrape at that sensation of a memory involving her, him, them, but when?: “But Death findin’ he can’t right now. Not you, chere. I can’t kill my chere.”
A horrible sob rips out of her. “Ah can’t feel you,” she says, framing his face with her hands. “You’re cold as death, sugah.”
“I am Death.”
“No, you’re Remy. Remy LeBeau. Gambit of the X-Men.”
“Gambit,” he echoes.
“Ah love you,” she says, meeting his cool look. “Don’t you remember that?”
She cups the back of his neck with both hands and pulls them together. Her mouth scorches. Her tears slide to her lips as they kiss, and he presses his thumb to her pulse so he can match the drum of her heart to the motion of her blood behind her teeth, where he bears into that salty copper-coin taste. A heavy thump rattles his ribs. It feels like dying all over again.
He becomes aware of the gap in his mind. Scent of lemon and spruce, peeling oranges by the kitchen window. Whose hands worked the knife, whose face was haloed in sunlight? It smells warm. He presses his cheek to their shoulder where he can faintly feel the rhythm of a heartbeat. It comes to him like a song, beats memorized, tapping against a part of his brain that knows you, knows you, knows you.
A name rolls from his mouth, stained with her blood.
“Rogue,” he says.
Her smile is sad and smeared with the evidence of their contact, but he considers it an improvement.
“Ah missed you, Remy LeBeau.”
“What do you remember?” asks the woman who calls herself Ororo, though the man wearing a visor calls her Storm, but then Death echoes her name to learn neither feel correct on his tongue. Ororo Munroe. “Yes. Do you have any recollection of our adventures in Cairo?”
Death considers that. For a long while, he stares at her and then around at the decor of the mansion, taking in the sights of pictures bearing his resemblance. Framed camaraderie with people he barely recalls. The girl who is named Jubilee drops her head into her palms and sobs, allowing herself to be escorted from the foyer by a young man Death doesn’t remember at all.
Ororo says, “Do not forget what you sacrificed to save the people on Genosha. Do not forget your family, or the generations you have ensured with your bravery.”
“What’s the last thing you can remember?” the man who calls himself Scott tries.
“Cold soil,” Death tells him. He taps his staff against the carpet and leans his weight onto it. “Gray skies, a voice above my head. The earth swallowin’ me whole. Driftin’… Lookin’ for somethin’.”
Ororo goes still as stone. An unsubtle unease thickens the air. “Oh, Gambit. I could not show my face. Your death was preventable, if only I had been—!”
“Death’s not preventable,” he says. “Ain’t nothin’ you coulda done ‘cept play your role on de long path of fate, chere.”
Tears well in her eyes. “Gambit…”
“Will you help us stop Apocalypse?” Scott asks.
Death furrows his brow. “Death sent by Apocalypse to remove you from his plan, mon ami. World’s so focused on somethin’ dat happened, ain’t nobody lookin’ at him.”
“Genosha,” a woman, Jean, says. “The something you’re referring to—do you remember Genosha, Gambit?”
Death reaches for the tendrils of the memories, working through them backwards. “It hurts. My body, my soul, burnin’. Why? Fire. De horizon’s gone dark. Save dem. Save her. She don’t want t’dance wit’ you. Blue sky. Too perfect, too much life. Death’s comin’, can’t you feel it?”
Rogue applies pressure to the wound he’d supplied and then cauterized to keep her from bleeding out in the back of the jet. Kurt is at her side. When a tear slides from the corner of her eye he dutifully wipes it away on the back of his glove. It’s like witnessing people clustered at a funeral.
A pang of guilt twists Death’s unmoving heart.
He looks over her shoulder—past Logan, the one who called him Cajun and punctured him like a balloon on a nail bed—and into a shadowed hallway. A small silhouette skips around the corner, disappearing from sight.
Death follows it. The people who surround him say Gambit quizzically but he brushes them off as he trails after the visage, knowing what she wants, already so fully aware she’s little more than an apparition with a desire that keeps her tethered to this world. She slips through office doors.
On the other side, Charles Xavier—Death knows him—and Magnus—Death knows him less certainly—both look up and away from a picture framed on the wall to address his sudden presence. The apparition spins pointedly around Magneto.
“Gambit,” Charles tries.
“Horseman,” Magneto says with a scowl.
“A young girl,” Death says, “followin’ you. Fingers in a cold metal fence, fever, your face as de world fades to black.”
Magneto’s expression falls. “Why are you telling me this? Do you find humor in tormenting my soul, Death?”
“She says don’t cry. Your family loves you.”
“Enough! Please, enough.”
Death blinks absently. The girl is gone. “Just de messenger, mon ami. Death got little interest in tormentin’.”
He turns and leaves, ignoring Xavier’s attempt to catch his attention. Death is miffed with him for reasons he doesn’t remember, but it’s a rooted anger, one he’s ill-prepared to scrutinize for the sake of amendments. Maybe another day, he figures. Or at the end of the road.
“You sure love pokin’ the hornet’s nest,” Rogue says as the doors close behind him.
“Death just helpin’ the dead. Help de souls find rest and de livin’ to learn self-forgiveness, vous savez?”
He doesn’t look at her for her own sake. Her grief is palatable. He tastes her tears on the tip of his tongue the way he does whenever a soul passes within an uncertain radius of himself. The emotions of the dead and the living’s sentimentalities for the deceased are like a spiderweb of interconnecting threads which tether Death to this world and to the world after it. He knows their pain, their memories, and their love.
That’s why he doesn’t remember his life. Too many others elbowing around for space, Death can’t afford to maintain his own.
But, when he closes his eyes, and when he thinks of her…
“You weren’t dere when de earth took me,” he says, “but I feel you holdin’ me still. Your voice. Fire. You’re beautiful, even when you’re sad. Who do dese memories belong to?”
“You. Your name is Gambit,” Rogue replies. He can hear the tremor in her voice. “Don’t you remember it?”
“Dat coat too big on you, chere.”
“It’s your coat, sugah.”
Death recalls a sense of knowing. He pivots on his heel and moves along the path, navigating the corridors and numerous rooms throughout the mansion, seeking threads of familiarity to knot his scattered memories together. Behind him, Rogue and Kurt trail at a measured pace. Death makes a conscious effort of moving with meticulous slowness so they can maintain their distance without offering them the opportunity to talk. He suspects Rogue can say anything, anything, and he’ll abandon his pursuit to return to her arms.
(His master would tell him: like a dog.)
(Death thinks of: two steady rocks, weathering a storm.)
Thankfully, Kurt is the one to speak. “Vhere is it you are going, mein freund?”
“Death will know when he gets dere.”
Two hallways later—a path of locked doors, divided by paintings of places he’s never been, statues of people he might never know, and wilted flowers which verdantly bloom as he passes—he finds it: a room which feels barely lived in. The sheets are rumpled. Partially-used packs of playing cards are stacked on the dresser. He takes one.
“Remy—” Rogue says.
“Death, mon Cherie.”
She says, “Gambit.”
Death turns to Rogue, finding her at the edge of his personal boundary. “Ah. Dis memory isn’t real,” he decides. “Dis bed never held two bodies, yet I close my eyes and every time—every time, chere—I feel you dere. Why you hauntin’ me?”
She frames his face with her hands, leans up on her toes to reach his lips, and kisses him. She smells like blood and smoke and sunflowers. Warmth pulses through his chest. His nails desperately dig into her lower back to anchor her there. Something tells him he could make it hurt, that she wants it to hurt.
When they part, he becomes aware once more that the coat she’s wearing is too big for her. The source of that cigarette smell, he decides.
(That’s what he was missing. It’s his coat.)
“Ah’m sorry,” she says, though he can’t logically conclude what for. He wishes she didn’t look so terribly devastated by whatever tragedy lingers beyond the scope of his knowledge. “Ah’m so sorry.”
“Help us to stop Apocalypse,” Kurt interjects. “You remember enough, ja? You must know zat Apocalypse is going to destroy everyzing.”
Death shakes his head. “Non. Like I said, he gon’ turn Death against you, mon ami.”
Rogue curls her fists in his suit front. How typical of the living to hold on with all their might. “You ain’t his pawn, Remy! Ah will not allow him to bastardize all the good you brought to this world with your sacrifice. It ain’t right.”
Death gingerly holds her wrists and imagines those angry hands in his. He imagines them sinking into his chest to pry out his heart. (And he’d give it to her—all of him, whatever she asked for, if only to feel whole again.)
“Oh, chere. Gambit would join you, always.” He turns one wrist over and kisses where her lifeline creases under her glove, then steps back out of her touch. “But I am Death, and dat’s all I’ve got left in my cards.”
When he leaves the room, they don’t follow him.
When he departs from the mansion, no one stops him.
His master very nearly unmakes him. Death can’t say he wouldn’t deserve to be returned to the soil for his inactions against the X-Men, but Apocalypse needs his Horsemen, and allows Death to remain despite it all.
Pestilence finds Death later, possibly that same day—it’s not easy to differentiate morning from night or which timeline he’s apart of when the sky above Apocalypse’s pyramid is a churning cosmos, splotched with red and purple like a fresh bruise—and makes a point of sitting on the other end of the fallen stone slab. It had once been a statue of a god from long ago, according to Famine. War had attempted to draw a connection between it and stories he’d read in his childhood, but seemed to stutter as his memories failed him, and never brought it up again.
Death wonders if Pestilence remembers anything about herself—important or trivial, favorite colors or detested qualities, or at least her name.
“Dey called me Remy,” he says. He rifles his cards, relying on muscle memory to rehearse old tricks. “One of dem said she loved me, but Death don’t…don’t remember.”
“It’s best we don’t recall anything about our previous selves,” Pestilence replies. She always makes things sound so philosophical. “Yet, I can’t shake this feeling that something is missing from me I should have never surrendered.”
Death gazes out into the burning midnight horizon. Stars blink in and out like lives, growing and dying.
Pestilence extends her hands, flexing her fingers into fists. “I can feel the weight of it. A part of me I want to hold, a part of me I love more than myself. More than anything I feel I’ve ever loved before.”
“Love is forbidden,” Death says, echoing their master’s sentiment.
“Apocalypse is correct to fear it.” She retracts her arms and lays them in her lap. “He’s revoked our memories and yet here we are, remembering what we’ve lost on love alone. How could he expect us to follow him into oblivion when the mere nostalgia of love binds us to the very things we would keep safe?”
Death flips over the top card of his deck. The queen of hearts.
He asks, “You t’ink Apocalypse loves anyt’in’?”
“I do,” Pestilence says with a plate-carrying equilibrium. “That’s why I think he tried to eliminate it. Love is what makes us, and so, it will undo us.”
Death holds the card to his chest. That unnameable pain within him begins to ease, but it occurs to him now that he’s always possessed a descriptor for it, a simple summary for longing, for a missing piece, for a want beyond all he has in the moment. Rogue possesses more than his heart. More than his love. Her mere presence had dredged up memories, her eyes struck his unbeating heart.
He hears a song in his mind, as if her very soul is calling him home.
The X-Men don’t interfere with their plans for several weeks, though not for lack of trying. War mentions that the existence of Apocalypse’s pyramid parallel to the reality of earth renders most efforts to reach them pointless, if not impossible all together. Death chooses not to reply. When the Black Bird inevitably, impossibly, smashes through the outside temple some long while later, he simply looks to War and raises an eyebrow.
This fight is different. The Horsemen confront the X-Men with such violent turbulence Death can sense the hum of their life force flickering. Rogue is looking at him. He has yet to raise his staff in her direction.
It’s late—still, again? He can’t tell from the stars, doesn’t know—and they stand in direct opposition of what Death suspects they had been made for by forces greater than themselves, unconvinced of his past mortality and uncertain if he can muster the strength to kill his chere. He finds himself unable to decide which side of the bed he should reclaim in those false memories, which deck of cards from the nightstand are originally his. He’s not sure where to place himself in his own narrative anymore.
(But she's always there, a cemented part of his history.)
Rogue extends her hand. He mirrors her motions, curious and petrified. Slender fingers skate over his, slowly entwining; something inside the cage of his body rattles, begging to be free. He imagines her touch, just like that, sliding up his chest, over scars of years lived in service to someone else. He imagines her name inscribed across a flowering tombstone in a dark, silent graveyard.
Out of reflex he holds her at the waist. He furrows his brow, concentrating on the way her suit, her second skin, yields to his fingertips, which reminds him of something he had desired only a few moments ago. He had wanted it. He had.
“Remy,” she says. “Please. Don’t let Apocalypse do this.”
(“You're the only one of us who perished,” Famine had said, once. “The rest of us have chosen our allegiance. Unlike you, we had the choice to surrender our love—I can’t blame you for wanting yours back.”)
He closes his eyes.
(And always, she is there, in so many memories, peering back when he looks into the cracks of his soul. Is that how he knew he loved her before he could even remember her name?)
I can’t kill my chere.
Death turns to the Horsemen, and charges a card.
Death’s power recedes the moment Apocalypse drops his hold over the horsemen and retreats from the X-Men, grievously injured. Reverting is like slipping away from time, neither cold nor hot, no pain, no recollection. It simply feels like falling asleep.
Gambit awakens intermittently in different places—his head in Rogue’s lap, or on a sterilized bed below a low, plain ceiling, or in an ice bath when his fever threatens to boil him alive, or on the cold, unyielding floor because something nameless has taken him by the hand and told him to run. Hank informs him it’s only a dream. Gambit asks which part, and doesn’t remain conscious long enough to find out.
As he sleeps, echoes of too many voices speak about him, to him, through him. Some call him Death, others call him Remy or Gambit, but he doesn’t know them, nor how they know him. Various pressures descend on his hands, his face, his shoulders. A woman with red hair whispers to him, “Wake up, Remy. Wake up. There is nothing for you here.”
Three weeks later, Gambit opens his eyes.
It takes him a few minutes to mentally adhere to his consciousness, noting the slow stuttering rhythm of the heart monitor and the cool slide of saline from the IV into his arm. Most of the last few weeks have transpired through him as if he’s been ripped from them, merely an apparition drifting cryptically parallel to the world. His memories feel lived in by someone else wearing his skin.
Warm fingers slip into his hand and grab hold, gently but fondly. His heartbeat jumps and stabilizes on the monitor.
“Rogue?” he utters.
“Welcome back, sugah,” she says, her messy curls falling into her face as she leans over to kiss his forehead. There’s blood on her jacket. He inhales her scent: sunflower perfume and burnt flesh from whatever’s exploded in her vicinity this time around.
“You’re hurt,” he tries.
“Nah, just a little stain from a tussle with those Humanity dunces.” She perches on the edge of the bed, still holding onto him with a terrified resolve, as if he might float away. “You’re gonna be here for a bit longer. Hank wants to make sure you’re well-enough, since your heart kept stoppin’ in your sleep. Like you were…”
She’s looking at him. Her gaze feels like an extension of that pointed bitterness behind his teeth.
“It weren’t your fault, chere,” he says. “Gambit’s death weren’t your fault.”
She nervously twirls her hair. “Maybe Ah shoulda been more grateful to Apocalypse for bringin’ you back, ‘stead a’ just punchin’ him in the face.”
“Rogue,” he says, more seriously. The guilt in her expression deepens. “Death got no hold over me anymore.”
But a thought occurs to him: you’re not supposed to touch me, chere. He cradles her exposed hand in his, yet the pain of her power doesn’t come. How, he thinks then—how do I know Death got no hold over me?
“We can talk about it when ya feel better,” Rogue decides, releases her grip, and quickly withdraws from the room. Gambit doesn’t make the mistake of calling her name, or of beckoning her back to him.
She leaves folded on the chair beside his bed with careful consideration, a familiar leather coat.