"Quagmire"
By Viridian5
9/16/01
RATING: PG-13. There’s a small bit of slashiness here. If you don’t know what that is, you might want to avoid this one.
SPOILERS: X-treme X-Men #2 and #4
SUMMARY: Gambit tries to score points on Vargas in his own style.
ARCHIVAL/DISTRIBUTION: Anywhere else too, as long as you ask me first.
FEEDBACK: can be sent to Viridian5@aol.com.
DISCLAIMERS: Marvel owns them and doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. Nothing in that statement fits me. No infringement intended.
NOTES: I was stunned (and happy) to watch Claremont let Gambit flirt outright with Vargas to save his life, so I decided to fill in the missing interior thoughts. Dialogue comes from issue #4 itself.
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"Quagmire"
By Viridian5
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Remy spread his legs a bit more and sat back a bit further on his heels, all to make his package more obvious to onlookers. When the blonde Amazon yanked on his hair a bit to better bare his throat, looking for her master Vargas’ approval, Remy’s smile widened even through the stinging pain in his scalp. She was readying him for Vargas to chop his head off, but if he’d gotten paid for every time somebody’d threatened that, he’d be set for life. He rocked a little as suggestively as he could and felt her grip loosen the smallest bit and her breathing shift. Then she let his hair go.
Remy knew on good authority that he looked very pretty on his knees. Not that Vargas would get to find out just how pretty he could look.
The flirting wouldn’t go past flirting. Remy wouldn’t do more, not with this man, not even to save his life.
He could die here. Many others had. The thought of his danger acted as a goad and a thrill.
He talked and smiled, playing to Vargas, feinting and sparring with words and confidence. With the right partner or adversary, it could be like sex. With Vargas, it felt more like masturbation. He kept on anyway.
Remy knew that in many ways he was a lot like his home. On the surface, New Orleans was bright colors and raucous sound, party town, loose and indulgent, but swamp rested underneath, and swamp was dark and deep and hungry.
Sometimes Remy worried about the swamp inside himself, but the swamp was his home too, Cajun that he was. It provided for him. It kept his secrets.
And the layer of his surface image was pretty thick.
Remy kept reaching out to Vargas with his charm but kept sliding off, even while the touch of that bastard’s mind made him want to wipe his own clean. Like touching grease. No moving parts in Vargas either for Remy’s empathic or kinetic senses to find. Null.
Arrogance could be sexy, but not the way this man did it.
Then Vargas unveiled his statue of Psylocke, and Remy had to fight the urge to clench his smiling teeth and roughen his light, bantering voice into a snarl. He didn’t care if Vargas could outthink and outfight him and any other X-Man; a man who killed indiscriminately for fun and needed a trophy statue to commemorate the event was vulgar as well as evil.
And maybe insecure under all the bombast too. Remy kept it in mind, since he intended to case the man even as he cased the joint. Recon.
Dieu, only cold, rotting flesh and cold, lifeless stone remained of fiery, pretty Betts. She deserved so much better, even if she had tried to pull his secrets from him once upon a time.
"She earned this place of honor in my home. She fought superbly," Vargas said.
Remy stood and touched the... trophy. What a waste. "She kissed better. An’ loved to waltz. Now you’ll never know," Remy answered.
"Why should I care?"
"Killin’ is easy. Been there, done that myself. Gets real old, real fast. Don’t mean you’re better, M’sieu. Not the way you claim to be."
Remy couldn’t kill Vargas. Not now, not with Vargas and his two pet blonds keeping their eyes on him. Not in a frontal assault. But he could entertain them and beguile them and make their own arrogance cloud their minds against him. He could see Vargas becoming more receptive and comfortable around him just in shifts of stance. Then he would take from them, show them how stupid they were. Theft as vengeance. It didn’t even start to make up for Vargas slaughtering Betts or breaking Henri, but he took what he could get.
He had to do something.
"What do you want, Cajun?"
"Same as you. A game dat’s worth my time." He had to let Vargas think that he didn’t care about anyone but himself either. People who figured you were mercenary thought they had your number and could predict which way you’d jump.
Not so long ago he could have blown them to hell with a thought, ripped them apart all the way down to the atomic level, but he couldn’t anymore. Fortunately. He knew all too well about absolute power and absolute corruption, and great power and great responsibility. He didn’t want it.
Vargas showed him one of Destiny’s books of the future to come, that the X-Men didn’t know Vargas had. Yeah, Destiny had known how power could suck.
Vargas said that Remy wasn’t really mentioned in the book much, insinuating that he had something to fear in that. That maybe his life might end here and now, but Remy knew an idle insinuation when he heard it. Vargas playing with him left him in familiar territory.
All of it only made him smile and flirt harder, having spent enough time tangled in his guild’s prophecies that he wanted nothing to do with anyone else’s. "Maybe dat’s because I’m no X-Man. I’m the joker in the deck."
"The wild card -- interesting." Vargas had no idea. "I thought you had come tonight for my book."
The very thought made Remy’s skin crawl. He preferred getting his look at the future one second at a time. Via the present.
"Couldn’t care less, Seigneur. I don’t follow maps. I make my own roads."
"And your own destiny? We have that in common." Vargas offered him a glass of wine, all friendly-like. "But the X-Men care a great deal."
"Dey’re heroes. I’m a thief." Remy accepted the glass. Part of him would have preferred having a knife at his throat.
"I like that, Gambit. I like you. ‘Til next time, then."
Oh, joy. Remy smiled and clinked his glass against Vargas’. "My pleasure."
********************THE END********************