Post by angel on Sept 20, 2006 6:45:36 GMT -5
It was the strangest of things.
So much action had happened in and around the Mansion and yet two people managed to successfully miss the whole lot, albeit for extremely different reasons.
What became of Lucas Bishop whilst all the hysteria in the mansion was occurring? That, for now, will have to remain a mystery. Let us instead turn our attentions first to Remy LeBeau, the man otherwise known as Gambit.
Once a thief, Remy, always a thief. That's what Papa used to say when he was a small boy. It was, to a certain extent true; although there was quite some difference between shoplifting a bar of your favourite chocolate because you had no change and pulling off some of the most successful art and jewel heists in recent years. One was an art form, the other was…well, the other was just theft.
When the first signs of trouble had kicked off at the Institute, Remy had slid quietly out of sight. He was good at melting into the shadows, disappearing, not being found. It was, after all, how he had stayed out of jail for so long. Of course, he had mused as he'd raced away from the Institute on Scott Summers' former motorbike, melting into the shadows was definitely easier when you had a 1200cc motorbike between your legs.
He'd got about ten miles from the Institute before the guilt had crept up on him, battered him mercilessly around the head with a hammer and forced him to stop.
"What y'doin', Remy?" he said to himself, sternly. "Y'get an invitation back t'this safe house, an' before th' first day through, y'stealin' Scotty's bike."
Not that Scott would be needing it any time soon, but still, the principle was there.
He parked the bike up under a tree and sat there for a while, smoking moodily until he heard the distant sound of helicopters vacating the area. The coast, he guessed, was now clear.
Remy fired up the bike and headed back to the mansion.
Once everything down below had gotten under control, Warren shrugged and flew back toward his room. Apparently, the drama was all finished with, and they hadn't asked him to do anything else, so he saw no reason to stick around like an airborne lump doing nothing.
Movement caught his eye, a motorbike heading up the drive. Warren hadn't been around long enough to know Scott Summers, but he had been around long enough to know that the only bikes in the mansion had belonged to Scott.
Must be a new arrival.
Flapping his wings, the Angel swooped down to land next to the garage and wait to greet their new guest. Poor Candice had fainted with all the... excitement of Bobby's arrest. She had enough to deal with for the moment.
The sudden appearance of a winged man nearly caused Remy to tip the bike over in alarm. "Merde," he swore, regaining control of the machine and bringing it to a stop. "Y'tryin' t'kill me, mon ami?"
This wasn't a student he recalled from his days at the Institute: and Remy was pretty certain that he'd remember a blond Adonis with wings. He didn't smoke THAT many 'herbal' cigarettes that his memory was shot to pieces.
"I was jus' out for a ride. Y'know. Clearin' m'head," he said, feeling the need to explain just why it was that he was on a vehicle that wasn't his.
"Huh?" Confusion crossed Warren's face before he broke into a smile.
"Oh, sorry, I thought you were new." Scratching his head with his left hand, Warren extended his right to offer a handshake.
"I'm Warren." He was still a bit confused about exactly what was going on, but apparently this guy wasn't new, which meant that was one of Scott's bikes, which meant that he's known Scott, which meant that Warren was the new one. Or something. His brain was still a bit fried from the conversations with his lawyer and Bobby's parents, but he tried to keep it off his face.
"Warren," repeated Remy, hesitating before he shook the other man's hand. His brow furrowed as a few things clicked into place. "Worthington, non?" His hand connected with Warren's.
"Remy LeBeau," he said. "Most folks jus' call me Gambit, though. Y'could say I was new, but I used t'live here few years back now. Been out in th' big wide world doin' my thing."
He got off the Harley. "Bit of a fuss kicked off here, I figured it weren't no place for me, so I took a trip out for a bit. All over now?"
The FBI weren't exactly the kind of people Remy needed to run into.
"The third." Was there anyone that didn't know who he was?
Then again, did he care that people recognised him? Well, he did care a little about when the police recognised him, but how many pharmaceuticals heirs had sixteen foot wingspans?
"Yeah, they're sending a representative to take statements sometime, but probably not for a while." Warren shrugged lightly. Not everyone liked talking to police. He didn't like talking to police, but he was squeaky clean enough to be able to do it without having to worry. They always made him feel guilty though, for some reason, even though he knew he'd never done anything that he could be arrested for. Unless some of those girls had been lying about how old they were.
"Nice to meet you. What made you come back here? Seems like things have been... exciting here for a while now." Not usually this exciting, though.
A brief smile flickered across the Cajun's face. "Everyone gotta have a holiday home, non? Jus' needed t'get away from the everyday drag that is life."
It was evident that this was all that was forthcoming.
"So...how long you been here, then?"
"Since the cure came out."
There was no point in dancing around the subject, everyone knew his name and everyone knew what his father had done. Of course, Worthington Labs had sold the cure, no long had any control over it - and Warren was beginning to wonder if that had been a bad decision. Now they had absolutely no idea how much was going to the military, or to anyone with more nefarious intentions.
"Been thinking of getting my own place, though - I only got out of boarding school a few years ago, seems odd to be back in one again." For a long time the Xavier Institute had seemed safer than the rest of the world. Now, the big wide world was pulling ahead.
"How old are you?" It was an easy enough question, but a surprising one. "Seems t'me that there's a certain type of person who stays here long-term, an' that's people like Scott an' Jeannie." He sighed. "They were good people," he added. Anal retentive in Scott's case, but good people.
"Twenty two." Shrugging again, Warren found himself nodding. "I arrived... in time for their memorial." He'd witnessed Jean's death - not having known her, Warren had found it difficult to be sad about the death of a woman who had killed so many. He'd been told many times since, though, that she hadn't always been like that. For a moment he wondered what had happened about that woman on the television.
"Don't know that a school is the best place for me. Finished my schooling a long time ago, and there's only so much you can learn to do with these." This time, he shrugged with his wings. "Not to mention that the girls... Well, I don't want to get into any trouble, you know?" He directed a cheeky grin at his companion.
"Ah, oui, I know." Remy took off his sunglasses and winked lazily, displaying his strange red-on-black eyes. "Somethin' that always seems t'land me in trouble as well. Can't think why."
The young Cajun - who further conversation revealed was only a couple of years older than Warren - seemed affable, likeable and easy to talk to. He replaced the wheel lock on the motorbike (the one that only a couple of hours ago he had picked to TAKE the thing).
"I don't know 'bout you," he said, "but I could use a coffee."
"Coffee sounds good." Leading the way back inside, Warren headed straight for the kitchen and pulled a tin from one of the higher shelves. The problem with the good quality coffee that he bought was that it only lasted a few days, so while he kept it aside so that it would always be there when he wanted it, he didn't hide it - at least that way it would get used.
With the coffee brewing away, Warren perched on one of the high stools to wait.
"So, how did you come to the Xavier Institute?" Warren had been interested to find out that until the Professor's death, the majority of the students had been invited to the school, rather than walking in as they seemed to be doing so often these days.
"Originally?" Remy shrugged easily. "Had a family tragedy, needed somewhere t'get my head together. Was put onto th' Prof. He was a damn good man an' helped me a lot."
That much at least was true.
"I didn't stop here so long," he admitted. "I ain't ever been one for institutions. Free spirit, y'know?"
"I hear he did a lot over the years. There's still a lot being done in his memory - I hope we're living up to it." Warren wasn't sure, but from what he'd heard, the Professor didn't fight for his cause in the literal sense. Which certainly wasn't in line with what they'd been doing lately.
"But yeah, I hear ya about institutions." Being bundled up and sent to boarding school didn't exactly lead to the most positive of feelings about the place. "And yet you're back now." Without waiting for a response, Warren stood and started pouring coffees.
"How do you take it?"
"Black, s'il vous plait," came the reply. Coffee generally made Remy moderately hyper. It was why he drank it. He accepted the mug from Warren with a grin and took a sip, nodding approvingly.
"So - uh - what was all that...chaos 'bout earlier then?" he asked, airily.
"You weren't at Baltimore, were you?" Shaking his head, Warren took a sip of his coffee before answering.
"Bobby Drake was arrested for murder."
I... killed a sentinel cop...
"I sure as hell hope no-one got a recording of what was said there, because Bobby said... well, he killed a sentinel cop. Says some telepath was controlling him at the time, but it's going to be hard to prove that." Warren wondered whether that was a hint of doubt he was feeling - it was an easy excuse to use, after all. 'I slept with your girlfriend - but a telepath made me do it, so it's ok, right?'
"Bobby Drake...Bobby Drake...oh, oui, I remember him. Was jus' gettin' in here when I left. I read 'bout Baltimore in th' news, seemed like some seriously heavy stuff went down there. That Brotherhood gettin' more of an inclination towards the violent since they lost Magneto, it seems."
Remy remembered the dilemma when he had given some serious thought to joining to Brotherhood's cause.
His eyebrows raised and he let out a low whistle as Warren continued with the explanation as to why Bobby had been arrested. "Killed a sentinel cop? Man, that's some serious stuff. Think I remember this from th' news - in th' warehouse that got blown to pieces, non? He had somethin' t'do with THAT?"
"Yeah, he was in there. There were pictures on the news the other day, him standing behind Pyro in the warehouse. It's going to look bad. Very bad." Warren had been brought up in a business environment, he knew all about how important reputation was. They were going to drag up everything they could on the X-Men in this trial, everything they could possibly do to make them look like inept vigilantes.
"None of us saw it, we were all out on the streets. Fighting zombies and man eating plants and..." That chick that had started dropping people from the sky.
"Well, yeah, seems like the violence has escalated these days." On both sides.
"Sounds like th' whole thing is some sorta crazy," said Remy, sipping on the coffee. Crazy, and at the same time the most amazing fodder for a 50's style horror 'B' movie.
Why had he come back to the Institute? He had come back to the Institute for sanctuary. He had been worried that his being there would increase possible risk to the students; that the people he knew were hunting him down might cause trouble.
Sounds like his was the tiniest problem in a huge cache of problems.
Sipping at his coffee, Warren considered the older mutant in silence. His eyes were odd, yeah, but he didn't have an obvious physical mutation. What people could do was usually a pretty common subject in early conversations, at least here where they knew that everyone could do something. Not many people bothered asking him - it wasn't exactly hard to guess.
While there were other people with even more obvious mutations than his - Kurt came to mind - Warren had always wondered whether his life would have been different if he'd developed something easily hidden. But that wasn't the subject at hand here, and the winged mutant knew that he was trying to avoid the thought of what had happened in Baltimore, how Bobby was going to be treated, what the trial would dig up.
"Yeah," he sighed, "That's one way of putting it."
"Sounds t'me like you people gonna need all th' help you can get. Guess I could afford to take time out my hectic social schedule an' stick around a bit."
Remy actually successfully made it sound like he was doing them a favour, not the other way around. All part of his manipulative charm.
He rarely discussed his mutant abilities. He'd spent most of his life around 'norms', as he liked to think of them, and had always been of the opinion that what people didn't know couldn't hurt them.
"Preaching to the choir." Warren smiled, his trademark cheeky grin. "There's a lot better things I could be doing." Right now, though, with one of his best friends carted off by the cops, a representative being sent down, his lawyer on the way... None of them seemed quite so appealing an usual.
"Well, while you're waitin' for those things t'come along," said Remy, reaching into his pocket, "how 'bout a game of cards?"
So much action had happened in and around the Mansion and yet two people managed to successfully miss the whole lot, albeit for extremely different reasons.
What became of Lucas Bishop whilst all the hysteria in the mansion was occurring? That, for now, will have to remain a mystery. Let us instead turn our attentions first to Remy LeBeau, the man otherwise known as Gambit.
Once a thief, Remy, always a thief. That's what Papa used to say when he was a small boy. It was, to a certain extent true; although there was quite some difference between shoplifting a bar of your favourite chocolate because you had no change and pulling off some of the most successful art and jewel heists in recent years. One was an art form, the other was…well, the other was just theft.
When the first signs of trouble had kicked off at the Institute, Remy had slid quietly out of sight. He was good at melting into the shadows, disappearing, not being found. It was, after all, how he had stayed out of jail for so long. Of course, he had mused as he'd raced away from the Institute on Scott Summers' former motorbike, melting into the shadows was definitely easier when you had a 1200cc motorbike between your legs.
He'd got about ten miles from the Institute before the guilt had crept up on him, battered him mercilessly around the head with a hammer and forced him to stop.
"What y'doin', Remy?" he said to himself, sternly. "Y'get an invitation back t'this safe house, an' before th' first day through, y'stealin' Scotty's bike."
Not that Scott would be needing it any time soon, but still, the principle was there.
He parked the bike up under a tree and sat there for a while, smoking moodily until he heard the distant sound of helicopters vacating the area. The coast, he guessed, was now clear.
Remy fired up the bike and headed back to the mansion.
Once everything down below had gotten under control, Warren shrugged and flew back toward his room. Apparently, the drama was all finished with, and they hadn't asked him to do anything else, so he saw no reason to stick around like an airborne lump doing nothing.
Movement caught his eye, a motorbike heading up the drive. Warren hadn't been around long enough to know Scott Summers, but he had been around long enough to know that the only bikes in the mansion had belonged to Scott.
Must be a new arrival.
Flapping his wings, the Angel swooped down to land next to the garage and wait to greet their new guest. Poor Candice had fainted with all the... excitement of Bobby's arrest. She had enough to deal with for the moment.
The sudden appearance of a winged man nearly caused Remy to tip the bike over in alarm. "Merde," he swore, regaining control of the machine and bringing it to a stop. "Y'tryin' t'kill me, mon ami?"
This wasn't a student he recalled from his days at the Institute: and Remy was pretty certain that he'd remember a blond Adonis with wings. He didn't smoke THAT many 'herbal' cigarettes that his memory was shot to pieces.
"I was jus' out for a ride. Y'know. Clearin' m'head," he said, feeling the need to explain just why it was that he was on a vehicle that wasn't his.
"Huh?" Confusion crossed Warren's face before he broke into a smile.
"Oh, sorry, I thought you were new." Scratching his head with his left hand, Warren extended his right to offer a handshake.
"I'm Warren." He was still a bit confused about exactly what was going on, but apparently this guy wasn't new, which meant that was one of Scott's bikes, which meant that he's known Scott, which meant that Warren was the new one. Or something. His brain was still a bit fried from the conversations with his lawyer and Bobby's parents, but he tried to keep it off his face.
"Warren," repeated Remy, hesitating before he shook the other man's hand. His brow furrowed as a few things clicked into place. "Worthington, non?" His hand connected with Warren's.
"Remy LeBeau," he said. "Most folks jus' call me Gambit, though. Y'could say I was new, but I used t'live here few years back now. Been out in th' big wide world doin' my thing."
He got off the Harley. "Bit of a fuss kicked off here, I figured it weren't no place for me, so I took a trip out for a bit. All over now?"
The FBI weren't exactly the kind of people Remy needed to run into.
"The third." Was there anyone that didn't know who he was?
Then again, did he care that people recognised him? Well, he did care a little about when the police recognised him, but how many pharmaceuticals heirs had sixteen foot wingspans?
"Yeah, they're sending a representative to take statements sometime, but probably not for a while." Warren shrugged lightly. Not everyone liked talking to police. He didn't like talking to police, but he was squeaky clean enough to be able to do it without having to worry. They always made him feel guilty though, for some reason, even though he knew he'd never done anything that he could be arrested for. Unless some of those girls had been lying about how old they were.
"Nice to meet you. What made you come back here? Seems like things have been... exciting here for a while now." Not usually this exciting, though.
A brief smile flickered across the Cajun's face. "Everyone gotta have a holiday home, non? Jus' needed t'get away from the everyday drag that is life."
It was evident that this was all that was forthcoming.
"So...how long you been here, then?"
"Since the cure came out."
There was no point in dancing around the subject, everyone knew his name and everyone knew what his father had done. Of course, Worthington Labs had sold the cure, no long had any control over it - and Warren was beginning to wonder if that had been a bad decision. Now they had absolutely no idea how much was going to the military, or to anyone with more nefarious intentions.
"Been thinking of getting my own place, though - I only got out of boarding school a few years ago, seems odd to be back in one again." For a long time the Xavier Institute had seemed safer than the rest of the world. Now, the big wide world was pulling ahead.
"How old are you?" It was an easy enough question, but a surprising one. "Seems t'me that there's a certain type of person who stays here long-term, an' that's people like Scott an' Jeannie." He sighed. "They were good people," he added. Anal retentive in Scott's case, but good people.
"Twenty two." Shrugging again, Warren found himself nodding. "I arrived... in time for their memorial." He'd witnessed Jean's death - not having known her, Warren had found it difficult to be sad about the death of a woman who had killed so many. He'd been told many times since, though, that she hadn't always been like that. For a moment he wondered what had happened about that woman on the television.
"Don't know that a school is the best place for me. Finished my schooling a long time ago, and there's only so much you can learn to do with these." This time, he shrugged with his wings. "Not to mention that the girls... Well, I don't want to get into any trouble, you know?" He directed a cheeky grin at his companion.
"Ah, oui, I know." Remy took off his sunglasses and winked lazily, displaying his strange red-on-black eyes. "Somethin' that always seems t'land me in trouble as well. Can't think why."
The young Cajun - who further conversation revealed was only a couple of years older than Warren - seemed affable, likeable and easy to talk to. He replaced the wheel lock on the motorbike (the one that only a couple of hours ago he had picked to TAKE the thing).
"I don't know 'bout you," he said, "but I could use a coffee."
"Coffee sounds good." Leading the way back inside, Warren headed straight for the kitchen and pulled a tin from one of the higher shelves. The problem with the good quality coffee that he bought was that it only lasted a few days, so while he kept it aside so that it would always be there when he wanted it, he didn't hide it - at least that way it would get used.
With the coffee brewing away, Warren perched on one of the high stools to wait.
"So, how did you come to the Xavier Institute?" Warren had been interested to find out that until the Professor's death, the majority of the students had been invited to the school, rather than walking in as they seemed to be doing so often these days.
"Originally?" Remy shrugged easily. "Had a family tragedy, needed somewhere t'get my head together. Was put onto th' Prof. He was a damn good man an' helped me a lot."
That much at least was true.
"I didn't stop here so long," he admitted. "I ain't ever been one for institutions. Free spirit, y'know?"
"I hear he did a lot over the years. There's still a lot being done in his memory - I hope we're living up to it." Warren wasn't sure, but from what he'd heard, the Professor didn't fight for his cause in the literal sense. Which certainly wasn't in line with what they'd been doing lately.
"But yeah, I hear ya about institutions." Being bundled up and sent to boarding school didn't exactly lead to the most positive of feelings about the place. "And yet you're back now." Without waiting for a response, Warren stood and started pouring coffees.
"How do you take it?"
"Black, s'il vous plait," came the reply. Coffee generally made Remy moderately hyper. It was why he drank it. He accepted the mug from Warren with a grin and took a sip, nodding approvingly.
"So - uh - what was all that...chaos 'bout earlier then?" he asked, airily.
"You weren't at Baltimore, were you?" Shaking his head, Warren took a sip of his coffee before answering.
"Bobby Drake was arrested for murder."
I... killed a sentinel cop...
"I sure as hell hope no-one got a recording of what was said there, because Bobby said... well, he killed a sentinel cop. Says some telepath was controlling him at the time, but it's going to be hard to prove that." Warren wondered whether that was a hint of doubt he was feeling - it was an easy excuse to use, after all. 'I slept with your girlfriend - but a telepath made me do it, so it's ok, right?'
"Bobby Drake...Bobby Drake...oh, oui, I remember him. Was jus' gettin' in here when I left. I read 'bout Baltimore in th' news, seemed like some seriously heavy stuff went down there. That Brotherhood gettin' more of an inclination towards the violent since they lost Magneto, it seems."
Remy remembered the dilemma when he had given some serious thought to joining to Brotherhood's cause.
His eyebrows raised and he let out a low whistle as Warren continued with the explanation as to why Bobby had been arrested. "Killed a sentinel cop? Man, that's some serious stuff. Think I remember this from th' news - in th' warehouse that got blown to pieces, non? He had somethin' t'do with THAT?"
"Yeah, he was in there. There were pictures on the news the other day, him standing behind Pyro in the warehouse. It's going to look bad. Very bad." Warren had been brought up in a business environment, he knew all about how important reputation was. They were going to drag up everything they could on the X-Men in this trial, everything they could possibly do to make them look like inept vigilantes.
"None of us saw it, we were all out on the streets. Fighting zombies and man eating plants and..." That chick that had started dropping people from the sky.
"Well, yeah, seems like the violence has escalated these days." On both sides.
"Sounds like th' whole thing is some sorta crazy," said Remy, sipping on the coffee. Crazy, and at the same time the most amazing fodder for a 50's style horror 'B' movie.
Why had he come back to the Institute? He had come back to the Institute for sanctuary. He had been worried that his being there would increase possible risk to the students; that the people he knew were hunting him down might cause trouble.
Sounds like his was the tiniest problem in a huge cache of problems.
Sipping at his coffee, Warren considered the older mutant in silence. His eyes were odd, yeah, but he didn't have an obvious physical mutation. What people could do was usually a pretty common subject in early conversations, at least here where they knew that everyone could do something. Not many people bothered asking him - it wasn't exactly hard to guess.
While there were other people with even more obvious mutations than his - Kurt came to mind - Warren had always wondered whether his life would have been different if he'd developed something easily hidden. But that wasn't the subject at hand here, and the winged mutant knew that he was trying to avoid the thought of what had happened in Baltimore, how Bobby was going to be treated, what the trial would dig up.
"Yeah," he sighed, "That's one way of putting it."
"Sounds t'me like you people gonna need all th' help you can get. Guess I could afford to take time out my hectic social schedule an' stick around a bit."
Remy actually successfully made it sound like he was doing them a favour, not the other way around. All part of his manipulative charm.
He rarely discussed his mutant abilities. He'd spent most of his life around 'norms', as he liked to think of them, and had always been of the opinion that what people didn't know couldn't hurt them.
"Preaching to the choir." Warren smiled, his trademark cheeky grin. "There's a lot better things I could be doing." Right now, though, with one of his best friends carted off by the cops, a representative being sent down, his lawyer on the way... None of them seemed quite so appealing an usual.
"Well, while you're waitin' for those things t'come along," said Remy, reaching into his pocket, "how 'bout a game of cards?"