If you're writing for dp3 then Hiraeth from your prompt list would work SO well since they're all stuck in the void! 🤲🏽😭 We need Gambit fics its a DROUGHT HELP
♧ ⎯ LUCK O’ THE DRAW !
summ. You find the Devil himself at the end of the world. Surprisingly, it isn’t the first time you have. It is, however, the first time it hurts.
pairing. Void!Gambit x f!Anomaly!reader (established relationship. Kinda. Multiverse be funky like 'dat.)
w.count. 1.8k
a/n. Because Channing deserved that Gambit all those years ago, and I've come to (attempt to) deliver what the the people have asked. Masterlist here.
MOST PEOPLE MEET THE DEVIL at a crossroads, but you meet yours in— quite literally— the back end of fuckin’ nowhere.
It hurt more than it should.
Your heart practically stutters.
“Remy.”
Then he turns, and you wait for the flash of recognition in his eyes.
Nothing comes.
And then. And then.
Realisation— logic. The cold, hard truth: This isn’t your Remy LeBeau. Your Remy had died long before, in a Universe that was pruned and erased into nothingness by the TVA. Your Universe. The joke? That the Gambit before you is merely a variant amongst a million. The punchline? He looks exactly the same as the day you’d lost your own.
“Well, this is awkward. You know off-shoot Hawkeye here?” Wade says, astonished, before his eyes widened. “Ah. Tragic exposition time for the readers, I see.”
Your mind is still reeling. It feels like someone’s just jammed a chisel straight into your gut. “I— Knew a version. Variant, I guess,” you manage to correct yourself, distracted by the skirting trenchcoat and the all too familiar sound of shuffling cards.
Christ, it’s like he’d stepped right out of your memories.
Remy’s eyebrows shoot up as he studies you. Something in your chest pulls taut, threatening to snap as he speaks. “Apologies, mon ami. But as far as I remember, I ain’t never seen you before.”
“Ouch,” Wade winces, looking between you both. “What a classic trope! This is like, me talking to my past Mom in The Adam Project. Funnily enough, my Mom was you!” He snorts, pointing to Elektra.
You ignore Wade and offer Remy a wan smile. “I figured. It’s okay.”
…It is obviously, in fact, not okay.
You avoid him like a plague shortly after the entire commotion; it’s almost comical. Wade had managed to come up with a plan with the rest of the group, albeit a ramshackle, flimsy one, but you’ve hardly been able to pay attention through the bloodrush of shock rocketing in your head, anyway.
Being around this Remy is stunningly stifling.
The lilt of his accent, the sharpness in his smile; the flourishing of cards and the faint hum-drum of kinetic charge against his fingertips.
You’ve seen it all before, once upon a time. You never thought any of it could ever bring you to this bad of a heel.
It hadn’t taken long before you’d tried drowning yourself at the end of a bottle of brandy Logan had handed you that night. (The whiskey tames his mordance and makes him uncharacteristically civil. He’d said something along the lines of: Y’need this more than I do, bub; look like you’ve just seen a fuckin’ ghost. Shit, I guess you did, huh? )
“Mais la,” comes a huff. “Ain’t that mine?”
A frisson runs through your heart.
“Sorry,” you say, barely glancing up from the barrel fire tucked outside the team’s hideout. You’re not quite sure you can handle meeting his gaze. “I know I should’ve asked.”
A playful hum. Remy settles on the log adjacent to yours. “S’alright. No harm done, chèr.”
It takes everything in you not to flinch at the endearment. If he’d noticed, well— he’s smart enough not to mention it. He’s curious and it stands to reason; afterall, he’s never quite seen someone look at him as weathered as the way you do. It’s as if the effort itself to do so would be unbearable.
“Y’kno’, I been told I’m easy on the eyes. Not for you, tho’, eh?” Remy shoots you an amicable smile. It’s charming, if a little compelling. “Guessin’ I made bad on you where y’from? You done been boudéin’ since y’first got here.”
You let out a laugh. It’s the most brittle sound he’s ever heard come from someone.
“No, no,” you shake your head. “It’s… You just make me a lil’ homesick, is all.”
Remy bristles with his deck of cards. A Charlier cut; a One-handed shuffle. It’s a mindless tic; your variant used to do the exact same with the exact same ease.
(Such a miracle, you remember thinking once, that there could be symmetries in the Multiverse. Now you learn, perhaps, it’s far more a curse. Either way, you can hear Remy’s doting voice in a distant memory, dimpling coyly at you: “S’just the luck o’ your draw, chèr.” )
You tamp down the memory before it could sink its jowls any deeper in you.
“You’re curious,” you say.
He makes a noise of assent. Revolution cut; One-handed shuffle. Repeat.
“I ain’t gon’ axe if y’ain’t wanna answer.”
It’s kind of him.
You forgot he was like this.
Witty, yet gentlemanly. The way Remy always has been.
Underneath the blanket of the night, the crackle of the flames limn the planes of his face in flickering, hazy saffron. The look in his eyes is sincere as they meet your red-rimmed gaze. It’s been awhile since you’ve seen him, and in this light no less: tall, cutting, strong.
Lively.
The last you’d seen Remy, he’d been drawn out and battered by the war. Not that he’d ever admit it; he always insisted on keeping up his sunny disposition despite the constant losing battles happening. (Sometimes you think you resent him for doing that; it’d felt like he’d taken the light of the world with him when—)
You thank your lucky stars the variant Remy doesn’t make a comment on how you must be staring so openly. It’s a feeble attempt to committing every detail to memory, you suppose, in case you don’t get the chance again.
“In my Universe, a war was waging against mutants.” Your nails tinker against the empty bottleneck of the flat whiskey you’d nursed, thinking of how to cut a bloodshed of a story short; to get your point across before you falter and lose your footing.
“There was a mission sanctioned, and during it— a decision had to be made at that moment. So… you chose. Easily.” Your brows pinch tight against your will. The molten burn returns to the back of your eyes. “You saved so many lives the day you died.”
Something catches in your throat when you realise your mistake, find yourself amending instantly, “He. He died.”
(It had been swift. A small mercy, all things considered. There wasn’t even a need to check for a pulse when you finally managed to reach for him.)
You’re fidgeting, too, with something in your other hand. Remy catches sight of it only now: a card, sitting pinched between your ringed fingers. Nine of Hearts. Its edges are torn and creased across the face, singed an ashen black.
A proverbial piece of Remy’s heart, carried to the end with you.
He’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel a cold rush over his body at the sight.
“…I’m sorry, chèr,” he offers quietly, inadequate as it is. He hadn’t expected that.
He can’t imagine how haunting it must be to look at someone you’d shared a lifetime with and be met with a complete stranger instead.
A living, breathing, ghost.
That unbiddable feeling of longing had always seemed to accompany the sight of him; but now it’s different. Now, there’s a blistering, brutal pain to come with; All-encompassing grief, thick as molasses in your lungs, overturning itself like a phantom from wherever you thought you’d buried it a long time ago.
The only way to smother it would be to reach out, to hold him like you had once before, and isn’t that an ironic inconvenience?
“No, no. I’m sorry,” you tell him, sigh coming out as an awkward laugh. A breeze passes and you inhale deep to ground yourself. Press your eyes shut momentarily to will away useless tears. “It must be so weird to hear all of this from me about— well, you, technically.”
“Mais, can’t ‘ave all been a bad memory, tho’, right?”
Right. No. It hadn’t been. There’s something else too. An undercurrent. Beyond the grief, the deep ache in your marrows— you think it’s nostalgia. Hiraeth. More bittersweet than it is painful.
It’s… It’s watching mutant schoolkids teaching him UNO for the first time. It’s the bickering over the beignets for breakfast, or your feet on his lap at the couch in the lounge after dinners with the rest of the X-Men. Lazy banter. Conversations that go everywhere and nowhere.
“Yeah,” you agree, feeling something bloom in your chest you thought long lost. “You taught me everything about your home, too. Down South. Told me about the bayou, the cypress trees. Your Cajun, your ways. We used to play Bourré.”
Talk of home has him ducking into a laugh. Remy had been in the Void far longer than the rest (he figures, at least)— he’s very nearly lost most of his fragmented memories to time by now. “Did I? Oughta’ play a game or two wit’ you.”
You buckle at that. “Ah. You were always the better player.”
Then:
He makes the leap before he runs out of steam. “Was we…?”
His finger darts between the space you two share.
“Oh, no,” you override, sheepishly. “No, we, we were good friends and stayed good friends. I was—” Your breath scurries; a reconsideration. “I was glad with that. You had a Southern belle named Anna Marie. A powerful mutant called Rogue. You two were good for each other.”
You must have given yourself away somewhere, though, the way Remy is reading you with a pinned gaze. It’s the same, levelled look you’ve seen before— the kind he gets in a game of cards.
Something discerning eclipses in his eyes.
He’d gotten the measure of you in an instant.
“Gambit musta’ been blind blind not t’see you.”
Ah.
You smile. It’s windswept. Resigned. “Well. Doesn’t matter now, does it? My Gambit’s gone. No matter how much I wish I can see him again.”
Remy’s eyes dart to your hands.
“Y’kno’, chèr,” he begins, something spirited in his tone. “In the world of cards, each a’ these and they suits hold a meanin’.”
He flourishes his deck, hypnotisingly smooth with every elegant cut, fan and spring. Every shuffle cascades as smooth as liquid in the sleight of his hands.
“Some of my folks back in New Orleans I remember, they learned me to read ‘em. Now, outta the whole deck? What you got there; the Nine of Hearts is also called the Wish card.”
The small laugh that punches out of you is bell-like. “Really?”
It’s warm. Bright. Musical to his ears. It washes over him, and he can’t help but hang on to the peal. He wanted to hear it again.
“Yes, Ma’am.” Remy clicks his tongue as he shoots you a sunny look. “Would never lie t’you, chèr.”
The cracks in your soul don’t disappear, but they surely lighten as you look gently at him. “Huh. Well, I guess I got my wish, didn’t I?”
He chuckles.
“Mais, I ain’t your Gambit but—”
He leans. Reaches out behind your ear with an empty palm, playfully revealing a gilded card from seemingly thin air with a sharp flick of his wrist:
Another Nine of Hearts. His. He hands it over to you, by way of meaning— I’m here, now.
New beginnings.
You take the card with a smile.
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one piece is set in a nautical world with presumably nautical idioms and exclamations to match, right, like swearing by the sea rather than on a god etc. to wit, there's five seas (the four blues + the grand line) so we can assume when you're feeling particularly dramatic, you might refer to all those vast oceans to get your hyperbolic point across.
keeping that in mind, lets live in a stupidly romantic corny ass world for a moment ok? take my hand.
"I swear on all six seas, if you don't shut the fuck up right now—"
"What?" Sanji looks at him like he's stupid. Nothing new, really.
"Ha, even you're going deaf having to listen to your own annoying ass whining all the time, Cook. I was—"
"No, you—"
"Don't interrupt me! Oi!" he yelps as a wooden spoon bounces harmlessly off his shoulder. He's not impressed that Sanji manages to catch it before it hits the counter.
"You said six seas," Sanji states.
Zoro stares back in lieu of an answer.
"Huh, maybe this has something to do with why you're always lost. There's only five seas, dummy."
And ah, now he gets what the idiot cook is on about. He's surprised and a little disappointed, honestly. You'd think the guy would be a little more aware about his own fucking dream, but whatever. He's got that annoying smile, smug and cocky like he's oh so much better than Zoro.
"Would you like me to count them out for you? I know it's a big number, it's probably confusing for a simple creature like you."
Zoro crosses his arms in clear warning, something the cook, as always, blatantly ignores. He's leaning on the counter that's between them now, eyes sparkling with glee. Idiot. Zoro's thoughts do not have a fond tone to them. Thoughts don't have tones at all, thank you very much.
Sanji lifts a hand and proceeds to count off on his fingers with the precision of a drill sergeant.
"I'm sure you at least know our ocean, the East Blue. There's also the West Blue, North Blue, South Blue, and of course the Grand Line," he wiggles all his fingers as he puts his thumb up for the last one like he's emulating fireworks.
Zoro snorts indelicately. "And?"
Sanji frowns with a tilt of his head.
"And?"
Zoro holds up his index finger.
"And," he says, stifling his amusement as Sanji goes cross eyed trying to follow said finger as it arcs towards him, "your All Blue. Dummy."
He punctuates the last word by poking Sanji in the forehead, snickering when he sputters and swats the digit away in a huff. Then Zoro's words finally sink in, and he straightens up almost too fast. It's not endearing at all.
"Wait," he says quietly, "you count it?"
Zoro doesn't like how Sanji's looking at him with an open expression he's not usually allowed. He looks earnest and sincere. Zoro feels suddenly out of his depth.
"Don't you?" he deflects uncomfortably.
"Well yeah, but that's different. You're—" he shrugs half heartedly and looks away. Zoro can't tell if the end of that sentence was going to disparage him or the cook. Odds are likely split down the middle. Sanji keeps looking at him, and he feels pinned. The bright look is gone, replaced by something more reserved but perhaps...searching? Considering, at the least. It's making him increasingly self conscious. He needs to get out of here.
"Okay. I'm gonna steal some alcohol now," he says shortly, striding to the cabinet and swiping a bottle before Sanji blinks out of his stupor.
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For those who are confused about the situation in Artsakh (part 1)
To anyone even remotely knowledgeable about the history of the region, the azerbaijani claims that Artsakh belongs or belonged to them, or that they are the natives of the land, sound not only incorrect but also hilariously pathetic. The earliest evidence of Artsakh’s ancient history dates back to the earliest stages of the Stone Age, specifically the Acheulean and subsequent periods (800,000 to 100,000 years ago). These include stone and bone tools found in the caves of Orvan-Msoz, Tsatsakhach, and Khoradzor. Excavations of settlements and tombs from the Bronze and Iron Ages (Stepanakert, Khojaly, Karkarjan, Amaras, Madagis, and the valleys of the Khachenaget and Ishkhanaget rivers) indicate that this area was part of the Kur-Araxes cultural system formed in the 4th-3rd millennia BC. The Kur and Arax are rivers in the Armenian Highlands; Arax is even considered the “mother river” of Armenia and is referred to as “Mother” in many Armenian poems and songs.
Artsakh was the northeastern boundary of the region where the Armenian people formed ethnically. This has been mentioned many times in the works of Strabo (64 or 63 BC – c. 24 AD, a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian), Ptolemy (c. 100 - c. 170 AD, a renowned Greek geographer, astronomer, and mathematician), and many other non-Armenian geographers and historians. For over 3000 years, Artsakh has been inhabited by its natives, the Armenians.
You might ask, what do these historians write about the azerbaijanis? Well, nothing—because azeris did not exist back then and wouldn’t exist for at least the next 3000 years. How, then, could they have been the natives of the land?
Furthermore, aren’t azeris Muslim? In that case, how is it that right after Armenia adopted Christianity as its official religion—being the first nation to do so—many churches were built in Artsakh, not mosques, but churches? For example:
Gandzasar Monastery (4th century) and St. John the Baptist Church (1216-1238)
Dadivank (4th century) and Katoghike (9th-11th century)
Amaras Monastery (4th century)
St. George Church of Tzitzernavank (4th-5th century)
Gtichavank (4th-13th century)
Monastery of Apostle Yeghishe (Jrvtshtik) (5th century), Mataghis
Vankasar White Cross (5th century)
Kataro Monastery of Dizapayt and Holy Mother of God (5th century)
Mokhrenis Okht Drne Monastery (7th-17th century)
Kolatak St. Hakob Monastery (9th century)
Tsori Holy Savior (9th century)
Tsamakahogh St. Stephen (9th-10th century)
White Cross Monastery of Vank village, Hadrut (10th century)
Desert Monastery of Elisha Kusi, Chartar (12th century)
St. George Church of Jankatagh (12th century)
Khotavank (12th-13th century)
Holy Mother of God Nuns' Monastery of Karvachar (12th-13th century)
St. Savior Church of Poghosagomer (12th-13th century)
Shoshkavank Holy Mother of God of Msmena (13th century)
Horeka Monastery (13th century)
Kavakavank (14th century)
And many, many more. It pains me to tears to say that these churches, along with hundreds of others, are being destroyed by azeris to wipe out the evidence that Armenians lived there, pushing their false narrative that they are the natives of the land. Since the 2020 war, azerbaijani forces have destroyed over 570 Armenian cultural sites, with 3 to 4 monuments being demolished weekly—not to mention the desecration of both old and new Armenian graves.
So, the next time an azeri tries to argue that they are the natives of Artsakh and Armenia, just laugh at their faces. I’m sure I’ve got socks in the back of my drawer that are older than their “nation.”
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