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sun-snatcher · 2 months

Note

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.