Onwards To Victory: The Gathering Storm

[x-gambit.livejournal.com]

Remy gets knocked out of the battle and is rescued by Storm and her team.



Remy dodged another swipe of the barbed tail, raining any debris he could get his hands on back at Moreau. But despite being the focus of optic blasts, sonic screams, electrical bursts and kinetic blasts, the creature didn't even seem to notice. He just plunged ahead, trying to overwhelm them with his myriad array of weaponry. Missiles blew out a wide chunk of exterior wall, and now the room was open to the air, three dozen stories up from the ground. Wind screamed through the hole, but was ignored by the manically grinning thing as he lay about with his spiked arms. One nearly skewered Remy, and while he missed the killing point, the backswipe caught him full across the chest and sent him flying backwards. With his leg injury, Remy's preternatural agility was badly compromised, and instead of being able to pivot in the air, the force of the blow instead carried him out of the building.

He hung for a moment in the air, and then crashed into the side of the Citadel walls. His inertia was too great to stop, as he tumbled down the sloped concrete and glass. Only a few feet ahead, the wall dropped straight away, and Remy scrabbled at the wall desperately, trying to arrest his momentum. His fingers caught the edge of a window, and stretching his tendons to the upmost, he managed to stop himself, hanging on for just a second before he lost the tenuous grip. Still, it had killed the uncontrolled fall, and he twisted and pushed against the wall. The move angled him just enough to slam into the cement floor of a wide balcony, just barely avoiding plummeting to his death. The impact winded him, and he lay with his cheek pressed against the cold floor, willing feeling back into his limbs.

"I don't fucking believe it." The glass door behind him slid open, and Remy was barely able to see the three figures in Magistrate fatigues step through.

"He must have fallen from up there." The other pointed.

"He's either the luckiest or unluckiest son of a bitch ever. Get him up." Two of them roughly pulled Remy up to his knees, black spots still swirling in his vision. "Take him to the brig?"

"You heard the Minister's orders. No prisoners. We'll do him here." The first Magistrate reached for his sidearm. Remy knew he couldn't stop it. In a minute, maybe two, but right now, his limbs felt like foreign objects and he couldn't find his feet to fight back. The gun came away from the holster just as the first few fat drops of rain landed on Remy's head. He mustered his strength and raised his face up, to look at the clouds and let the rain splash on his face in increasing volume.

"Any last words?" The Magistrate said, and Remy smiled at him, red on black eyes locking with the brown stare.

"Oui," he croaked. "Remy like to introduce you to my wife."

They had gone too far. They had taken Rachel, they had twisted Yvette and Amara and countless other innocents, they had used and abused people whose only crime was to be born with a difference in their genetic code. And now they were pointing a gun at Remy and that. Would. Not. Stand. The glass door shattered with the impact of the three bodies, their limbs flailing and jerking as lightning coursed through them, channeled through the hands of the weather witch as she touched down lightly on the balcony next to the kneeling figure.

"Come, mpenzi," she said, her gentle tone contrasting with her wildly-whipping silver hair and otherworldly eyes. "Our fight is not over yet."

"Perfect timing, chere." Remy said, leaning on her to help get to his feet. The shock of the impact was slowly bleeding away, and his breath was starting to come back. "Give me a second. Falling off a building kind of took de wind out of me." What he didn't say was that seeing her swept away the blackness that had been creeping inside his thoughts and his feelings; the fact that she was alive and relatively unharmed forced back the voice inside that whispered to let Gambit out, and show Genosha just what a monster really was. Instead, he leaned against the balcony, rubbing feeling back into his fingers and hands, and let his body recover.

"Tell me dat dis isn't de whole strike team left?"

"Happily not. Vance, please just toss me the rest of the way -- cheers." Marius rocketed into view from somewhere beyond Remy's field of vision and landed with a thump on the balcony, completely unfazed by the impact. He disliked telekinetic ferrying. Due to the nature of his powers, he found it profoundly uncomfortable to be suspended in the air only by an invisible grip on one's clothes.

"Multi-front assault," the X-Man explained as Vance appeared over the railing with Molly and Layla in tow. "With the exception of you lambs lost still within, we are largely regrouped." Marius took in Remy's bloodied thigh and generally battered appearance, and frowned. "It seems things have been eventful within the fold."

"To say de least. Thomas Moreau has been... changed. If Remy was to hazard a guess, he's been imbued wit' de powers of dose dat got made into mutates - Yvette, Sarah, de lot. He's grafted himself into dis robot body and-" Remy shook his head. "Haller hit him wit' a telekinetic blast that could have snapped a cruise ship in two, and it barely slowed him down."

Molly was feeling a little wobbly, like she was on an escalator up in the air. She couldn't tell if she liked it, but not being able to grab onto something was leaning her towards the scary side. Her eyes widened when the black-eyed man talked about some guy being turned into a monster. She knew Yvette and Callie got turned into stuff...but now....

"Cyborg robot mutant?" she said, then made a face. "Not fair."

The bad guys were monsters too. But it would be nice to beat things up.

Having actually been raised up and floated about by Vance's telekinesis before, Layla wasn't quite as disoriented as Molly. Though she was reconsidering her general non-fear of heights somewhere mid-flight. "Can't we just, like, douse him with water and short out all his cyborgy shit? I mean, like, we have a walking rainstorm," Layla said, gesturing to Ms Munroe. She couldn't help thinking that just as she got a handle on one impossible situation and came out of it fate went 'oh wait, that wasn't enough, wait until you see what else I can think up!' Fate was fucking little bratty bitch and Layla was sick of her trying to get her fucking way all the time.

Then she realized the cajun dude said something about Sarah and the questions came tumbling out of Layla's mouth in one breath. "Wait, is Sarah alive? Is she big and bad ass and fucking crazy like Yvette was? Have you seen her?"

Remy shook his head. "All of de students dat were turned into de mutates were deployed against your teams coming in. Our original plan was to subdue dem and see if dey could be changed back, but we've been out of touch since 'manda's last teleport out to get on de comms." He missed working communications gear. Their plan had been solid, but involved a lot of ifs.

Vance touched down onto the balcony at the same time as Layla and Molly, his own pink teke disappearing and retreating until only his eyes glowed a bright pink color. "We've seen some of the other teams. They came and took Penance after our little... encounter, and are looking after her." He looked tired and beaten and bloodied-- but at the same time, there was some deep down determination that kept him going. They weren't at the end of this yet, and until they were, the part of his brain that was screaming at him every little trauma and pain was locked away for safekeeping. There would be time to catalogue all the damages later. Once they had divested themselves of the monster and taken care of him once and for all.

"The process bein' reversible should we all be good little mutants was part of that introductory 'we are merciful gods' speech," Marius pointed out, for is own benefit as much as Layla's. "We got . . . Penance, an' a few others, so I expect we'll soon find out." He turned hard eyes towards Ororo and said, "Just to be clear, the veracity of this claim would have no bearing on the number of limbs we leave attached to Moreau, correct?

"I believe Mr Moreau has forfeited the right to remain attached to any limbs regardless of whether he was telling the truth regarding that particular statement," the silver-haired woman replied coldly, casting a clouded gaze over the mutants assembled on the balcony. They were all there, and she could practically feel them simmering with anger. They were as ready as they would ever be for this fight. She stepped closer to Remy for just one moment, sliding a hand into his and taking strength from the feel of his skin against hers. Thus heartened, she let a peal of thunder roll out across the sky, feeling it resonate deep within her bones. It spoke better than any words could.

Let's go get the bastard.