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The storm still rages outside when Ororo closes the door to her room, an envelope left on her bed. She’s taken what little she needed - what little didn’t feel like wearing someone else’s skin when your own was torn away from your body - and wrote a note. Speaking would… Would hurt too much. Explaining what can’t be explained. Only understood. And of course, all of them had left somewhere before, but leaving this, leaving the family they have built over the years, leaving everything that feels like home… It’s its own torture.
Jean knows. Jean would understand. And help others do the same.
Ororo turns around slowly, and flinches as the lightning and thunder come without warning, shaking the glass of the windows and bathing the hallway in a quick flash of light. It makes shadows seem sharp. It makes lines cut like knives.
It makes eyes watching her glow with sinister, frightening crimson.
For half a moment, Ororo is stunned by terror, however quickly it fades.
“Bad weather for goin’ out, chère.”
His voice is quiet, rumbling, charm curling in the air as he speaks. But under it, there’s something else. Something tired. Something resigned. Something that reminds Ororo of a desperate, lonely young man he was when she first brought him to this house.
The guilt pangs on her from the inside. Because the way he looks at her - that quiet resignation that should never be seen in the eyes of a gambler - tells her about a man who was so used to losing things, he never really let himself have.
Ororo takes a breath, relaxing her shoulders, holding his gaze. He is still, which is her first clue to how serious this is.
“Gambit,” she says and for a moment the glow of his eyes dims as he blinks, a silent recognition. “You cannot stop me. No words can. Even yours.”
He shrugs nonchalantly, stays where he is.
“Ain’t never been able to charm my way with you,” Gambit’s voice echoes through the hallway, the sound of the rain weaving through his accent. “Doubt I’ll start now.”
And the way he says it - no demand, no fear, no accusation… Just the weight of her decision that presses on her shoulders more. Ororo closes her eyes, her skin crawling. There’s a hole in her where her powers used to be. She wanted to leave quietly, disappear as a shadow at dawn, like she once could, when staying in the dark was a means of survival, when being quiet meant breathing for another day.
Of course, it had to be the other thief to catch her.
“I cannot stay, Remy,” she says. Waits for him to ask why but it doesn’t come. So Ororo just looks up at him again. Gambit simply watches her, completely silent. Ororo takes a deeper breath and pushes out the truth, words scraping raw at her throat, heart shuddering in her chest.
“I can’t be an X-men. I am no mutant.”
He tilts his head.
"Ain't never cared 'bout dat, Stormy."
She furrows her brows, just slightly. The sound of this ridiculous nickname, like an echo of a life already lost, like a flicker of a dead star, makes her lips twitch in a small, rueful smile.
"This isn't my name, Remy," Ororo tells him for a hundredth time, her voice brittle. Then, quieter, adds. "Not anymore."
He doesn't hesitate. Just pushes off the wall and comes closer, his arms still crossed over his chest, like guarding something behind his ribs.
"Ain't never cared 'bout dat neither."
His duster rustles in the quiet of the hallway, thunder rolling in softer than before.
Gambit stops in front of Ororo, holds her gaze.
“Ain’t gonna stop you, Stormy,” he says, bowing his head slightly. “Even if I think it shouldn’t be you leavin’.”
Ororo sighs quietly, searching his face, seeing the flicker of anger and hurt in his red eyes. The latter lingers when he looks at her again, just softens a bit, pain turning into ache. And he looks so used to it, like seeing someone close to him leave is something he’s seen time and time again, and Ororo’s heart breaks for him.
“You goin’ through somethin’ awful, je sais,” Remy tells her. “But you once told dis ol’ Cajun he always gonna have a home here. Don’t think dat ain’t apply to you. ‘Cause it do. Dis place, these people, they gonna want you more than you ever cared t’think. No matter how, no matter when.”
Ororo feels her eyes burning. And Gambit, that foolish man, just smiles.
“And me? Gambit gonna be here when you come back, chère. Greet you with a pot’a gumbo and a game’a pool. Maybe take you on a little heist. Like ol’ times.”
And she laughs in spite of herself because it’s impossible not to when he’s grinning like that.
It’s still hard. It still hurts. She still notices the tiniest cracks in his mask he keeps on for her sake.
“Take care, Gambit.”
The thunder rolls a final time as Ororo turns around and leaves him standing alone in the hallway, arms still over his chest, eyes glimmering with things she couldn’t decipher if she tried. He watches her, a thief seeing off his brethren, until the shadows engulf him completely.
Storm opens her eyes, looking up at the sky.
Gambit gonna be here when you come back, chère.
The rain keeps falling, cold water running down her cheeks when her tears have run dry but her pain hasn’t.
“Liar,” she whispers in a low, mournful voice. “You liar, Remy LeBeau.”
It breaks her ribs from the inside, and the clouds get heavier with her sorrow, darker, lower. No tempest, no raging winds or thunder. Just that quiet pain that lives in her chest, breathes with his lungs, and presses, presses until she can’t breathe.
And she can’t help but think…
If he never followed her, would he be better? Would he be happier? Would he be alive?
Was it worth it, bringing him into the light when he spent his whole life in the shadows? Was it worth it, seeing him smile and be at peace, watching him grow and learn and atone for sins he never should’ve carried at all?
Was it worth it, letting him die a hero?
She doesn’t know. All she knows is that he is gone now. And she wasn’t there to help him.
“Ororo…”
Forge sounds concerned as he walks out of the little house they shared for a while now. His own heart aches at seeing her pain, she knows it. She can even be grateful for it. But it won’t make hurting stop.
"My brother died today, Forge," Ororo says, quiet and final. There is no thunder, no lightning. Just the rustle of the rain and grief that sets deep into her very bones.
They have seen it, the broadcast. The blinding flash of magenta caught by the witnesses. The stories of survivors about a man in a torn white suit, his dark eyes a guiding light for those he saved. The way people got quiet when they spoke of a woman holding a broken, bloodied body, begging for him to live.
Ororo takes a long breath and the world around her breathes in too. The wind curls around, toppling water droplets and whipping her hair around, but Storm doesn’t care. She settles in, pain and grief still sinking its teeth into her bones even as her eyes, her posture, her whole form exuding calm.
“I have to go back,” she tells him, not expecting a fight or an argument. It’s merely a fact. Forge nods back to her.
“I’m going with you,” he answers. “Right now?”
Storm looks up at the sky again. It’s still dark, still heavy. She can still feel water dropping down, churning in the belly of the beast above their heads. But her grief doesn’t have to be this way. He wouldn't want it to be this way. He wouldn't want to be remembered like this.
“No,” she says. “Tonight, we honor the man I knew. We sing his name to the skies and dance to the music of his people.”
The man, whose eyes were dark and his smile bright.
The man who was a thief and a hero.
The man who loved as he lived - fiercely, recklessly, unapologetically.
The man who was her brother in more than arms.
So Ororo raises her head and sings.