2014.06.22 - Good Old Days

The mind is made up of so many memories, many mundane (but perhaps less so, since Gambit was Emma's current subject). She sifted through all sorts of memories, but one of the few she was able to wrap her hands around was one in particular involving a particularly troubled girl. Rogue.

She had very recently acquired the powers of Ms. Marvel, and was getting used to the fact that it might be permanent. The flight and the strength were fantastic. But it was Carol's personality that was driving her bonkers.

Rogue had snuck off from the Brotherhood hideout and found herself a seemingly empty junk yard. She grabbed an empty van and tossed it towards a pile of scrap metal, looking pleased at the mess she was creating.

As memories go, this one might seem at first to be completely forgettable. There Gambit was, sitting on the back of an idling Suzuki motorcycle and talking on what passed for a smart phone five years ago. The conversation seems fairly prosaic, with a lot of 'Uh-huh's' and 'Yeah's' on Gambit's end. But it's when the conversation ends, and the sketchy Cajun flips out the sliding keyboard on his archaic phone, that things become a bit more interesting.

Tapping furiously away at the tiny little mouse-finger-sized keys on the plastic keypad, he inputs an address that he's apparently just been given, and speeds off in that direction as fast as the Japanese import will take him.

And so it is that he finds himself pulling in near the rear of the junk yard right as the commotion begins. It takes only a swift crack from his unextended staff to render the proprietor unconscious, enabling him to disable any "security" the man might have installed in a vain attempt to keep his junk from being messed with.

"This deal keeps gettin' better and better. They got me babysitting now, next thing I know they'll have me changing Magneto's depends and making sure he don't eat anything too binding."

Let the young mutant think that she's alone for now. She's clearly got an issue or two she'd like to work out.

An issue or a dozen was more like it. There wasn't any sort of Brotherhood gym, or training school that Mystique didn't like to talk about in front of Rogue. Not that Rogue had any interest in something like that. Nerds in spandex? Pass.

But she was eager for herself to stretch her limbs and possibly figure out just how much she could bench press now. Whole different ballgame. Rogue didn't catch any office building, so she felt like making a bit of a mess.

She flew up to one large pile of flattened cars, and pushed it over. What was the harm? No one seemed to be here...

As the cars come crashing noisily down and knock over a few surrounding piles of junk, two realizations dawn very suddenly on Our Protagonist. The first is that this girl is far more dangerous than his mysterious informant suggested over his G1 Motorola Droid. The second is that there is only so much trash here to fuck up, and the girl is probably going to get bored very quickly and move on to a more promising target.

So he does what comes naturally to him: he mysteriously appears somewhere that he wasn't before. Almost as if he came from nowhere, he's standing on top of yet another pile of stacked-up cars. His arms folded across the chest of his unwashed, semi-ratty coat (five years ago, apparently it hadn't started developing holes yet...), he glares through his faintly-glowing red eyes at the woman who dared to mess with 'his' junk.

"Hey there Boo! I don't see a big-ass wad of cash in those tight-ass pants of yours, so I'm going to have to politely ask you to quit fucking up my shit before I sick Ol' Rufus on you."

Her eyes glared at the man who seemingly was the owner of this pile of garbage. She flew towards him so they were on the same level. Obviously she noticed the eyes, but she was too offended to care. "Look hun, Ah didn't realize this belonged to nobody. But you best not be lookin' at my pants or anythin' in them. You don't need to be such a /sleaze/ about it."

However the idea of a dog being there was terrifying. What if she had crushed him? She tossed back her hood and rubbed at the back of her neck, "Um. Ah didn't hear any dog. So he should be...ok Ah'll just go. Shit."

"Dog? Why do you think there's a dog here?" The thick Cajun accent of the questionable junkyard owner is broken up slightly by an undertone of genuine confusion. For a second Gambit's eyebrows knit a bit closer together, as if he were legitimately trying to figure out what the young woman was talking about. But then, it seems to come to him.

"Oh... no... ha. I wasn't talking about a dog. Ol' Rufus is just what I call my..." he pauses, and apparently thinks twice about explaining himself. "... you know what? Nevermind."

Her eyes widen as she incorrectly puts together what 'Ol' Rufus' was referring too. "Yeah you better never mind that you sick pervert! Ah ought to knock yer teeth out!"

She grabbed at his ratty-ass coat and lifted him from the pile of garbage, high off the ground, "You should learn how to speak to a lady."

"Whoa there, Jailbait! If you want to get treated like a lady you probably shouldn't manhandle total strangers. Not that I mind if you wanna wrassle, of course..." The tone of his voice is so appallingly greasy that it's hard to imagine anyone not finding it instantly offensive. But the smirk on his face is clearly the more intolerable of the irritants that he's putting out into the universe at the moment.

"But maybe we just skip all that foreplay, and get right to the smoochin', no?" He even puckers up his lips and leans forward as if he expects the girl to lower him enough for him to make good on his threat. It's probably fortunate that she kept him at arm's length.

To the outside observer, it might seem that Gambit was just the oiliest sleaze bucket to ever haunt a junkyard. But as this is Gambit's memory we know that at that particular moment he was legitimately scared, and simply trying the first thing he could think of to get her to redirect her rage rather than fly away.

Rogue had the intense desire for a shower after meeting this man. In her line of business she met all sorts of undesirables regularly. But this was just unpleasant. She grinned as he made the offer, "Oh yeah, you want a kiss? You got it."

She gave him a hard kiss on the mouth, planning on making enough contact to make him go to sleep. Instead she received the truth and a bit extra. As she pulled back she rolled her eyes, "Oh you've gotta be kiddin' me!"

She flew closer down to the ground, and dropped him with a bit of a thud onto the surface, "You were watchin' me. Ah can't ever get a moment of privacy can Ah? Gambit right?"

Suddenly, like Pepe Le Pew, Gambit is seeing stars after a kiss. So bad is the disorientation that his ordinarily catlike agility fails him and he actually falls and lands on his ass. The recovery is quick, but the dignity has already been lost. "Wow. You know, maybe jail wouldn't be all that bad. Just sayin'."

He doesn't answer the question, at least not directly. Instead, he busies himself with adjusting his coat and dusting himself off now that he's back on his feet. "In all seriousness though, p'tite, you don't want to be messin' around trying to suss out my secrets. Nothing there for you but confusion and heartbreak." For once, he's not lying, as anything beyond the past several minutes is all a haze of static and random images. "But you're not the only one who can figure out something about people. For example, I know that privacy is actually the last thing you want. I could feel the frustration when you kissed me. You're like a caged animal with a bad dye job."

She moved to sit on top of a broken bus, and crossed her legs underneath her. Rogue clearly wasn't amused, "Aint like Ah even want you in my head anyway. Don't exactly got the room right now. No vacancy."

She made a face at the dye job comment. Rogue exactly didn't have the time touch up her roots, and she immediately tossed her hood back up. "Privacy is what Ah /should/ be lookin' for. Should just quit all this mess and move into a cabin in the woods. Get a couple of cats or whatever."

She looked to the side and sighed, admiring some of the damage she caused. Her voice lowered, "Anyways Ah don't see why you'd care. Unless yer some weird mutant therapist my mom hired. Which /wouldn't/ surprise me."

"Don't do it girl, cat's are the worst." He actually looks somewhat disgusted at the suggestion. Clearly not a cat person. Or at least he wasn't one five years ago. "Besides, you don't need a cabin, or cats, or a therapist." With an unassuming grace, albeit mingled with a bit of confident intrusion, Gambit swooshes his brown trenchcoat behind him and joins the girl on the side of the bus. However, he lets his legs dangle freely over the side. "You're a fucked up, angry kid. Probably think nobody gets what you're going through, that your powers are a curse. I'm also picking up on some mommy issues. But that stuff doesn't last, and you'll get past all of that as long as you've got something to look forward to."

"Which is why I promise to make you my girlfriend soon as you turn legal."

Rogue moved a bit away from him and glared. Five minutes can't go by without her being offended by something this man says, "Listen /Gambit/ don't act like you know me. Ah don't think my powers are a curse, but they fuckin' suck. And do /not/ bring up anything about my mothers."

She looked him over, any sort of attraction she would normally have over a fashionably dirty southern man was not acknowledged at the moment, "One, Ah aint datin' material. Two, you look like you haven't bathed in the last month. Goin' for the Johnny Depp look?"

She layed back onto the metal surface and rubbed at her eyes, when her hands came off of her face her irises became blue. "But yeah Ah am messed up. Ah've never permanently...absorbed someone before. Don't know what to do."

"Ouch. Comparing me to this year's Sexiest Man Alive is a real low blow..." Apparently Gambit occasionally glances at the cover of People when he's at the supermarket stocking up on Gauloises and Remy Martin. The smirk returns to his face, as he's apparently gotten all the confirmation from her that his ego requires. "Anyway... fortunately for you, your boy Gambit knows exactly what to do to make you feel better. And it don't even require waking up Ol' Rufus." He's feeling a bit more invigorated suddenly, and he drops off the edge of the bus onto the ground below. From one of the inside pockets he pulls out a seeminly-normal playing card, and charges it up with purplish kinetic energy. A quick toss, and the card is sent screaming toward a mid-eighties Honda Civic, which is instantly obliterated.

"C'mon down here, chere. We're going to smash up all this junk."

"Yeah but Ah've heard he smells in person. And don't bring up 'Ol Rufus' in front of me again, that's weird hun." But she does enjoy the idea of smashing things. Much better than talking about your problems. She would get along with the Hulk. Rogue flew down from the side of the bus and slipped off both of her gloves, "Plus Ah think Ah've still got enough of yer juice to do /this/ Step back."

She placed her hands on the side on their previous seat and it also charged up with the weird purple energy which also became obliterate. Rogue flew out of the way in time and laughed, "Gotta hand it to you 'sug, you've got yerself a pretty handy power."

"Enough of my juice? Now who's being dirty?" Another car blows up, this one a Volkswagen Rabbit. "Does your momma know you talk like that around strangers?" The bus he used to be sitting on explodes in a shower of purplish pinkish fragments.

"By the way, does your momma look like you? Because I don't know if I can wait a year or two for you to grow up..." At this point, he's got to raise his voice pretty dramatically to be heard, but he seems to think it's worth yelling to get a rise out of the woman he's been tasked with babysitting.

And there goes a Lincoln Continental.

A smile was spread across Rogue's face, that night a little bit of distraction was all she really needed, or wanted at the very least. At Gambit's now obvious attempts to rile her up, she simply flicked him off, "Yer a real piece of work, you know that? Now watch this."

She took one of the cars still standing and charged it up as well but then hoisted it in the air. She cheered and hollered as that was destroyed. With a smile still on her lips she hovered over to Gambit, "Now someone saw /that/ So Ah'm gonna scoot. Got a thing in the mornin' anyway. Be seein' you Gambit, you should take a shower or somethin'."