Luck
Pairing: Gambit x Male!Reader
Requested: Yes
Original Request: So tumblr ate the original ask ages ago but it was along the lines of “Tatum!Gambit with childhood friend!reader finding him again in the void”
Warnings: Implied traumatic childhood/parental abuse/neglect (not graphic), brief mentions of a fatal car accident (not graphic)
-----
It’s been a shit day. It started normally enough with your alarm failing to go off and making you late to your miserable day job. Unfortunately today was your boss’ last straw and she fired you.
You ended up at a shitty hole in the wall dive bar, intent on drinking away the strain, only for your evening plans to be interrupted by some asshole who called himself Deadpool kidnapping you and some guy he said was called Wolverine, and dragging the two of you off to some weird interdimensional office building. Somehow he managed to piss off the guy in charge in all of about thirty seconds and got the lot of you dumped in the TVA’s desert scrapyard dimension.
You’re briefly captured by Charles Xavier’s twin sister (which, weird as hell) and then your mismatched little trio finds yourselves in the cave hideout of the so-called rebellion. You meet Blade and Elektra and X-23 (aka Laura) and as you’re staring out over the desert there’s a crash of breaking glass behind you.
Reflexively you turn, and you’re greeted by the sight of Wolverine surrounded by shards of glass, the neck of a whiskey bottle still clutched in his hand. A familiar purple mist is still dissipating.
It looks like - a traitorous part of your mind whispers, and you have to force yourself to remember that it’s not possible. That he’s dead, so it couldn’t possibly be him.
“Didn’t you ever hear it’s rude not to ask before touchin’ another man’s liquor?” the voice is soft and honey-smooth, vowels drawn out and consonants softened by the achingly familiar accent. You know it’s him without even turning around.
“And who is this succulent reminder of my own inadequacies?” Deadpool asks and you can’t even bring yourself to be annoyed by him because you’re so thrown off by-
“Remy?” The word is out of your mouth before you can stop it. You cringe as the room goes silent and you can feel everyone looking at you. It takes a moment to gather your strength, but eventually you turn to face him.
It’s a strange sort of deja vu - Remy simultaneously looks just as you’d known him and like a complete stranger. He’s got the same dark hair and green eyes, the same tiny scars across his hands from before he’d gotten so good with his cards, but he’s taller now than when you knew him, the scrawny kid you’d played with as boys replaced by the muscles and height of adulthood. He’s got a confidence to him that your Remy never did.
“You’ve got me at a disadvantage, cher,” not-your-Remy says, crossing his arms over his chest. “You know ol’ Gambit’s name and he don’t know yours.”
You don’t know what to say - how to begin to explain all the history. The years as kids splashing through creeks and wrestling and chasing frogs. The whatever-you-were-becoming as you grew out of being boys and started growing into becoming men. The devastation of losing him.
“I-” your voice dies in your throat, a choked, aborted sound. “It doesn’t matter,” you manage, turning on your heel and pushing past Wade to get outside, intent on getting as much space between you and the others as possible.
“Wow,” you hear Deadpool say as you dismiss yourself. “That was more dramatic than a telenovela!”
-----
It doesn’t take him long to find you, only thirty minutes or so since you’d settled down at the bank of a stream you’d happened to stumble across. You don’t even look up as he sits down beside you, letting the silence stretch.
He breaks it eventually.
“You wanna tell me what all that was about?” It’s not judgmental, the way he says it, just curious - open in a way you hadn’t expected.
“Not really,” you say back, but you press on anyway. “I knew my universe’s version of you. We grew up together, best friends since diapers. We discovered our powers together, and it didn’t matter what our parents or the other kids at school thought, because we had each other.”
He tips his head to the side, curious, and you’re reminded again of your Remy.
“You said ‘was’,” he shifts and the side of his thigh knocks against yours. “Did something happen?”
You swallow, trying to force the words out before you can’t anymore. “One day, Remy didn’t show up to school. I figured it was no big deal, he was probably just ditching, so I went to our spot after school and he wasn’t there. I think ‘okay, maybe he’s sick,’ so I go to his house. His mom answered the door and I could tell she’d been crying.” You take a breath, scrub your hand across your eyes, and press on. “My Remy was hit by a car that morning. Killed by a drunk driver. EMTs got there fast but there was nothing they could do.” You huff out a laugh and it’s a bitter, spiteful thing. “I’ve been alone ever since.”
A breath escapes him and you can’t fault him for not knowing what to say - it must be strange to think about your own death, even if it was a parallel universe’s version.
“He was lucky,” Remy says, and he must realize how cruel that sounds because he rushes to continue before you can say anything. “To be able to go to school, have parents who cared - at least a mom who did - and you-” he cuts himself off, studying you intently, “You loved him, didn’t you?”
You can’t deny it, so you don’t bother to try. “I always will.”
He nods again, and the slight smile that crosses his lips is soft and fond. “Yeah,” he says, “Lucky.”
Silence stretches between you again until a thought seems to strike him. “Oh!” he exclaims, reaching over to shove your shoulder playfully. “You gotta hear the wild-ass idea those couyons dreamed up on getting your boys back home!”
-----
A wild idea is right, you find yourself thinking as the lot of you pile out of the beaten up minivan and charge into battle against Cassandra Nova and her goons. Wade and Logan break off, heading into the base to face Cassandra, while the rest of you take on the hoard.
Elektra and Blade are handling themselves as well as you’d anticipated, each holding their own against nearly a dozen opponents, and Laura seems to be having the time of her life, using her own Wolverine-like claws to shred her adversaries as she battled her way toward Juggernaut. Remy - Gambit, he’d told you - is holding his own as well, charging and throwing cards with an exuberant grin.
And you - well, you’re doing your best. You meet each blow you take with gritted teeth and determination, returning the attacks with a pair of daggers you’d swiped off a corpse since your powers require too much energy to use consistently throughout a long fight.
You hear the crunch of glass under a heavy boot and find yourself face-to-sharp-metal-claws with some strange big cat mutant and you know you won’t be able to block the hit in time. The mutant swings and you flinch, eyes closing reflexively - when they open, the mutant is gone and you catch sight of Remy through the fading violet haze. His hand is still outstretched from the card he’d thrown to save you.
He grins when you catch his eye, a boyish little quirk of his lips that reminds you too much of your first love - your Remy. “You owe me one,” he teases, smile spreading when he sees you laugh.
“Yeah, whatever,” you grin back, moving to turn back to the fight but you freeze as you notice movement on the horizon, a massive figure coalescing from cloud and smoke and barreling toward the altercation. Lightning crackles through the monster as it roars, the sound somewhere between thunder and a scream.
Panic floods the crowd as they recognize the behemoth bearing down on you. Some start to flee and others remain frozen, knowing there are only seconds before Alioth devours everything in its path.
Your mind races, churning through possibilities until you’re interrupted by hands on your face and Remy towing you down until he can press his lips to yours. He kisses you fiercely, lips and teeth and tongue and hands grasping desperately at you and your blood feels like it's on fire.
Alioth’s howling echoes in your head, rattles through your bones like thunder as it approaches and the familiar heat of your powers flood your nerves, you clutch Remy tight to you, fingers digging into the rough fabric of his coat. I won’t lose him again, you vow to yourself, kissing him back with just as much ferocity.
In the split second before Alioth descends, you let your powers flood through you, electricity sparking through every nerve ending, rewriting your atoms and tracking over your connection to Remy to unmake him too. You don’t fight your abilities, don’t try to direct or control the energy in any direction except away.
Eventually - minutes or hours or days, it’s hard to tell - the two of you reform, atoms and molecules and cells piecing back together to leave you scrambling to your feet in a marshy field of long green grass with Remy beside you.
He blinks up at you, something between awe and confusion in his eyes, “Where are we?” he asks, pushing himself upright.
“I don’t know,” you say, studying your surroundings. “Not in the Void anymore, at least.” The sky is too bright, the colors too vibrant, for you to still be there.
Remy blinks, looking around with greater interest. “I didn’t know you could jump timelines.”
“I didn’t either,” you reply, attempting to use the sun’s position to orient yourself, “But sometimes atoms do what they want.” You force yourself to grin even though you’re more than a little uneasy. “We should get moving.”
Remy hums and catches your hand to lace his fingers with yours. “I was right,” he tells you, keeping pace as you start heading North. “Any version of me is lucky to know you.”
And yeah, you feel pretty lucky too.