Chapter Text
As Gambit leaps from the mansion’s roof into the hovering helicopter, he has time to think two things: one, that it is a good thing he had his boots resoled recently, and two, that he hopes someone is watching, because he’s going to need a ride home later.
The pilot and co-pilot are just turning when Gambit flicks barely-charged cards at them. They flinch away from the little flares, leaving Gambit room to lunge in and steer the helicopter away from the mansion. He hit’s the throttle, opens it up wide. He counts down from thirty, knowing he has to buy enough time for the mansion’s new air defenses to come on line.
The pilot reaches for something, and Gambit back hands him, hard.
Then there’s a pistol pressing under Gambit’s ear….and 3, 2, 1. Gambit takes his hands from the controls and straightens up. Turns around at the terse command of the man behind him.
The mocking smile on Gambit’s face freezes.
The maze of scars on his forearms twist in his skin.
“Welcome back, Mr. Le Beau,” Stryker says.
For only the second time in his life, Gambit prays for rescue.
Logan shoves the med pack into his shirt, adds the canteen to his belt. Wraps the pack in a waterproof bag and stashes it under a dead tree, one of several in this old growth hollow somewhere in the Canadian Rockies.
His head lifts into the wind. His nostrils flare. He smells metal, and men, and insanity - there, two points to the north.He sights on that peak and then another, crouches down to pinch up some dirt and get its scent. Memorizes that configuration of trees and the way the ground rises to the east, and dips to the south.
Logan takes a deep breath. Gambit needs him.
He lets the animal rise.
The Wolverine takes up the hunt. He paces through the forest with the tireless lope of the hunting beast, his senses crackling with shapes, sounds, scents, the flow of the air and the slap of a leaf. His thoughts eddy, swirl, lose words to instinct, with action a mere nerve‘s speed away.
The ground rises into another mountain, and Wolverine surefoots over boulders. The mountain’s shoulder falls away into a crack and he works his way down the gorge on a goat trail, somehow balancing his great weight on the inches wide track over a sheer fall. He feels no fear, no thought of consequences beyond delay that cannot be tolerated.
Wolverine homes on Gambit. How, he cannot say. But he knows: there is his friend, and his friend is in trouble.
The beasts of the forest fade away from him. Deer melt into shadows. Moose amble through underbrush and take no notice of the thorns, their slow footfalls a bare echo of their passage. His smaller brother, a four footed wolverine, regards him from the hollow of a fallen tree, unafraid, ready to fight if challenged.
Wolverine registers the creatures of the forest, and passes on. His heart beats steady, breaths a perfect rhythm. His energy is a great well that cannot be emptied. He is saving himself for the kill.
Pre-dawn light finds Wolverine working his way down progressively more tumbled fields of huge rocks where some long melted glacier had once held sway. There’s a scruffy bit of evergreens at the bottom of the slope and then another broken shoulder of mountain to climb, the back side of the secret base Stryker has taken Gambit to. He pauses in the narrow band of trees to consider possibilities for cover on the mountain.
A greater shadow among the trees, not 20 feet off, resolves itself, a great hulk becoming clear as the light brightens. A full grown male grizzly raises his massive head, regards Wolverine.
The two top predators hold each other’s gaze. Wolverine cannot go around. He cannot wait.
Wolverine will not give way. He stares the grizzly down.
The grizzly shakes its head and paces off.
Wolverine slips into the secret base - this one is new to him - under cover of the full light of morning, when no one will expect an invasion.
He takes down the two guards on the door before they can stop being surprised and leaves them bleeding out on the metal floor.
The place smells of stone dust, burtn metal, fear sweat. Wolverine moves slowly, teasing Gambit’s gunpowder scent from nondescript human, other mutants, who always smell somehow brighter, the tell tale tags of chemicals, the tang of surgical instruments.
His nostrils flare: Stryker. But it’s an older scent, and Wolverine forces rage aside. His friend comes first. He draws two full lungs of air, half closes his eyes. There: he needs to head north-east.
Most of the rooms here are abandoned: cells, open and empty; a barracks room with bare cots; labs, dusty and dry. He works his way inward, counts off maybe a dozen different beings in the place, all the while following Gambit’s scent, which dissolves and reappears, flares and melts away, hangs in the air like smoke and dissipates like there‘s been a storm.
Wolverine finds a vacant cell awash in Gambit-smell. He ranges back and forth across the corridor, quartering. Gambit has been taken elsewhere. Has gone elsewhere. Which way?
A stronger trace of gunpowder tickles his nose and Wolverine lopes down halls and access corridors, claws ready, tracking Gambit’s scent-trail.
Half a level down, Wolverine runs his target down in a tangle of machine rooms.
Gambit rises from his crouch by something all metal and blinking lights. He holds half a dozen shards of metal at the ready. He’s got a black eye, a bruised jaw, lines of dried blood criss crossing his chest, arms, and hands.
He smells of sweat and adrenaline - and fear, though Wolverine can’t place that scent at first, it’s so foreign to this man - but Gambit’s eyes are fierce under the tangled hair.
“Logan?”
Wolverine shakes his head. That’s him, isn’t it? He shakes himself all over, runs his tongue over lips gone dry. “I - yeah,” Wolverine says.
“Merde, I almost killed you,” Gambit says.
“We gotta go,” Wolverine says.
Gambit shakes his head. “Not yet. Watch the door.”
Wolverine takes up station just inside the doorway and extends his senses. Nothing, so far.
Behind him, metal scrapes metal and buttons click.
“Alright,” Gambit says. “Let’s go. We got about half an hour lead time. Maybe.”
Wolverine looks Gambit over. He’s not in top shape, looks overall like he’s been run too hard. Still, he’s ready, he’s game, and that’s all Wolverine requires. He takes point and Gambit follows at his shoulder.
They step over the bodies of the dead guards, skirting the still liquid blood on the floor, and walk casually down the mountainside. Fast movement draws attention, and Wolverine wants to conserve his companion’s strength. They pass the grizzly wood at a decent pace before the first patrol emerges from the mountain.
Wolverine draws Gambit into a narrow cleft between two massive boulders to watch their hunters. He pulls the canteen off his belt and offers it to Gambit, who takes two swallows and passes it back. Wolverine draws a mouthful of water and lets it trickle down his throat. There’s nothing they can do until this patrol sweeps past.
The two soldiers pass within twenty feet of Wolverine and Gambit’s shelter. Without thinking, Wolverine
moves to stalk them down.
“Non, Logan, this way,” Gambit says. “Come on, homme, we got a ways to go, and me, I’m not so strong on my feet.”
Wolverine steadies Gambit with a hand on his belt, an arm around his waist, whatever he needs to get through the rocks. He would carry him, if they had more cover. But here they’re too exposed, and Wolverine needs his claws free.
It’s good to have a packmate again, Wolverine thinks. His companion is not as good in the woods as Wolverine is, but he doesn’t get in Wolverine’s way and he can soft foot across a graveled slope like the lightest fox.
Wolverine can still smell blood on the man following him, but that’s not a skill the humans will have. The enemy will have other things, seeing things and air things, and so they have to get under cover of trees.
And then they are away into the woods.
Armed men explode out of shabby frontier buildings when Gambit and Wolverine step out into the bush town’s single street. Wolverine strikes the first before he can get his gun up from ready position, claws shearing through the barrel of the automatic weapon and down through the man’s shoulder. The soldier screams as he falls, big shoulder artery severed and pumping liquid life down his camo uniform.
Wolverine spins away, not hampered at all by the pack he‘d retrieved from the woods.
Gambit puts the second man down with a handful of flashing cards, gritting his teeth at the grind of pain through his arms. He grabs the soldier’s gun out of the air and finishes him with a burst to the head.
A third and fourth man charge. Then there’s a squad moving to surround them and Gambit feels the red rage rising, the rage-fear at being trapped and returned to his cage.
He casts more cards at the soldiers. His arms throb. Several go down, but it’s not enough.
Wolverine rushes the line and a hailstorm of bullets strike him, lodge under muscle, tries to make a bloody mess of his knees, but the injuries only fuel Wolverine’s near-berserker rage. His healing factor and the adamantium clothing his bones are just bonuses.
They must finish this, Gambit knows, or the helicopter that’s been stalking them for the last hour will descend.
Fuck. Too late. The hovering craft sweeps over them with search light blazing, less to show them up - they
have night vision for that - than to dazzle the eyes of their prey.
Wolverine coming for Gambit just doubled their prize value.
Gambit takes to the bed of Wolverine’s pick up, stashed here when he came on the rescue mission. He hopes his timing hasn’t deserted him, and ignores the pain of his ribs, his head, the sick feeling in his throat, the cold burning in his arms. He throws himself off the top of the pick up and seizes hold of the landing gear of the helicopter.
The aircraft wobbles.
Gambit knows any hesitation will be fatal. Will have to be, because Gambit will die in pure screaming agony before he lets Stryker lay a hand on him again. Gambit hauls himself up and throws himself into the copter, survival knife in one hand, and nothing but fury in the other.
The co-pilot scrabbles for a handgun, gets it up in time to squeeze the trigger. The survival knife spears him through the throat and his hand slackens.
With raw adrenaline keeping him on his feet, Gambit yanks the blade loose and reaches for the controls, but the pilot, frozen, won’t move his hands.
“I’ll take you anywhere you want, man,” the pilot says. “Just give the word.”
“Fuck. You.” Gambit drives the knife into the pilot’s eye.
The copter yaws as the pilot dies over the controls but Gambit is there, Gambit knows this machine. He crowds himself around the dead pilot and brings her steady, sets her down in the middle of the dirt street.
With a distaste that brings gorge to up his throat, Gambit hauls the bodies out of the copter and drops them clear of the bird.
Wolverine stands yards away, gun held in expert hand, a feral glint in one eye. The street looks like a killing field. He’s covered in blood and looks like he’s about to take off for the woods. The copter has phased him, set him further back into wild, cautious ways.
“Logan,” Gambit calls, “let’s go.”
Wolverine hesitates, looks over his shoulder. Gambit could swear he twitches an ear.
“Logan. Now,” Gambit says, putting a whip crack in the command.
With a shake of his head, Wolverine jogs over to the copter, and jumps in.
“I’ll try to keep her level and true, old man,” Gambit says. When he sits down at the controls, his hands are trembling.
Wolverine stares out the window, watching their back trail. He reaches over and puts one strong hand on Gambit’s, stilling his fingers on the stick.
Gambit rolls his shoulders and takes the bird up, Wolverine’s hand steady on his own.