The little boy ran through the streets and alleys of New Orleans as if the Devil was after him, and maybe a kind of devil was. He wasn't sure how he had managed to keep ahead of the older boys who were chasing him, but he had. Just goes to show how fast a small pair of legs can run when propelled by fear and adrenaline.
Hiding in a dark alley, the boy paused, heart pounding, trying desperately to catch his breath. It wasn't really working, but he kept trying anyway.
Once he collected his breath satisfactorily, he pulled his prize out of the pocket of his faded jacket. This was why the teenagers were after him: he had picked the pocket of the group leader (quite a daring move for a small boy...he was rather proud of himself for it) and stolen this gold watch, which was obviously an antique. The boy figured the teen's grandfather had probably given it to him or something.
The boy was so intent on looking at the watch, wondering how much money he'd get for it at the pawn shop, that he didn't notice the teenagers standing in the entrance of the alley, until the leader said "There he is! And he's got my watch! Now, he's gonna pay for taking it, the little mutie brat!"
Glancing frantically around and realizing he had no way to escape, the boy backed up against the end wall of the alley, trembling, his red and black eyes wide with fear. He bit his lower lip nervously as the older boys approached him. He was outsized and outnumbered...and very, very scared...
"Sure, no problem." the nineteen year old replied, glad of something to do other than rob people and be bored. He'd come a long way since his childhood on the streets. Not much scared him anymore, not even the evil-looking Sinister.
So, he assembled the Marauders for his new friend with a light-heart, completely unaware of the tragedy that would occur because of his actions.
The group waited outside the tunnels as instructed. When Sinister arrived, he told Remy his job was done, that he could go. Remy agreed, but stuck around, curious enough to want to see what Sinister was going to do with all those Marauders.
He waited until he knew Sinister wouldn't notice him, and slipped into the tunnels quickly and quietly, like the thief he was. Once inside, his eyes widened in mortification at the horrific sight before him.
The Marauders were mercilessly murdering a large group of innocent Morlocks (the hideously deformed mutants who made the tunnels their home). So that was Sinisters plan all along. Remy felt sick to his stomach as he realized his part in this massacre.
The realization hit Remy like a ton of bricks and he knew that while he couldn't stop it, he had to do something, even a small something, to help the Morlocks. He saw a young Morlock girl huddling in the shadows, obviously hoping to be overlooked. Remy picked her up and raced out of the tunnels, leaving her with the few of her kind who had managed to escape on their own.
He then got away from there as fast as his legs could carry him, a sickening feeling of self-hatred rising inside him. He would never have killed anyone unless it was absolutely necessary, and even then, he'd only do it under major protest. And he certainly would never have helped Sinister if he had known what was going to happen.
Feeling lower than the ground he was walking on, tears flowing from his red and black eyes, Remy headed out of the city...
What he couldn't get over was the extreme whiteness of where he was. Well, that and just how cold it was, but mostly the whiteness. For as far as he could see, it was white. Gambit honestly had a hard time telling where the ground left off and the sky began. It was all the same to him, especially in the wind.
It was so cold, so very bitterly cold. For Gambit, born-and-raised-in-New-Orleans, the cold was amazingly unbearable, especially given the fact that he really wasn't dressed to be there.
He pulled his trenchcoat closer around him and promptly stumbled, falling to his knees, thinking ironically that he should have went with Wolverine when the Canucklehead had gone on those vacations back to Canada in the wintertime rather than staying inside at the mansion as far away from the snowy outside world as was possible for him to get in New York state.
Shivering, he sat there for a few minutes, his strength failing him yet again. He had been there, in Antarctica, for days. He wasn't sure how many days it was, but it had been quite a few. To Gambit, it seemed like an eternity. He was hungry and weak, his body like a skeleton, with the clothes just hanging off it.
'I already was thin b'fore, but dis is pushin' it.' he thought miserably, wishing he was anywhere else. Jail would even have been better than this.
He tried to get up and keep going, but stumbled again. He just didn't have the energy anymore. He silently began to cry, and experienced the weird sensation of the tears freezing on his cold cheeks.
"Rogue..." he whispered, unable to speak any louder. Days before, he had screamed her name for hours, begging his sweetheart to come back, to not leave him there. She didn't listen, though, even when she was still in sight and could probably hear him. Once she left, she wasn't going to come back.
This--being abandoned in Antarctica by the woman he loved--was his punishment for his role in the Morlock massacre. Rogue and the rest of the X-Men had found out about it after all this time. Rogue couldn't deal with it, couldn't forgive him (even though he had pleaded endlessly at his trial that he really hadn't known any better) so she left him there to die. None of the other X-Men had tried to stop her either, not even Stormy, who was his closest and dearest friend.
"Mon Dieu..." Gambit whispered, his voice inaudible over the cold arctic winds blustering around his freezing body. "I'm sorry...so sorry...been sorry ever since it happened. Isn't dat enough?"
He fell back in the snow, lying down because he was so tired and going on just didn't seem to be an option at the moment. "I don't deserve dis, do I?" he asked the snow, despair filling his entire body with dread and self-loathing. "Do I really deserve to die...?"
His eyes closed.
Remy jolted awake, shaking, eyes wide with fear, unfocused. The sheets were in a tangle around his thin skeleton of a body. Breathing heavily, closing his eyes again, he tried to calm down, realizing tears were streaming uncontrollably down his sunken cheeks.
He opened his eyes again and miraculously, they focused. Taking in a deep breath and letting it out slowly, he realized where he was. No longer on the Antarctic tundra, he was in his room at his home in New Orleans. The person shaking him was his father, Jean-Luc, who was sitting on the bed beside him. The voice belonged to that wonderful creature of a Tante Mattie, who was seated on the other side of him.
Both older people were experienced with this kind of thing--Remy had often had nightmares regularly when he first came into their lives at the age of ten all those years ago.
Tante Mattie drew the young man into her warm, safe embrace, while Jean-Luc rubbed his sons trembling back, silently cursing the X-Men for leaving his precious son to die in a frozen wasteland.
"Remy, it's okay, you're safe. You jus' had a nightmare, dat's all." Jean-Luc said softly, as he and Mattie did their best to comfort him.
And Remy relaxed, leaning on Tante Mattie, closing his red and black eyes tightly in an attempt to stop the tears. He realized for the first time since waking that, while each part of the dream had really happened to him at various points in his life, the time in Antarctica only a very short time ago, this time, it was only a dream.