Title: Better Than Before

Characters: X-23, Gambit, Jubilee, Wolverine

Summary: Laura has memories of her own, but few she wants to share.

Warnings: self-harm, implied non-con (m/m)

A/N: This story takes place after the "Collision" story arc (the Daken issues) and during the "Touching Darkness" story arc (the Jubilee issues). Special thanks to mozzarellaroses for a wonderful beta job.

Better Than Before

1.

In a few minutes, they'll already be talking about the past. Gambit will cast a slant-eyed glance at Logan and take the salt shaker from next to his plate, wink once at Jubilee, and then hint, artfully, at the memories they share. Do you remember when . . . ? He'll grin, and Logan will pretend to be uninterested. The time Scott got lost in Buffalo. The time Hank was on Montel. He'll pull a smile from Logan yet. This ritual has already begun.

Laura realizes that this is Gambit's role. He is the keeper of long-cherished memories, a dutiful record-keeper of funny things. Perhaps he has always had this purpose. Perhaps this is why he has returned so many times to the X-Men, and why they have always taken him back.

"Did I ever tell you girls, did I ever tell you girls . . .?" Gambit leans forward and takes a piece of bread from the basket. Gives them his best indulgent-mother smile. "Did I ever tell you girls about when Logan and I quit smoking together?"

"You don't have to tell me," Jubilee says. "I remember. You were impossible to live with."

"We didn't quit together, LeBeau." Logan leans his back against the upright wooden booth. "I quit. You couldn't. End of."

"Ah," Gambit says. "Wasn't quite so simple." He shifts his gaze to Laura and raises an eyebrow.

Laura knows that she's supposed to lean in, ask "what?" She's the one he's doing this for. She has none of these memories. The things that Gambit and Logan talk about when they're together—the good times, the old days—they all happened before she was around.

"Well," Gambit says, ignoring the fact that Laura hasn't asked him to go on, "get this. Apparently an ordinary nicotine fiend has no business bettin' a dude with a healing factor that he can quit smoking first."

"You must have gone on the patch twenty times," Logan acknowledges.

"And those things were fuckin' expensive."

"You cheated constantly. No willpower, Gumbo. Absolutely none."

"You," Gambit says, looking up, "were a lousy sponsor."

"We made a bet. It was a competition, not a twelve-step program."

Gambit raises both hands and looks at Laura and Jubilee. "You believe this guy? Where I come from, you help your buddy when he falls off the wagon. You don't take his money an' laugh as he pukes through the withdrawal."

Logan's laughing, but Jubilee just smiles. Laura remembers that she's supposed to react and also smiles. But she's keyed into Jubilee, who seems more distracted than she is.

And then they are reminiscing again, and Laura has already tuned out. And then when Kitty said . . . Remember when Jean . . .

Laura is her own record keeper. She has memories of her own, but none that she wants to share. Right now she knows only her most recent memory: two hours ago with Jubilee on the sidewalk, Jubilee against her neck, Jubilee clutching her shoulders and gripping her back. And the unexpected tirade that tumbled from her mouth afterwards: I worked hard to be normal . . . couldn't accept the fact that I'd changed . . . It was all so strange, Laura thinks. But not really. Humanity always rears its head at the most inconvenient times.

Paris is a place she could do without. It isn't that she's unimpressed. Or difficult to please. She admits that it's beautiful and different, that its low cityscape and winding medieval streets are things that everyone should experience at some time or another. But she preferred Madripoor, tropical and chaotic, a brand-new city built on an old slab of volcanic rock. And she misses the food. But she can't tell this to Gambit, who confessed to her that he hopes never to set food on Madripoorian soil again.

Back at the hotel, Laura slips into the bathroom before anyone else and takes off her jacket. She inspects her neck for traces of blood (doesn't need Gambit asking any more questions) and runs the water so she can wash her face. When she's finished, she turns the faucet and the light off and turns the doorknob gingerly before pushing open the door.

"Jesus, X," Jubilee gasps. She's standing on the other side of the door, her hand on the doorknob. "I didn't know you were in there. Try making some noise next time, okay? I'm the goddamn vampire, but you're the one who should wear a bell around your neck."

Laura stares for a moment. Nods. "Okay."

"No, I was just joking," Jubilee says. She smiles. "It's something people say. You're really stealthy. That's all I meant."

Jubilee is carrying a towel along with some shampoo and lotion. She catches X looking and holds up the bottle. "Appletini shampoo. Smell?" She pops open the cap. "I'll leave it in the bathroom for you to use tomorrow."

Laura takes the bottle and sniffs. So that is the fragrance she smelled before when Jubilee's hair was pressed against her face. Laura has never used specially scented shampoos, not even when they were popular among the girls at Utopia. She always washes her hair with whatever is cheapest.

She closes the cap and hands the bottle back to Jubilee.

Jubilee smiles broadly for a moment, and Laura thinks she's about to say something—and then she realizes that Jubilee just wants to get into the bathroom. It's an awkward moment that X brings to an abrupt end by stepping aside.

"Sweet dreams, Laura. Can't wait for what we're going to do tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"Shopping," Jubilee says, closing the door just enough to still be poking her head out. "I cleared it with Remy and it's a total go. We're hitting the shopping district, no matter what Logan says." She gives a thumbs-up before closing the door completely.

Laura wanders back into the bedroom to find Logan already there. He's setting up a makeshift bed in the corner and Laura knows, with a brief sense of disappointment, that this is the way things are going to be now. When she was traveling with Gambit, they lived side by side; they shared their things and were hardly apart, and this was the first time—she was certain of this—that someone was close to her because he wanted to be. But then she cut Gambit and she cut herself and proved that she couldn't be trusted to share small quarters with someone so vulnerable. Now Logan is here to monitor her. With Logan, she can't run away or sneak off to hurt herself.

"There you are," Logan says. He fluffs his pillow and sits down on the bed.

She clears her throat and sits on the bigger bed, then bends over to unbuckle her boots. There's a conversation she needs to have with Logan—about Madripoor, about Daken, about the things that happened at Utopia before she left.

But she doesn't want to have it now. She half expected him to bring it up during their first conversation on the roof—So I hear you met Daken. But he didn't. And hasn't.

"Don't you wanna get changed?" Logan says.

She glances down at her pants and top. "I will take off my things when I get into bed. I have no—" She realizes all too late that she has admitted something abnormal for someone her age: she likes to sleep nude.

She waits for Logan's censure. Instead he smirks. "You like to travel light, huh? Can't say I blame you. Never liked to bring a bunch of shit along myself. Clothes weigh you down." He leans back onto the bed. "Well, just go ahead and do your thing. I'm so tired I'm gonna be out when my head hits the pillow."

"Alright, Logan."

"Missed you, kid," he says suddenly. He scratches the back of his neck.

She smiles weakly. She missed Logan too, but she doesn't want to talk about it right now.

She moves away from the bed and steps toward the door. Logan turns his head and looks at her.

"I'm thirsty," she explains.

From the kitchen she sees that Gambit has bedded down on the sofa in the main room. He's sprawled out there, his hand around the remote, flipping through the stations. He glances up at her and grins, his face half-lit by the TV screen. He shifts into a sitting position, careful to keep his bandaged arm elevated above his heart. "Hey petite. You happy to see Logan?"

She brings the glass of water to her lips and nods.

"Yeah, thought you'd be. Looks great, don't he? A lot better than the last time we saw him."

She sets the glass down. "He does."

"Listen," Gambit says, arching his back so that he's looking at her. "He's glad to be here with you. Told me himself. Big old load off his mind to know you're okay. He may not always show it, but you're first an' foremost."

As he talks, Laura watches and listens. Gambit's eyes are fixed on hers, steady and unblinking. The words he speaks are about one thing, but he's talking about another—it's why he's projecting confidence while hedging, just slightly. He's saying Logan feels this way but what he really means is don't tell Logan what happened.

She wonders why it's okay—so perfectly reasonable and normal—for Gambit to have secrets from Logan, from everybody, while her life is always on display. But she will keep his secrets. She won't tell Logan about what Gambit did—that he went to Daken for her, that he made a deal.

Jubilee pads into the room and the spell is broken. "Remy," she says, "have you seen my slippers? You took them, didn't you?"

He stoops over and retrieves two slippers from underneath the coffee table. "You got big feet, but not big enough for me to wear your slippers, petite."

Jubilee shuffles into her slippers and tells him that he needs to change the channel to something not so horribly dubbed. Laura leaves the room, certain that no one's seen her slip away, until Jubilee calls out "Goodnight, Laura," and leaves it at that.

Humanity reared its head at the most inconvenient times, but if you went looking for it, you found it. Same thing could be said for Daken. He wasn't someone you wanted to follow, but if you needed to catch him, you would. And then you would wish you'd never found him at all.

She hated to admit this, but Gambit had been right. When they were looking for Daken, laying over in Singapore and making arrangements to get to Madripoor, Gambit pulled her aside. "This is no good," he told her once, his voice low and quiet. They were outside a noisy restaurant and it was dark. "Bein' half in and half out like this? This way will get you killed. It won't lead you to where you want to go, anyway. Take it from me, Laura."

She wasn't swayed. She needed to stop Colcord.

"You want to be good?" he said. "Then just be good. Let's go home. Back to San Francisco."

She couldn't. If she didn't kill Colcord, then who would? She told Gambit as much. She told him she didn't have a choice.

"You always have a choice," he said. "Walk away from this. Know that you can't stop every bad person with a hard-on for mutant DNA from fucking up the universe. If it ain't Colcord, it'll be somebody else."

"But right now it is Colcord. And I know how to find him." In that warm alley, on that spring night, she made the choice that would take them both into a situation from which they'd have to extract themselves.

"Dieu," he whispered. He ran his fingers through his hair. "Okay. Okay. Sit tight. I'll call in some favors."

"You do not have to come with me if this makes you uncomfortable."

In the dark, he leveled his gaze. "I'm not leaving you." And then, the words that would seal them forever: "I'm never letting you go."

The night before they reached Madripoor, Gambit got sick. He had eaten something, something bad—probably the crabmeat salad. She'd eaten it too, but she had not gotten sick. "My healing factor assimilates toxins," she explained, and from his cot he groaned, "Not fair."

"You should have known better," she told him. "You have traveled internationally many times before. You should know that certain foods carry a higher index of microbial anomalies."

He groaned again.

They were docked on a small island off the coast of Madripoor and Laura wondered—she couldn't help but wonder—if he had done this to himself deliberately. Just so that they would miss their window to catch Daken and Colcord. Certainly he should have known not to eat crabmeat!

But then when she saw him, pale and sweating and struggling to get to the bathroom in time, she understood that her suspicions were unfair and ungrateful. He was very sick. Worse, he was scared.

"You will be fine," she reassured him. "It is just food poisoning."

"Folks have died of less, petite." His nose was running.

"You are not going to die."

"If you say so."

She pulled her hair back from her face and sniffed once. "I know this sickness. You are strong and it will pass."

He closed his eyes and relaxed. His relief was palpable.

"I will make tea," she said. "You must stay hydrated."

"What kind of tea?" he said.

"Chamomile. It will settle your stomach." She left his side and went into the kitchenette where she found the kettle for boiling water. "Hisako makes it," she explained. "It is especially therapeutic when one is menstruating."

"In that case I'll drink the whole pot."

He sat up when she brought the tea to him, held the cup to his lips. "Petite," he said. "Laura."

She crouched down beside him. She understood that he was trying to mark the occasion, to say something important. In this sense he was different from her, different from Logan. He liked to be demonstrative. He offered her his heart, and often. "Sorry for what happened," he said.

He was talking about the woman from Singapore. "It was none of my business," she said. And meant it.

"No," he said. "You were right. It's wrong to do things like that." He shifted his weight against the wall. "Sit down, Laura. Take a load off."

She sat on the edge of the cot, her hands braced against her knees. She didn't want to remember the fight; it was the worst fight they'd had. Much worse than any fight she'd ever had with Logan. She always fought with Logan but never with Gambit.

Before they left Singapore, Gambit had slipped away from the hotel room for a few hours. Laura was supposed to be sleeping, but when she awoke to find him missing, she'd been worried. She left the room and followed his scent downstairs, to the bathroom of the hotel bar. He was there—he was with a woman.

He didn't know that she had seen.

When he returned to the room, she was awake and waiting, and waiting had enabled her to convert her shame into anger.

"Hey Laura," he said. He walked into the room and his eyes skimmed over her without lingering, and he smelled like sex, but he didn't seem cowed or embarrassed. "Thought you'd be asleep."

"Where were you?"

"Called in my favor. Got a phone number of an old ami willin' to take us to Madripoor." He slipped a piece of paper from his pocket and laid it on the mahogany nightstand. "I'll call tomorrow."

She sat cross-legged on the bed.

"Madripoor's no good," he continued. "We need a plan. Can't just go in there guns blazing. Place is a hot mess right now. Real Armageddon-like." He paused. "Daken dialed a number, apparently. Not that people know who's behind it. But that's what's happening."

"Who was the woman?"

He glanced up but didn't seem surprised.

"You were with a woman approximately twenty-three minutes ago. The hotel bar restroom. Second stall on the right."

He took his money clip from his pocket and laid it on the nightstand. Cracked his knuckles. Cleared his throat. Then, in a voice so quiet it seemed to come from someone far away, he said, "I take my pleasures where I find 'em."

"That's not what happened," Laura said. "This wasn't about pleasure. You traded sex for information."

Gambit moved from the nightstand to the mini refrigerator in the corner. He bent over and opened it and took out a small bottle of something or other.

"You traded sex for information," Laura repeated—this time to herself. "Like . . . a prostitute."

"Hmm," Gambit said. He twisted the cap off the bottle and took a sip. "Well, that's where you're wrong. Prostitution's illegal in Singapore. Very illegal. When money changes hands, then you've got a problem. But when all you're tryin' to do is comfort somebody because her brother's lost somewhere in Madripoor—"

"It's wrong," Laura said. She planted both feet on the floor and stood to face him. "You manipulated that woman. You let her think you could help her in order to get information."

"I didn't—I didn't do anything—"

"You lied," Laura said. She leaned in, and what she said was like something passing through her—like it was coming from her and from someone else all at the same time. "I know what you did. You let that woman think she could trust you, and then you had sex with her. You—you're like a whore."

Gambit turned sharply, slamming the bottle down on the table. "You listen to me," he said. He lifted his hand—not to surrender but to defend—and the gesture seemed unequivocal, completely un-Gambit-like. "I've done everything you wanted. You want Daken? You want Colcord on a silver platter? Well it don't just happen all on its own, hon. You wanted to go down this path and I told you not to. This is what it looks like. This is how andouillette gets made. If it bothers you, then go away and come back when it's served."

"It's wrong," Laura said.

"It's sex!" Gambit jerked forward and the front of his jacket flopped open. "It's not killing!"

Laura stepped back.

And then Gambit was gone. He swiped the drink from the table and adjusted his jacket before leaving the room.

For minutes after he left, Laura stared at the carpet. She wasn't quite sure what had happened. The fight was so sudden and so unexpected, and Gambit had gotten angry so quickly—even-tempered, mellow Gambit who'd never so much as uttered a cross word. No one made Gambit angry. Except her, apparently. As she got into her bed, she wondered if he would come back or if she had infuriated him so much that she'd never see him again.

He came back an hour later and slipped into his bed. Said nothing. The next morning he was mellow and calm as always; nothing in his mood hinted at the previous night's events. The fight was like a violent storm that had passed over them both without doing any visible damage.

Until he got sick on the boat to Madripoor. And then he wanted to talk. Sprawled out on the bed, he slumped against the pillow and looked at her. "Sorry about that whole business, petite. But old habits are hard to break, y'know, and I got used to using certain assets . . . to get things. Sleeping with people, using sex like that—it's a shortcut I've often used to get the job done. Ain't right. You were justified in telling me what I didn't wanna hear."

She tucked her hands underneath her lap. She didn't want to talk about it.

"Being here, being your friend . . . makes me realize that I shouldn't take shortcuts anymore. That it's best to do the job right, even if it takes longer."

"Why?" she asked. What had he heard about her?

"Because it's all about choices. You don't blame other people for things, even though you could. I need to stop making excuses for myself. Shit, it's been a real lesson in humility." He rolled onto his side and grimaced a little.

Laura looked straight ahead and tensed up her shoulders. So maybe he didn't know about her. It hardly seemed possible; hadn't Logan told him? Logan had told other people so much about her. She was constantly surprised by the information he divulged. "I have no right to judge you," she mumbled. "I have also done bad things."

Gambit held up his hand as if to wave away her ambivalence. "We all have."

She was torn between two impulses: to tell him everything, or to let him believe she wasn't as bad as she was. She knew she should confess. I have done things other than X-Force or my work for the facility. I was not just an assassin but a prostitute too. But she knew that once the words tumbled from her, she would never be able to take them back. And perhaps Gambit would just feel worse for what he had done. He would understand why she had taken his actions so personally.

At this moment, he needed to feel better, not worse.

But beyond this, she sensed that he would not be able to comfort her in the way she wanted. She would say, I was a prostitute—the worst kind, and he would feel sad and shocked and angry on her behalf, and he'd say nasty things about pimps, and he'd say it wasn't her fault, and that she did what she had to do to survive, and that someday somebody would love her regardless of what she'd done.

She would tell Gambit later. After this Colcord thing was over.

That night, she lay in a makeshift sleeping bag she'd made from spare sheets and blankets. Gambit snored softly and the water lapped gently against the side of the boat, and she understood her real reason for not telling him the truth: because people hate in other people what they hate most about themselves. At that moment she thought of Logan and wondered what was happening to him. Then she wondered how all of this would end.