Playing Cards

Once upon a time, someone asked Gambit why he always carried a deck of playing cards.

It was Bobby Drake — also known as Iceman — who asked the question. They were in the Danger Room at Xavier's mansion after a training session, sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall, both of them pleasantly tired. Bobby was making small frost crystals on his fingertips the way some people doodle with a pencil. Remy was shuffling his worn deck, letting the cards cascade from one hand to the other, the soft whisper of paper a familiar sound.

"Is it a habit from New Orleans?" Bobby asked. "The cards?"

Remy looked at the deck in his hands.

"Sort of," he said. "Let me explain the whole thing."

Remy's mutant power was the ability to charge objects with kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is the energy of motion — it lives in everything that moves, in a spinning top and a bouncing ball. When Remy focused his gift, he pushed kinetic energy into an object steadily, the way you might breathe air into a balloon. The object began to glow — a soft pink at first, then a deeper purple, crackling at the edges. And when he released it — all of that stored energy exploded outward at once. Bright. Precise. Controlled.

The flash was always that same pink-purple color. It was specifically his.

He could charge almost anything. Coins. Pebbles. A door hinge, a length of rope, a piece of chalk. He had once charged a single grape as an experiment during a training session, and everyone in the room — including, briefly, Wolverine — had laughed until they were red in the face. It had been a very small explosion. But grapes are soft, and the effect was extremely surprising.

But cards were his preference, even before he fully understood his power. Cards were light — a whole deck weighed almost nothing. They were flat and aerodynamic, cutting through the air cleanly. And Remy had been practicing the wrist movement since he was nine years old in New Orleans, learning to deal and shuffle from the older Guild members, learning to flick a card from his fingers so quickly that the motion was invisible.

He kept two decks at all times. The worn one in his left pocket was his practice deck — he charged those cards during quiet moments, feeling the energy build, then released it back into himself rather than outward. This was his focus exercise. His meditation.

The fresh deck in his right pocket was for real situations. He replaced it every week.

His favorite card was the ace of diamonds.

"Why that one?" Bobby asked.

"It flies truest," Remy said, holding it up. "I've tried to figure out the physics, but at some point I just accept that it does."

Bobby considered this. "Can you do things other than just explode them?"

Remy smiled. He demonstrated: a flash charge — just enough energy for a single bright pulse of light, no explosion. Then a delay sequence — he charged five cards one after another and tossed them. CRACK — CRACK — CRACK — CRACK — KRAKOOM. Five explosions, walking across the floor like measured footsteps.

"And this," he said, charging a sixth card and then slowly, deliberately, pulling the energy back out of it. The glow dimmed. The crackling stopped. The card sat in his palm, plain and still. "I can defuse it. It takes more concentration, but it works."

Bobby was quiet, looking at the plain card.

"That one seems really important," he said.

"That one has saved more lives than the explosions," Remy agreed.

He put the card back in the deck. Shuffled once, twice, the soft familiar whisper of paper.

"The cards aren't the weapon," he said.

"What is?" Bobby asked.

Remy stood and tucked the deck into his coat pocket.

"I am," he said. "The cards are just how I introduce myself."

He walked toward the door. Bobby watched him go, making one last frost crystal on his fingertip — a small, perfect snowflake, briefly beautiful before it melted.

Outside, through the mansion's high windows, the afternoon light was long and golden — the kind that made the old stone building look warm and permanent, a place that had been here a while and intended to stay.

And somewhere in the mansion, in the comfortable quiet of a room after a good day's practice, someone was shuffling a deck of cards.