Gambit Savage Land
Once upon a time, an X-Men jet flew far, far south, all the way toward the icy edges of Antarctica — and then it did something no jet is supposed to do. It fell.
It crashed into a place called the Savage Land, a strange, hidden jungle warmed by a mysterious light, where ferns grew taller than houses and dinosaurs, believe it or not, still roamed the earth exactly as they had millions of years before.
Rogue climbed out of the wreckage slowly, brushing leaves from her hair, and found she was not alone. A stranger stood nearby, grinning as though crash-landing in dinosaur country were the most ordinary thing in the world.
"Name's Remy LeBeau," he said, in a warm, slow drawl that curled around every word like smoke. "Folks call me Gambit."
Gambit had an unusual gift of his own. He could charge almost anything with a burst of energy — especially his playing cards, which he carried in a worn deck tucked inside his coat — and when he threw them, they exploded on contact, quick and precise as anything. Somewhere in the ferns nearby, something enormous roared, shaking the leaves. Gambit did not look the least bit worried.
"You always this calm during a crisis?" Rogue asked, keeping a careful, practiced distance, her gloves checked twice out of old habit.
Gambit only shrugged, easy and unbothered. "Panicking never got a man anywhere back home in the bayou, chère."
For two long days, the two of them tracked their scattered teammates through the dense, humming jungle. Gambit threw a charged card at anything that rustled too loudly in the undergrowth, and Rogue flew ahead whenever the canopy thinned enough to let her scan the ground from above. It was slow going, and tiring, but neither of them complained.
Near a wide river crossing, a whole pack of raptors surrounded them, quick and sharp-eyed and hungry, circling closer with every passing second. Gambit's cards scattered them in bursts of orange sparks, one after another, quick as he could throw them, while Rogue swept in low and hauled a fallen teammate clear of danger with strength she still hadn't quite gotten used to trusting as her own. Together, they made it through, breathless and a little scraped up, but safe, and laughing with relief once the raptors had vanished back into the ferns.
By the second night, they built a fire from dry ferns and Gambit's stubborn patience, and sat close beside it as the strange jungle hummed and clicked around them. They had run out of urgent things to talk about by then, and so they talked about everything else instead — Mississippi against Louisiana, the gloves Rogue never took off against Gambit's restless hands that never quite sat still, what it felt like to grow up different in a world that always seemed to notice.
At one point, Gambit rested his bare hand on a fallen log, only an inch from Rogue's own gloved fingers. He did not flinch. He did not pull away, and he did not ask for anything either. He simply left his hand there, quiet and steady, an offer with no demand tucked inside it at all.
Rogue looked at it for a long moment, watching the firelight flicker across his knuckles, and then, gently, she let herself relax beside the fire instead of bracing against it, the way she so often braced against everything and everyone.
When the rescue team finally found them the next morning, cutting through the last stretch of jungle with relieved shouts, Rogue realized something she hadn't noticed until just then: for two whole days, she had not once thought about her power as something to fear. Not as a wall. Not as a warning. Just as something that was simply, quietly, hers.
Gambit tipped an imaginary hat to her as they climbed aboard the rescue jet together. "Savage Land suits you, chère," he said, with that same easy grin from the very first moment they'd met.
Rogue only laughed and shook her head. But quietly, as the jet lifted off over the tall green ferns and the last roar of some ancient creature faded behind them, she found herself hoping — just a little — that this would not be the last strange, wonderful place the two of them found themselves stranded together.
Goodnight, Rogue. The jungle kept your secret safe tonight — and maybe, just maybe, it gave you something new to carry home too.