All characters owned by Marvel Comics - with the exception of a few I created to help move the story along.

Author's note: Very nearly a Rogue solo story, but when New Orleans is involved, you can bet Remy will show up eventually. As always, I write my character's with minimal accents. Mature audiences all the way through for violence, language, and some steamier scenes, but I will flag any especially smutty chapters for your protection. This takes place shortly after the end of the last Gambit solo series, pre-Uncanny Avengers' 'Apocalypse Twins' storyline. Hope you like it!

Chapter 1

"Sorry it ain't the prettiest solution, Ms. Raven, but it'll hold until the new window comes in." I nodded in resignation, taking in the sight of the massive piece of plywood blotting out the mid-afternoon sun, and bent to rummage through my battered leather handbag in search of my checkbook.

"It looks just fine, Calvin, and please, call me Anna. I really appreciate everythin' you and your daughter have done for me these last couple days, I can't thank y'all enough…" I unfolded the register on an antique side table and whipped out a pen. "How much do I owe you?"

Calvin Theodore, neighborhood handyman and all around nice guy, put down his hammer and shook his head. "We'll settle up when everything's done. No sense you makin' out more than one check." I opened my mouth to protest but he just leveled those immensely solemn brown eyes of his at me. "It's just fine, Ms. Rav…Anna. I know it's been a challenge for you to deal with this all the way from New York." I chucked the wallet back in the general direction of my purse and ran a hand through the unruly white bangs that dangled across my forehead.

"You don't know the half of it, sugar." The New Orleans' PD had called me two days ago. My long dead foster mother Irene Adler, the mutant precognitive known to the world as Destiny, had left me a beautiful Garden District home among other properties spread across the world that I rarely visited or acknowledged, and someone, the police had no suspects, had broken into the house and ransacked it. Though my heart and soul would always belong to the band of mutant misfits branded the X-Men, my current superhero day job was as a member of Earth's mightiest heroes, the Avengers, and that made it more than a little difficult to pick up at a moment's notice and run down to the Big Easy for a personal emergency. Calvin and his daughter Zoe lived four houses down from mine, and in his spare time Calvin played Mr. Fix-it for those in the neighborhood and had been helping me put things back together. Originally a Philadelphia boy, he was a big bear of a man with skin the color of milk chocolate and a mustache that would make Burt Reynolds green with envy. He had played football for the Saints in another life, but once New Orleans had gotten into his blood he had never looked back North and made the city his permanent residence. I had met him the one and only time I had stayed on my inherited property, and he kept me up to date regularly on all the local gossip and did his best to keep an eye on the place.

My heart fluttered thinking of that particular visit to New Orleans, barely a handful of years gone by, though it seemed a lifetime ago. Remy LeBeau, the mutant thief Gambit, love of my life but presently my ex, had been seriously wounded fighting a big, bad villain named Vargas, and I had been just as injured, the bastard skewering the two of us with his broad sword and leaving us to perish in each other's arms. Somehow we had survived, pulled ourselves back to life for love of one another, and the X-Men had joined us in New Orleans while we recuperated. Troubled times, but good times I looked back on fondly despite all the pain then and since. Remy and I had nearly died for one another. Long ago someone told me that kind of sacrifice forged bonds that didn't break, and though we weren't together at the moment, I was inclined to agree with all my heart and soul. I had thought Remy and I would make this residence our permanent home, raise our family here, after all he was a New Orleans' boy through and through, but that didn't look to be in the cards so to speak. I had royally screwed up, that was the truth of it. Our relationship had always had major obstacles, and we both tripped over our own big mouths and bigger hearts at every turn, but the last cut had been mine to make and I hadn't been able to make amends, to tell him how wrong I had been.

I sighed unevenly. Worried, Calvin touched me lightly on the arm and I flinched, bringing a look of alarm to his face. Even after all these months, I still caught myself forgetting that I could touch people skin to skin without disastrous repercussions. The biggest of Remy and my obstacles right there, my mutant powers. Since puberty, my special gift had allowed me to share a person's thoughts, memories, and talents with the barest touch of my skin, the price being that I sucked out their soul and knocked them unconscious or worse in the process. For a long time it was uncontrollable, the slightest touch triggering the transfer, and I had covered myself from neck to toe everyday just to be able to walk amongst friends and family. Took me a long time to understand why Remy, who looked like a Greek statue brought to life, had wanted to waste his time with 'Anna the Untouchable', especially when with just a hint of his smug smile women dropped their panties left and right when he passed them by, but truth was he was just as damaged and lonely as I was, the gorgeous, cocky exterior hiding a fragile, broken heart beneath. We had helped each other heal some pretty deep wounds and in the process helped one another understand how deserving of love we both truly were. Still, my power had made it real challenging even on the best days. It was under control now and my life was free and easy in so many wonderful ways, but every so often, if I was caught off guard, that old panic slammed into me when I came into contact with someone.

"You sure you'll be all right staying here by yourself?" Calvin asked warily. I squeezed his hand to reassure him.

"I'm sure. I've got plenty to keep me busy…"

"Ms. Raven?" Calvin's daughter lightly crossed the threshold from the dining room into the sitting room. Zoe was starting college at LSU in the fall and her father had suckered her into helping him out for the summer. Where Calvin was a giant refrigerator-sized block of muscle, Zoe was small and dainty, fine-boned and beautiful. She must favor her mother, but she had certainly inherited her father's big brown eyes and sweet disposition. She held my phone aloft. "You left this in the dining room. The same man called a couple of times in a row before I could bring it in here. Didn't leave a message, though."

"Oh?" I held my hand out for the cell.

"Yeah. His picture's a little scary…" She creased her delicate eyebrows and the phone started buzzing again when she passed it to me, Logan's picture flashing on the screen. I huffed a breath that blew the bangs out of my face. Logan, the Wolverine, my longtime teammate and friend, had a serious big brother complex when it came to me. Most times it was endearing, other times…

"I better take this. Thanks again, y'all, for everythin'." Calvin waved and shouldered his tool bag.

"We'll be in touch. Call us if you need anything, hear?" He ushered a waving Zoe out of the room and I grudgingly took the call.

"Hey, sugar," I flopped wearily onto the antique wingback sofa perched in front of the floor to ceiling windows. The one Calvin had boarded shut was a blackened tooth in an otherwise pearly row.

"You talk to the police yet?" Logan's gruff tone raised the hackles on my neck like no one else could.

"Why, yes, I had a wonderful flight. Thanks so much for askin', it's so sweet of y'all to be so concerned…" I answered tartly. He could pull that tough guy shit on everybody else, but not me. I knew what a softie he was underneath all that hair and snarl, and when he pushed, I pushed back.

"All right, all right. Cool it. I wouldn't have called if I wasn't worried about ya', would I?" Point taken, but one of the great joys in my life was givin' him a hard time. "I still think I should have come down there with you."

"That's really not necessary," I was a grown-ass woman that slugged it out with supervillains and demi-gods most days before breakfast. I didn't need Logan, the big bad Wolverine, to come and babysit me. It was mildly insulting.

"Anything missing?"

"Million dollar question, sugar. I haven't spent enough time here to be able to tell. There's an insurance policy that lists all the high dollar items and they seem accounted for, but the little things? Kind of hard to tell. If you want my first impression, it looks more like whoever did this was lookin' just to trash the place to be an asshole, or they were lookin' for something specific. Doesn't feel like your standard B&E." Logan's breath hissed though the speaker.

"What did the Cajun have to say?" I puffed out my cheeks. There was the rational part of my brain that knew I should have gotten Remy the hometown boy involved, but I was still sore at him and still embarrassed with the way things had gone the last time I had seen him, so I had decided to do my best to keep him out of my mess.

"Don't know. Didn't call him." That got me more than a few heartbeats of silence before Logan spoke again, this time his tone clipped and measured.

"You want to tell me why?" He asked sharply. I swallowed the hot anger that jumped into my throat. The last person I wanted to talk to about my relationship with Remy was Logan, and I wasn't in the mood for one of his lectures when it was none of his goddamned business. I didn't answer and let the silence drag over the line instead. When he finally got the hint and realized he wasn't gettin' any more out of me, he moved on. "You think somebody knows it's your house?" I chewed my lip. It had definitely crossed my mind, but I thought it more likely maybe the house had been tossed not because I owned it, but because Irene Adler had.

My foster mother was the best at what she did, no offense to Wolverine, and what she had done had been valuable to a lot of folks. When her mutant talent to see the future had manifested itself in her late teens, the young Irene had been assaulted with innumerable visions of things to come, had nearly gotten lost in the tangled web of possibilities made visible by her powers. Unable to stop the onslaught and needing a way to bring order to the chaos, she had sat down and committed everything to paper, crafting diaries that spun a multi-volume horror story, each page a dissection of potential and probable timelines outlining the imminent history of mutantkind in her scrawling handwriting and deft illustrations. The effort of puking all of that madness across the page had left Irene blinded for the rest of her adult life, and drove her lover, my other foster mother Raven Darkholme, the sometimes terrorist Mystique, down a seriously dark path in their combined efforts to unravel the tapestry of the future. The X-Men had stumbled onto the diaries and had done our best to escape from their trap, but we weren't the only ones that knew the volumes existed. The break in could have been a coincidence, or it could have been something much more sinister. For a split second, I wished I could call Mystique. It would have been nice to get her opinion, have her look the place over. Her input could have been invaluable and saved me a lot of time. Then, I reminded myself that the last few times we'd seen each other she manipulated me and mine for her own agenda and tried to kill me. Raven never was what you'd call a loving mother, and throughout our entire relationship I had given her the benefit of the doubt and made excuses for her calculating behavior, but how many knives to the belly would it take to get through even my thick skull before I definitively ended our connection? I shared my suspicions with him.

"Could be somebody was lookin' for something of Irene's, maybe." Logan swore a blue streak.

"I thought we were rid of those fucking diaries. Now you're tellin' me you think there's more of them?"

"I'm tellin' you I don't know. It probably has nothin' to do with them, I'm just throwin' out options, but it's something I need to keep in mind. Whoever did this was after something. What else makes sense when somebody breaks in and leaves a Monet hanging on the wall?" He grunted, his favorite answer to everything.

"I got something else you're gonna love, darlin'."

"Oh?"

"Hank figured out how the Cajun got those files." I stopped myself from swearing my own streak. The last time I saw him, Remy had gotten himself into a whole heap of trouble, as usual, and had needed my team to bail him out. Before that, I had asked him to join me in New York as part of the Avengers' Unity Squad, the mutant outreach arm of Earth's mightiest heroes, but my embarrassment over our last encounter and conversation had stemmed from the team's eventual dismissal of his bid for membership. Private meetings had been held, heated arguments for and against his admission laid on the table by each of the members, including myself. Many of the arguments against Remy joining had been pretty brutal, and during our last goodbye he had quoted some of those opinions back to me word for word, though they were frankly missing a little context. The information was something he shouldn't have had access to, he could have only gotten it from files stored in the Avengers' supposedly impenetrable computer system, and my involvement in the proceedings had made me look like an asshole. I had told Logan about the incident and we had decided to keep our inquiries 'in the family' until we could figure out how the hell he had gained access. We had consulted Hank McCoy, the Beast, also an Avenger and X-Man just like us, to help with our investigation. Logan and I had went round and round over the hows and whys Remy had the material, and I knew he wasn't pulling my leg, I really wasn't going to like this.

"And?" The late afternoon sun streaming through the latticed glass wasn't the only thing warming up my temper.

"Figured you'd want to visit Papa LeBeau while you were down there, have a little conversation. Word is he's back in town…" Son of a bitch.

"The Guild?" Remy had been rescued, adopted, and raised by Jean-Luc LeBeau, head of the Thieves' Guild of New Orleans. Jean-Luc had a bad history of using, abusing, and manipulating Remy, and the badly edited version of the files he had parroted at me sounded like a prime example of those manipulations. One of the things Remy and I had in common, parents that ran hot and cold with their love, who worked their children's gifts for criminal advantage, dangling emotional connections just out of reach like a carrot in front of a donkey.

"We can't let this go, but the last thing I want is to pull Gumbo down into the mud if he really didn't have anything to do with it. Go talk to Jean-Luc, see what you can figure out before we take it to the big boys."

"You're damned right I will."

He growled. "Rogue, keep it civil. And call me. If I don't hear from you every couple days, I'm on a plane down there." I rolled my eyes at the phone.

"Are you kidding me?"

"Does it sound like I'm kidding? You take that gun with you like I told you to?" I scowled towards the slouched shape of my handbag on the floor.

"Yeah. Had to go to a different security line at the airport, but my Avengers' ID got me through." I stood and walked slowly to the bank of windows. I had hired a crew to take care of the garden below and the spring flowers were a heady jungle of blossoms, but it all seemed like such a waste if I was never here to enjoy it.

"It's not enough to have it with you, darlin', I want you to be prepared to use it."

"Logan…" Guns weren't my thing, I wasn't comfortable around them. I got that they were necessary and respected everyone's right to carry, but I had always had my mutant powers to take care of me or had borrowed someone else's. For me, weapons had rarely been required. Logan had taken it upon himself to teach me to shoot recently, but I was lousy at it.

"It could save your life, give you the edge you need to survive," he had told me, relaying a story about doin' the same thing a long time ago for Ororo Munroe, Storm, our friend and fellow X-Man. His voice slipped into Papa Bear mode. "Anna, I ain't treatin' you any different than any other woman on her own in that city. Crime rate's pretty high, makes me more than a little nervous you roamin' around on your own. We both know you have a history of jumpin' feet first into situations that are way over your head. I just want you to watch yourself." He chuckled. "Still, can't believe a Southern girl like you is anti-gun…"

"Oh, no, don't you dare pull the Mississippi card on me. You seriously tryin' to red-state me, Mr. Canada?" My voice was teasing. I grew up next door to New Orleans in Caldecott County, Mississippi, but my childhood was about as far removed from your typical magnolia blossom as could be thanks to my radically leaning foster mothers, though I definitely learned how to defend myself. "You know who raised me, sugar. Weren't no red or blue politics in our house, Mystique just saw things in fifty shades of grey…" He didn't get the reference, though I think it would have weirded me out more if he had, but I got a kick out of it.

"Take care of yourself, darlin'. Call me tomorrow." We said our goodbyes, and I tossed the phone onto the couch and took a weary look around. I was already exhausted and still had so much to clean up. The sight that had greeted me when I arrived a couple days ago had broken my heart. The house, a tidy Greek revival, normally looked like a spread for Better Homes and Gardens' historic homes issue: polished wood floors, crown moldings, a spiral staircase, each room tastefully decorated with expensive rugs, artwork, and antique furniture. Tears sprang to my eyes as I took a slow look around. The house had been ripped to shreds from top to bottom, furniture flipped, dishes smashed, drawers pulled open, my abode looking like a frat house at the end of hazing week. I hugged myself despite the clammy New Orleans heat. This house had never felt like my home, not really. Irene had willed it to me and I had pretty much left it as it was when she was alive, frozen in time. Everything in it was mine by the letter of the law, but none of it was mine. I hadn't changed the decor or kept any of my belongings here, but that didn't stop me from feeling violated. Calvin and Zoe had been a big help with the cleanup so far, but there was so much that I needed to sort through myself. Who had done this? What had they been looking for?

I knelt to pick up a broken picture frame, and my teenage self, flanked by my smiling mothers, looked back at me through cracked glass. I had never come to this house as a child, never visited any of the opulent places that now had my name on the deeds. Destiny and Mystique had kept it all secret, kept me living the quiet life in small town Mississippi up to the day they started training me for my spot in the Brotherhood. I thought they loved me, but what had been real of our time as a family and what had been a carefully fabricated illusion? I knew it wasn't fair, but I tended to blame Raven more than Irene. It was ridiculous to put more of it on her shoulders when Irene was the one who would have seen it all play out with her powers, but there it was. It twisted my guts that they knew what was gonna happen to me, maybe I gave Irene a pass because she was gone and I could tell myself that she had kept an eye on the bigger picture and possibly better outcomes, whereas Raven was still here and still used me every chance she got. Lost in thought, I sliced my finger on a sliver of the jagged glass and reflexively dropped the frame at my bare feet and legs.

"Shit!" I jumped back from the shower of glass. The cut wasn't deep, but a good amount of blood welled up from the slit. I tiptoed around the gleaming landmines and stepped into the kitchen to run the finger under cold water. Hell if I knew where any Band-Aids were at this point, if there were even any in the house to begin with. Zoe had worked all morning in the kitchen while her father and I had tackled the sitting room and entryway, sweet girl had even ran to the grocery store for the essentials, and I looked appreciatively at all she had accomplished while I held a paper towel to the cut to stop the bleeding. The house, thankfully on the smaller side for the neighborhood, was still too much for me to handle. Built in the 1840s, it was two stories of scrolled columns covered by balconies, the gardens wrapped by looming wrought iron fences. Four bedrooms, five bathrooms, a formal sitting room, a dining room, a winding staircase fit for Rhett sweeping up Scarlett, vaulted ceilings, fireplaces, chandeliers, the amenities were overwhelmingly endless. Most of the house was decorated tastefully to match the original era of the house, the kitchen and bathrooms having been updated in the last decade, probably right before Irene had been killed, but now, all that beauty was drowning in its own mess, and I had so much work ahead of me.

The bleeding stopped. I snagged the broom, a dustpan, and kicked on a pair of flip flops, heading back to the newest mess with a brown paper bag. I swept myself a little path and knelt to pick up the battered frame. The force of the fall had snapped its corners, and something poked out from behind the picture. Mindful of what was left of the glass, I dislodged a rectangular piece of cardboard from behind the photograph. I thought at first it was a playing card with a big corner missing, but when I flipped it over I realized it was something much more ominous. A tarot card. An old tarot card, as old as this house, The Death Card, a skeleton in armor riding a white horse, hidden away for years behind our family photo. Had Irene expected me to find it? I had learned there were no such things as coincidences where she was involved. I yanked the photograph out and laid it face up on the side table, peered into the remnants of the frame for the card's missing corner, but it wasn't there. I padded over to the windows and stared at the faded image on the card. The lower right corner of it had been torn away, but I wanted to rip it into twenty more pieces and burn them all in the fireplace.

I knew enough about tarot to know that the Death Card didn't necessarily mean bodily harm or physical death, usually just change, but the name hit a little close to home. In a misguided attempt to save me and the X-Men from the villain Apocalypse, Remy had volunteered to become the horseman Death, and in service to his new master he had been turned into a monster that had tried to strangle the life out of me. He had come back to himself after a lot of pain and heartache, but not back to me, and though he never admitted it, I knew he was still plagued by the after effects of Apocalypse's influence. There was no cure for what that madman did to folks.

If Irene had meant the card as a joke, I wasn't laughing.