X-Trees| Volume One: Welcome Home

Chapter Two

Summary: Two X-Trees find themselves in Las Vegas with free time...

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On the Las Vegas Strip, a Blackjack Oak ambles down the crowded street. He fingers a playing card, passing it between branch-fingers as he sways in and out of excited tourists and less than thrilled locals. He wears a brown trench, his eyes a vibrant red. Two garment bags are slung over his shoulder. His three pet cats sleep soundly in his tangled canopy, their soft purrs a welcome sound among all the cacophony of Sin City.

All around, neon lights advertise debauchery: gambling, an endeavor of which the oak Tree was very well-acquainted with and adored much; liquor stores and pawn shops Log-an would have appreciated if not for the crowd; and dancing tree establishments of which the Tree had frequented as a sapling only to phase out as he aged, and fell further down the trappings of love for his fellow X-Tree.

The She-Tree who has forever captured Remy LeBeau's heart, doing what no other she-tree has done before, marches beside him. She is a beautiful birch Tree, long and feminine in shape. Her canopy consists mostly of dark brown leaves, save for a strip of silvery-white ones that frame her face. She walks carefully, keeping her branch-arms at her side, her hands never without their gloves.

For Rogue of the X-Trees, getting too close to anyone, spells disaster. The slightest graze of her skin against someone else's could put them in a coma; it'd happened before.

Gambit doesn't mind. If anything, he finds the space she constantly forces between them, maddening. He desires nothing more than to touch the Tree he loves. And he doesn't care if fulfilling that desire ends with him in a hospital bed for a couple of days. As long as Rogue was there when he awoke, that'd be all that mattered. But Gambit knows that his suffering would hurt her, and the last thing his love deserved was more pain.

In his canopy, a ginger tabby with a mangled stump of a tail stretches its front paws. Gambit can feel the light drag of Blackjack's claws against his bark. The others, a grey and white striped cat named Gambler, and an all-black one with a tuft of white fur between his eyes named Ace, remain comatose, dreaming of whatever it was cats dreamt of. Fish, he suspects.

"It's intoxicating, this atmosphere," he says in his thick Cajun accent as he lifts his branch-arms over his head. He steeples his fingers together at the base of his canopy, where his neck sticks out from his jacket. "Yah, mon ami?" Rogue seems less than impressed. Her brow is furrowed, her shoulders meeting the lowest branches of her canopy. "It's drainin' for you. These crowds, no?"

Rogue flashes him a passing smile, but it doesn't take Gambit's hawkish gaze to see the fragility beneath it. One wrong move, one false step or heavy wind, and Rogue's branches might touch another. The pain her powers caused others was temporary and slight compared to the scars it left behind on her psyche. She'd been the only student at the Grove who'd never come to accept her powers. To her, the inability to touch another, to foster real, tree connection, to shower affection upon those she loved, was a curse.

"I'm fine, sugar," she says, her southern drawl sweetly accenting her words.

"That ain't nothin' but honeyed lies." Gambit looks at her earnestly when he replies. She can't deny him the truth of his words so instead, she turns away, pretending to be momentarily spellbound by a glimmering marquee encased in white lights. It advertised Dazzler's show for later in the day.

The dry heat of the Nevada desert causes Gambit to cough. The heat he was used to, the lack of humidity, not so much. Rogue turns to face him, concern in her eyes. "You okay?"