25 years old kinetic energy manipulator/empath
citizen of the United States member of the X-Men
widower
Go backGambit's in and out of Westchester, casually and at all hours. He has, I gather, another life outside the X-Men, and he tries to keep them as separate as possible. I asked him about it, but I only got a kiss on the forehead and the subject was changed before I could pull myself together far enough to ask again.He's shameless. He takes far too much delight in making me blush, and he's catalogued every possible way to do it. A consummate flirt, he's superhumanly aware of the moods of others, and he's more cautious of human contact than I expected. In the late evening, he tends to sit outdoors and brood. (Scott called it that. Gambit calls it 'thinking.' Someone who shall remain nameless called it 'posing,' though they might only have been referring to the dramatic shadows his body cast after moonrise.)
Photographing Gambit became a kind of afternoon pastime. I met four or five artists in New York who'd had him model for them at various times in his life, and certainly his exhibitionist streak made him less of a strain to work with than most of his team-mates proved to be. If I ran into him around the house, I took his picture. I have enough photos to produce a book of him alone.
Still photography doesn't capture everything. It can only freeze-frame a fraction of a second of the grace of his movements. Henry McCoy told me a bit of the physiological side of it -- flexible bones, extremely long tendons, extra muscle layers -- but it amounts to a startling flexibility and grace. Neither did the camera capture his eyes. The most obvious sign of his mutation, Gambit's eyes are made up of red irises on black sclera. In a photograph, they look like an accident of the light, and nothing I tried could make them seem remotely plausible.
I took this photograph in the brightest part of the afternoon. I'd been swimming in the lake below the Westchester house, and we startled each other. The only revenge I could extract was to commandeer him to my service. I shot the picture while standing waist-deep in the lake, trying to ignore his slightly skewed commentary on my person, the other X-Men, and the position in which he found himself.
[Gambit's speech is both heavily accented and extremely charming. He was born in southern Louisiana and grew up in New Orleans, in a primarily French-speaking community. I've reproduced his verbal ticks -- particularly his habit of referring to himself in the third person -- but not his individual pronunciations. I won't think writing it as "dialect" would capture the rhythms of his speech any better than I've done here.]
Sinclair: Considering how well you function outside, why do you stay with the X-Men?
Gambit: You grow up in a big family, and you get used to having people around. Sometimes when Gambit couldn't get home, he used to go looking for any kind of a group to join. It's not always a good idea -- you need to belong to a group, you got to please them, and maybe it only gets you into trouble.
Sinclair: And the X-Men don't?
Gambit: [laughs] The X-Men get in plenty of trouble. But they do it together, tiens? They don't leave one person to bleed for everybody. [pause] And Gambit knows well enough that he don't always take care of himself so well.
Sinclair: What brought you this far north?
Gambit: Stormy's an old friend. She asked Gambit to come up, and he wasn't doing anything that couldn't wait. You get cold up here, but that's what trips home are for.
Sinclair: New Orleans?
Gambit: Oui.
Sinclair: What's it like?
Gambit: It's dark. Hot. It's a place for getting into trouble. Where you go back for your family. You learn about magic and the things you do when it's too hot to make love.
Sinclair: [coughing]
Gambit: Steady, cher. That was maybe a bit much?
Sinclair: Yeah. I think.
Gambit: So ask something else.
Sinclair: Does it bother you that the X-Men work outside most state laws, and a fair number of federal ones?
Gambit: [incredulous look] No. That's not among the things that bother Gambit. The X-Men are not criminals.
Sinclair: You sound like you're getting attached.
Gambit: I suppose. Gambit tied to more people than he been tied to since he left New Orleans. Got Rogue, got Sarah. Got the X-Men to take care of. And it's important to take care of the people you've got. If they disappear, you learn then how much you needed them.