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Predator/Prey

Mac O'Roni



     Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: I may not know exactly how long I’ve been alive, but I’ve been alive long enough to get dangerously tired of the run-of-the-mill. I may not look real sophisticated, but I’ve got cultivated tastes. Like a cat who’ll only eat his Fancy Feast off your finest crystal, I only want the best. That means I spend a lot of time lookin’ without much success. The best is hard to come by.
     The hunt is fun, though. There isn’t much I like searching for more than that special smell that’s more intoxicating than the hardest bathtub gin. It isn’t always female, it isn’t always male, but it’s always the sweet, heady scent of sexual perfection. And I really only smelled it once in my life. I suppose that makes sense—once you’ve witnessed the absolute pinnacle, everything else seems ordinary by comparison. I used to be satisfied with near perfection. That changed six years ago. It was just my rotten luck that things didn’t work out right.
     I was down in New Orleans paying a visit to an old buddy of mine, one so old I don’t even know how long we’ve been buddies, and I don’t think he does, either. We’ve got a few things in common. He doesn’t look much like a centenarian, either. He’s not a mutant, an’ he doesn’t have a healing factor, but he doesn’t age any more than I do. He’s a Thief, with a definite capital “T,” and that means more than you might think.
     I hadn’t seen him in a long time. It might have been as much as twenty years, but I can’t keep track of that kind of thing. Years blur together after awhile and nothing changes but everything does. If you’ve been alive as long as I have, you probably understand. Jean-Luc certainly does.
     Whatever. The point is, the last time I saw him he had one son, named Henri. A good kid but nothing special, at least as far as Thieves with Capital Tees go. This time he had two sons, and the new one was clearly far beyond merely amazing. I could tell that before I even met him, just from the way Jean-Luc sounded when he told me about him. Jean’s a good fella, you might not believe that of a Thief but it’s true, an’ you could always tell he loved his kids, but the way he talked about this boy, you could tell that he was just about proud enough to burst. “Youngest Master Thief in history,” he told me, and any time he mentioned the kid you could hear him put it all in italics. Remy. My boy Remy. Don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what I found.
     It doesn’t matter how much natural ability you have; to become a Thief you’ve got to put in a lot of training hours. Boot Camp has nothing on what they put Guild Apprentices through. When you finally make Master Thief, you’re at the peak of physical grace; a state of Balance that masters of the martial arts can only envy. I think Remy musta been just about born a Master. When I met him he wasn’t quite eighteen years old yet but already he was Break-In Specialist for the guild, a position that is at once the lowest form of grunt-work a Thief engages in and yet the one that commands the most respect. Only the crème de la crème specialize in that field. Remy could get into, or out of, anything. The most advanced security systems had no treats that he couldn’t out-trick. And he. Was. Gorgeous.
     It seems to be almost a hard and fast rule that when a man smells like a prime fuck, and I mean a really first-class lay, he’s the sort of Pretty Boy that sets my teeth on edge; batting eyelashes and smirking lips, a body that’s never seen any hard labor outside of a health club and a brain so convinced that the man attached is the best thing since sliced bread that they never think about anything except primping and priming themselves to be as attractive as possible. That’s probably way too general, but that’s what I’ve found. Remy was different. Not to say he didn’t know how perfect he was, because he clearly did. It’s just that he didn’t spend that much time thinking about it. When you know you’re as hot as it gets, and you’re right, then I guess it just doesn’t matter so much anymore. He kept himself looking good, and he strutted like a prize rooster, but all of it was just as natural and innate as his sexy, don’t-fuck-with-me red and black mutant eyes. He was a pretty boy, but he was too hard to be a Pretty Boy. The scent of danger was a bright crimson runner under the salivating aroma of his sexual appeal. I knew from the minute I smelled him that he and I had a lot in common. The wild animal in him was overlaid by the shiny veneer of big city life, but I could sense it. A bull alligator slipping silently through black bayou waters. A sleek jungle cat crouching in the bushes and ready to spring. Dangerous. Maybe even to me. I wanted him so bad I could taste it.
     But he was my best old buddy’s son, and although he was almost legal he was still technically jail-bait to boot, so I kept it in my pants. Sodomy is still illegal in a lot of places but I never cared about that; the law about minors makes sense to me, so that’s the one I follow. I’m like Jean-Luc and his Thieves that way; I only follow the rules when they suit me. It didn’t suit me to leave without even the memory of a one-night rodeo with a perfect creature like that, but I did it. And for the last six years the memory of that boy’s smell has ruined every near-perfect lay I could have had. I finally had to bury myself in my work with the X-Men because rippin’ new assholes for tough guys like Sabretooth kept my mind off sex.
     And now, Lord help me, he’s here. Not Sabretooth, I mean the kid. Remy. He’s callin’ himself Gambit an’ I don’t think he’s told anyone his real name or his real Profession, but it’s him. He’s distinctive, and not just by smell. He brought ‘Ro back to us and she convinced him to stick around. Don’t think he’s interested in the work, I just think he likes the company. Especially Rogue. Interferin’ bitch, I could bone-claw her right now. He’s still gorgeous.
     Six years ain’t been good to him, though. He’s too thin, too hard, too quiet. He doesn’t look 24, he looks 36. I know what happened, though I ain’t gonna tell anyone. Jean-Luc told me all about it. I never seen him so close to cryin’ about anything in all the time I can remember knowing him. It’s gotta be hell, sendin’ your kid away under pain of death. Particularly when you’re as proud of him as he is of Remy. Exile looks to have been damned hard on the kid. He can’t trust nothing or no one now. There’s lines in his face that shouldn’t be there, lines that make him look like a carved statue, with all the life and warmth of stone. Sometimes his eyes light up and he gets to grinnin’, and he looks his age then, but it isn’t a good thing to see because it only happens when someone is about to get seriously dead. I was right about him, the kid is downright venomous. Some damn fine day he’s gonna kill every mother-lovin’ one of us. I want him more than ever. He knows it, too. Teases me. Won’t let me get a taste but he’ll sure let me sniff the cookin’. I don’t know how what happened to him with the guild or whatever might have happened to him in the six intervening years could have put so damned much hate in him but it bakes off him like a madness, and sometimes it really is. A smart crazy, though, which is loads worse than a dumb one. God, how he gets to me. Maybe because his hate, his crazy, is so like a projection of my own.
     So I’m hunting again, only this time my intended prey is aware of me and just as intent, maybe, of preying on me. It’s exciting, maybe even one of them “life-affirming moments” the shrinks talk about. Certainly when the hunt is on I feel more alive than I have for a long, long time. Sometimes I attack and manage to score off him—never the way I want to, but he always knows what I really mean by it. Just as often he counter-attacks and slashes me open, even though he doesn’t have claws. And I know what he means. When you fuckin’ wit’ me, mon cher, he’s sayin’, you gon’ always wanna remember you fuckin’ wit’ de bes’. I don’t know how long we can play this game. Probably a long time—one thing the kid is good at is gaming. But I’m a patient man, when it comes to the hunt. Tenacious. I’m willing to bet my life that I can hold out longer than him. And the answer may lie right there in the way the two of us define what it is we’re doing. To him it’s a game. Games, in his book, are meant to be won more than fun, but it’s still just a game. And no matter how good the Gambler, in the end, the House always wins.
     To me, this is a hunt. And for me, hunts only end one way; with the predator feasting on the prey. My prey this time is a predator too, and a real hard-ass, but I’m the original hard-ass and I think there’s a trick or two this old dog can still teach a young fox. We’ll see. It may take awhile, but we’ll see.
     We’ll just have to see.



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