Work Text:
It’s a beautiful night.
Warm, and sultry, like the woman he’s just spent it with.
He slings his trench coat over his shoulder and whistles a dissonant little tune as he heads up the grassy incline to the mansion.
He’s jumped the walls. He prefers not to trigger the cameras. His indiscretions are his own. In any other place, he wouldn’t care. But he does here, in this place where there are responsibilities, and truth, and justice.
He doesn’t fit in. He knows this already. He won’t ever.
I’ll be sad, if you go, Stormy tells him. But if you must, you must.
I ain’t cut out for this, he replies. I ain’t like all’a y’all.
And she raises a gentle eyebrow at him, says; After all we have seen, all we have been through together, you can still say such a thing?
We had some fun, p’tit, he concedes with a grin. But look at ya now. Ya all grown up, Stormy. You’re an X-Man. And I’m still just a thief.
He’s worse. But no one here has to know that, and he doesn’t want them to know, not ever. Guilt is a heavier burden, in a place like this. You weigh your soul against the goodness of others. Stormy figures he can find some sort of redemption here. But she doesn’t know the sins he must one day atone for.
Earlier that day, he’d started packing. But he hadn’t been able to resist one last hurrah before hitting the road once more.
He’ll go back to his room, have a shower. Sleep what little he can, before a new day rises.
Then he’ll bid his adieus and be gone.
He skirts by the lake, and as he does, he hears a nearby splash of water. Once, twice.
It’s too early in the morning for birds. He pauses. He steps around the dense trunk of the cedar tree and follows the sound.
He stops when he sees her.
Floating on her back in the water, eyes closed, her silver and cinnamon hair fanned out like a halo around her.
She’s never like this.
Rogue is brash and loud, and when she’s silent she’s sullen… sometimes sad. But she’s never like this. Calm. Peaceful. At home with herself.
He looks aside a moment, feeling like he’s encroaching on a moment, and not knowing how to extricate himself from it.
Truth be told, he doesn’t want to.
He’s been avoiding her. Not because he doesn’t like her, but because he likes her too much. She’s a reason to stay, and yet a reason to go. He wants to touch her, but he can’t. He doesn’t stay for things he can’t touch, he can’t steal. What’s the point in stealing a heart from a body you can’t touch, after all?
He hears her splash again, and his eyes move back to her.
She’s standing waist-deep in the water with her back to him, her hair a coppery sheen down her back. She lifts her arms and wrings the water from her locks.
She’s naked.
His heart is thudding in his ears.
He knows a thing or two about beauty, but something about hers stirs him every time, in places he doesn’t know could be stirred.
He slinks back into the shadows of the tree, and when he hears her begin to the leave the pool, he turns aside and quickly leaves.
He feels as if he’s intruded on something he shouldn’t have seen, that she would never have let him see. The sentiment has never stopped him before, but he tells himself this is self-preservation. If he sees her and she sees him, it’ll invite him to break a boundary he doesn’t dare articulate. After Belle, after Marissa, after all the women he’s fallen for, there’s too much at stake.
There’s too much.
He marches up the slope to the back entrance. He’d thought he’d worked out all his urges and then some tonight, but she stokes fires in him without so much as even throwing a look his way. Tugs at him with the memory of her kiss, one he can’t ever relive again.
He reaches the flagstone steps, and walks up onto the veranda. The need hasn’t gone, and so he pauses in the doorway and lights up a smoke to calm his nerves. He closes his eyes and breathes. When he opens them again, he sees her walking up the hill towards him, dressed in nothing but a blue, terry-cloth robe, her feet bare. She ascends the steps, oblivious to his presence, and when she sees him in the shadows, she starts.
“Gambit,” she almost exclaims.
“Rogue.” He steps forward a little, into the porchlight. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean t’startle ya.”
She says nothing. For a moment they stare at one another, a little awkwardly, a little something more. He hasn’t spoken to her for about a week now; but he’s sensed her eyes on him, sometimes, across the dinner table, or from the other end of the Rec Room. He’d pulled away from their banter and light flirtation because he’d slowly been coming to the conclusion that it was better to leave, but here, now… he doesn’t want to go without saying some sort of goodbye to her first.
Maybe he's even tempted to steal another kiss from her, her powers be damned.
“You’ve been out late,” she breaks the silence first, noting his trench coat and his unbuttoned dress shirt. She’d been aiming for flippant; but the words are a little self-conscious, a little defensive, as if she knows, instinctively, what he’s been up to.
“Looks like you’ve been too,” he responds quietly.
She colours a little, tugging the robe tighter around her, as if suddenly aware of her nakedness beneath it.
“I went for a swim, down at the lake,” she explains, almost in a rush. “It’s safer to do it now, when no one else is about. Don’t gotta worry ‘bout absorbin’ anyone.”
“Hm.” He nods. “Bet it reminds you of splashin’ round in the Mississippi durin’ high summer too, neh?”
She smiles then, a genuine smile.
“Yeah,” she says. “Sure does.”
Silence falls. She swallows. His heart is still crashing in his ears.
He can’t stop thinking about their kiss.
He guesses she can’t stop thinking about it either.
“Listen,” she blurts, after a moment, “I was wonderin’… Wolverine and I gotta trainin’ session tomorrow mornin’. You wanna join us?”
He’s surprised.
“Heh. You want me to hand your ass t’ya again, chere?”
She almost colours again – it’s less the ass-handing that bothers her, and more the kiss that had come afterwards.
“Naw. Ya just been lookin’ so sorry for y’self lately, I figured you could use a distraction.”
He laughs softly.
“Thanks but no thanks, chere. Three’s a crowd. And I know Wolverine don’t like me much.”
She quirks a small smile.
“That old grump don’t like no one.”
“He likes you.”
She looks aside, reflecting on that a moment.
“Well… I protected someone he loved. And in return… he gave me the gift of life.” Her voice had become quiet. “Before that… he hated me. Everyone here did.”
He’s surprised to hear that.
“Why?”
She darts a look at him, awkward again.
“Didn’t Storm tell ya?”
He says nothing, and so she continues; “I was with the Brotherhood. I… I did a lot of bad things. To the X-Men. To other people. To innocents.”
She clutches the robe tighter around her, as if to shield herself from her shame.
“I nearly killed Ms. Marvel – someone who’s a real hero. I stole everythin’ that belonged to her – her powers, her mem’ries – everythin’ that made her her. Her mem’ries ate at me. Drove me nearly t’madness. She was so strong. So strong, I began to fear I’d lose myself. So I came here. Hopin’ against hope that the Professor could help me. And he did. Just not the way I was expectin’.”
The words seem to take something out of her. She sits on the balustrade, still clutching the robe around her.
“When I first came here, everyone hated me. I couldn’t blame them. I’d tried to kill them, hurt them, countless times. But I had nowhere else to go.”
“And you earned their trust,” he finishes the story for her. “You became like them. A hero.”
She smiles up at him faintly.
“Everyone who comes here… somehow… we all end up heroes. Of one stripe or another.”
He laughs self-deprecatingly and grinds out his cigarette with his heel.
“I ain’t no hero,” he mutters.
“You seem to be doin’ pretty well so far.”
He shakes his head and moves to sit on the balustrade beside her. Close… but not close enough to risk brushing against all the naked skin she’s exposing right now.
“You’ve moved on from your past, chere,” he mutters, rubbing his long fingers together. “Maybe I ain’t ready yet t’move on from mine.”
She stares at him. There it is again. Her gaze, like fire on his flesh, in his gut and lower.
“Nothin’ you’ve done can be so bad it’s irredeemable,” she says.
There’s certainty in her voice. She believes it. Everything she’s experienced here, with the X-Men, has taught her to believe it. But he doesn’t. He knows what it is to stain his hands with blood.
“Would ya say the same to the Shadow King?” he asks.
She says nothing for a moment, and he thinks he’s caught her out – but she doesn’t take the bait.
“Y’know somethin’, Gambit,” she begins softly instead, “for the longest time I wasn’t sure whether I’m here now, fightin’ the good fight, because it was Ms. Marvel’s mem’ries, her personality, her goodness and sense of justice, that brought me here. Hell,” she exhales a heavy breath, “I still don’t know. Scratch the surface, scratch away all the psyches I’ve ever absorbed… when you get to the core of me, the real me, who is Rogue? Is she a murderer and a terrorist, who became a ‘hero’ because she absorbed a hero? Or was she a good person from the get-go? I genuinely don’t know anymore. Since I was thirteen, all I’ve ever had is other peoples’ personalities layerin’ over mine, over and over, buryin’ me under.”
She braves a look at him.
“Sometimes I get scared that… I’ll wake up one day, and discover the real me that’s been hidin’ underneath all that shit. I get scared I’ll kill everyone in their sleep. That I’m not – and never really was – a hero.”
Her eyes her greener under the porchlight. There’s an earnestness in them that tugs at him more powerfully than her body.
And he can answer her question. Because he knows it. Because it’s been self-evident to him since he first laid eyes on her.
“You’re a hero,” he assures her quietly. You’re somethin’ I’m not. He touches the sleeve of her robe because he can’t touch her hand, and he adds: “You’re a good person, Rogue.” He rubs the fabric between his fingers, because he can’t rub her own. “And… you’re beautiful.”
The earnestness doesn’t leave her eyes. She doesn’t look away.
“I think the same things about you,” she says simply.
She puts a hand on his knee, and he feels the warmth of each finger through the fabric of his pants. His heart is crashing in his chest. A touch has never felt so intimate. He leans towards her, and, Dieu, she’s brave enough to lean back towards him. He wants to kiss her so badly, he thinks he might chance it. He thinks he might chance oblivion, and all his ugly secrets being ripped out into the open, to kiss and be kissed by this sweet creature who swears she’s no angel, yet is nothing but to him.
For a few short, lingering seconds they remain there, a breath away from a kiss. She draws away first. He doesn’t know it now, but in the years to come, it will always be her who will draw away first.
“I… I should go. Gotta get up early for that trainin’ session tomorrow.”
She slips off the balustrade. He is still holding her sleeve, and somehow he can’t let go. She glances up at him.
“Will ya be joinin’ us?” she asks hopefully.
“What time?”
“Eight.”
He thinks about it. He’s been planning to be long gone by then.
“A’right,” he says.
She smiles. He loves her smile, because she doesn’t smile enough, not like the way she is right now.
“Great. I’ll see ya then.” She pauses, adds a little shyly, “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
He relinquishes her sleeve, and she pads up to the door in her bare feet, throwing him another smile over her shoulder before she leaves.
He heaves out a pent-up breath.
His senses are burning. She consumes him like the sun. She doesn’t need to touch him to do it.
He gets off the balustrade and goes inside. He climbs the lonely stairs and heads back to his room. He stares at the bag on his bed, the bag he’d packed only just this afternoon.
He thinks of his words. Words so painfully honest he’d never meant to say them until he’d said them.
You’re a hero. You’re a good person, Rogue. And you’re beautiful.
Her hand on his knee. The warmth of its imprint.
I think the same things about you.
He wants to be the person she sees.
He doesn’t know if he can be. But he wants to be, for her.
He makes up his mind.
Slowly, methodically, he begins to unpack.
-END-