. II .
Rogue awoke to the softly swaying silhouettes of trees in the moonlight, shadows that played across the room with the eerie quality of a shadow puppet show. For a moment she could not place the image of her own bedroom – the shades of night had invaded it, conquered it, made it their own. She had awoken to a vague sense of premonition, a vague sense that tonight she was supposed to do something that was meant to be of some significance. She couldn’t place the feeling, nor could she place its source; a moment later the strangeness had left her and she was wide awake, the familiar old features of her room returning to her. Her head ached terribly. It wasn’t a good sign. Past experience told her that headaches meant the onset of some sort of power fluctuation in her – except now, her headaches didn’t make sense. She’d learnt to control her powers, after all. Her and Sage had worked at it for months now, and it’d finally paid off. She was able to touch without draining people’s powers. She was able to hold back the psyches in her head.
So why did these headaches keep on coming back?
She shifted, found a cool spot on her pillow, moaned softly. If this headache didn’t let up soon she’d have to go downstairs and get some painkillers. And she didn’t think she could face the light.
The rhythmic sound of breathing was emanating from the end of the bed. The sound was muffled, heavy, strained. Rogue opened her eyes and rolled over only to find that Remy was not in usual his place beside her. The breathing sounded again, tight, less controlled. Rogue knew that sound for what it was. The sound of fear. It had to be him. Her head throbbed dully, flared again, willing her back into unconsciousness. She closed her eyes, forced back the pain.
“Remy?” she ventured, her voice brittle in the night.
He didn’t answer, but his breathing slowed. His silence hung in the air like something charged. Instinct sent apprehension running through her. Since they had made things up between them back in New Orleans the previous year, their relationship had still been shaky, but they had tried to work things through as best they could. Rogue had found it difficult to stop feeling guilty about the way she had treated him, not least for what had happened with Sinister. Since the confrontation in New Orleans he hadn’t spoken to her about his supposed father, and she hadn’t liked to push the matter. She had understood that he needed his own space to deal with things in his own time, but it still didn’t stop her fretting about him. The way he went so quiet, so distant… Sometimes his silence frightened her more than anything else.
Slowly she sat up. The headache was leaving her, the tendrils of that dull, throbbing ache still clinging stubbornly to her temples. She shrugged it aside out of concern for him. He was sitting at the end of the bed with his back to her, knees raised to his chest, head bent forward. She had rarely seen him looking so child-like and defenseless; she did not need to see into his mind to know just how vulnerable he was feeling right now. How strange it seemed, after all the times she had longed for his arms to be around her, for it to be him that was comforting her!
“Remy, are you okay?” she spoke, her voice louder now.
Again he did not answer. A little afraid, she slid out from under the covers and crawled across the bed towards him, gently reached out to touch his shoulder.
“Speak t’ me, Remy, please,” she pleaded with him in a whisper. “Please don’t shut me out like this.”
He did not turn, did not face her. But as if encouraged by the warmth of her hand on his shoulder he raised his head and she suddenly realised that he was trembling.
“Are you Rogue?” he murmured back after a moment; despite the way his body shuddered, his voice was quiet, controlled. “Are you Rogue?”
Something in the words shook her to the core. Feeling sudden tears smart her eyes, her hand gripped his shoulder tighter, as if fearing that he might somehow slip from her grasp.
“Yes,” she spoke, trying desperately to keep the tears out of her voice. “Yes, Ah’m Rogue, Ah’m Rogue.”
She reached out for him, placing her hands on his face, turning him to meet her gaze, and as she did so she was shocked to find that his cheeks were wet.
“Remy!” she gasped. His tears frightened her more than anything else could have, all the more so for the fact that that day he had been happy, so happy… He and Logan and Ororo and her, they’d all had a few drinks in Harry’s Hideaway, laughed and joked just like everything was normal… Normal. Nothing was normal anymore, not since he’d found out about Sinister. Remy had always worn masks – even she didn’t know how many. Was this just another mask, or was this the real him? In the darkness she searched his face, but all she could discern were the burning red eyes, glowing like embers in the dark. She shuddered instinctively. Those eyes…
“Remy,” she began again, forcing the calmness to return to her voice with an effort. “It’s okay. Ah’m here. Ah’m here, Remy. Come back t’ bed. Let me hold you. Let me…”
“I killed,” he interrupted her, his tone low, bitter, determined. “I k-k-k-killed…”
She stared at him helplessly, knowing where the train of thought was leading. Too often it had gone like this, too often all their conversations had turned to this.
“No, Remy, please…!”
“I first k-killed,” he interrupted again, only to pause, his voice finally cracking with emotion. “I first killed a man when I was fourteen.”
“No!” He was beginning to tremble again, violently, and she held onto his face desperately, as if to channel all the strength she possessed into him.
“I’m wicked.”
“No!”
Something gripped her then, something violent and unforeseen, so much so that she almost blacked out at the force of it. A feeling, a sense, a memory…no, not a memory, not one from the past anyhow, but one from the future, from a future, and she sensed him and what he could become – the power, the bitterness, the darkness, the hatred…
She crumpled, falling into him, trembling almost as violently as he, her breath ragged, her own cheeks stained with tears of pain and horror. Something… the future… was this the terror of Destiny’s power? To see one’s own loved ones turn into aberrations, monsters?
Was this why Destiny had killed herself?
She sobbed dry tears, holding onto him for dear life, willing him not to become the thing she had felt. And for the first time, a fraction of her understood the latent power he held within him. Is this what it is like for all the Seven? Is this the future we risk? One we could destroy? She could not let this future come to pass! She could not!
After a moment the shaking left him; now it was his arms that encircled her, tender, soft, dispelling the nightmare the vision had sent her, as if to say that what she had sensed was a fiction, a fantasy… And when he smoothed back the hair from her aching forehead, she thought that she must indeed have imagined that premonition.
“Rogue?” he spoke softly, like a man awoken from a dream, from a trance.
She looked up at him, found those dark red eyes burning into her own.
“Y’ ain’t wicked,” she whispered.
She awoke the next morning to find them both sprawled out across the bed where they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms the night before. His right hand was in her hair, stroking her lightly, rhythmically – it was through this that she knew that he was awake.
Slowly she sat up; the warmth of the sunlight spilled in from the window and onto her face as she swivelled round to look down at him. His look was composed, silent, but she thought she caught a hint of sorrow in those dark red eyes. For a long while they both stared at each other, wordless. From outside the sound of bird song filtered in through the window; no other sound could be discerned, not even from within the usually bustling mansion.
“I had a nightmare,” he said at last, his voice just a notch about a whisper. She knew what he said was meant to be an explanation of the previous night’s events.
“So did Ah,” she answered back softly.
He regarded her a moment, then looked away, his teeth pulling at his lower lip, whether in reflection or consternation she found she could not tell. She wondered if he was thinking on last night as she was – of their shared and temporary madness, of the way they had held one another like children, unable to understand the pain of the other, only knowing that it was there, that it was very real. Over the past few months, this was what their relationship had become – the private and individual struggle of two people bound to one another in… In what? Rogue hardly knew anymore. That she loved him was certain, that he loved her was certain – but a strange kind of inertia had come over them, as if to love first they needed to destroy their own hate and their own fear, and neither could find the answer in the other. All they found was comfort – a temporary comfort, such as the comfort they had found last night in one another’s embrace. But not the comfort of true understanding. And neither of them could ever understand the pain of the other. She could not understand the rage, the resentment, the bitterness he felt both towards himself and Sinister; he could not understand the frustration and fear she felt about her precognitive dreams. There was some great gulf between them, some great distance encapsulated by grief, and she had no idea of how to encompass it.
After a moment he turned back to face her, and as he did so, she caught the old familiar smile on his lips, the old roguish gleam in his eye. She was suddenly aware that what she had seen the night before, what she had seen just a moment ago when they had gazed at one another – that had been his true face, and now… now, in the action of turning away from her, he had subtly replaced his mask. Gently he reached out to toy with a lock of her hair, twisting the curl this way and that in the ray of sunshine, as if to study the effect the light had on the cinnamon coloured strands.
“Y’know Roguey, I’ve been t’inkin’,” he began, and this time his voice was as light and carefree as it always was.
“What?” she asked, trying to prevent a frown from forming on her face. She felt he was avoiding the subject of what had happened last night and she didn’t like it. She wanted to talk things over with him; she wanted to ask him why he had been sitting there, in the dark, crying. She wanted to ask him how it had felt to kill a man when he was fourteen. And she had wanted to tell him about the vision she had had, that strand of the future where he would become his father… Desperately she pushed the thought out of her mind. No, that was not what she had seen… Was it? She could barely remember. The vision seemed so vague now, less certain somehow… She felt that in embracing him the night before, she had made that version of the future less certain. But it was ridiculous, wasn’t it? She couldn’t change the future just by doing something as simple as that…
“I was t’inkin’ we should do somethin’ today,” he was saying, unaware of the insensate train of thought currently working in her mind. “Together. Enjoy ourselves. Take our mind off things. We ain’t been out together for a while now.”
The observation brought her back down to less ethereal matters. It was true – they hadn’t even gone to the supermarket together lately, let alone a date. With an effort she pushed away all thoughts of the prescient vision, managed a slight smile for him.
“Ah’d like that,” she said at last.
Darkness was penetrating the sky, thick black clouds roiling over the horizon, like a dream she had once had, a dream that seemed so near and yet so far away, a dream that had haunted her every waking hour and yet that she could not remember.
Rogue stared out of the restaurant window, stabbed her fork into some lettuce and murmured: “It’s goin’ to rain.”
Across from her, Remy cast a glance out of the window.
“Looks like it.” He settled back in his chair, sipped from his glass of wine, and looked at her. It’d been fifteen minutes since they’d got here and they’d barely said a word to one another. Rogue eyes had seemed fixated on some point somewhere outside the window, her reverie almost as impenetrable as the lingering sense of dread that had been plaguing him on and off for the past few months. Their relationship – such as it had been – had never been simple; but matters seemed to have to have become even more complicated over the past couple of months or so. He had always refused to talk about his troubles, hiding them under a mask of forced joviality; she, on the other hand, had immersed herself in them, brooding silently. Now it was he that brooded, finding difficulty in expressing the turmoil deep inside him; and while he knew that Rogue still had troubles of her own, he was too busy ruminating over his own misfortunes to be concerned over hers. They both knew what the other was feeling. They both knew what the sources of the other’s troubles were. They were sores that were just far too raw, far too painful to be touched. And now, as he sat there across from her, knowing where her mind lay and unable to communicate with her about it, he wondered what was the use in their being here; he wondered why he had suggested this at all.
“You okay, chere?” he asked her. She managed to tear her eyes from the window, smiled faintly back at him.
“Yes – Ah’m fine.”
Stupid question; stupid answer. Much better to begin over again, Remy thought with some frustration. Since last year, nothing had been a hundred percent between them in any sense – all that was certain was the feelings they still held for one another, but continuing a normal, healthy relationship was easier said than done. He still resented her for abandoning him to Sinister; she still found it vexing that she could not make him understand the nightmares she was having. He had his own nightmares to contend with – most of his nights were sleepless, possessed by the fears and the truths that he could not hide from. Truths were harder to run from than lies; this, he knew from bitter experience. No torture could have tormented him so acutely than the knowledge of who and what he was, or the knowledge that this was what Rogue had left him to. Rogue, the woman that he loved and still loved, yet found so hard to do so. Sometimes, when he lay awake in bed in the early hours, he would hear her wake up, hear her shuddering, sobbing quietly in the darkness; and he would pretend to be asleep, not finding it in him to put his arms round her and comfort her. If he had known that she dreamt of him and what he could become, would he have felt differently?
It was fruitless for them to fence as they had been doing so for so long now. The previous night his nightmares had seemed to consume him – he had awoken uncertain of the very substance of his being, unable to place himself, unable to say that he was anything more than an extension of the dark thing inside him, the face that called itself Nathaniel Essex. And when she had come to him, when she had awoken and wrapped her arms round him as he had found it so difficult to do to her, he had realised his selfishness; and moreover, how he could not hope to crawl out of that deep, dark hole without her help. Nor could he do it without her love, or the love that he felt for her. For to be devoid of love was the thing that he feared most – for in that he would truly be the son of Essex.
It began to rain.
Rogue twisted the fork into the piece of lettuce and guided it into her mouth, shuddering briefly, instinctively. Lightning cracked across the sky, punctuated only seconds later by a deep and foreboding drum-roll of thunder. Rainwater crashed against the window, obscuring her view of the streets below. Across the table Remy stared at her, considering. In the stark illumination of the lightning his eyes seemed to burn, then fade to the dimness of black coals. Why did this feel familiar, why did this whole thing seem so familiar…?
You had a choice, Rogue, and you made the wrong one… Now you are Destiny, and you made me this…
Remy’s hand touched her own, and she started out of her reverie.
“You look like you’re a million miles away, p’tit,” he was saying.
She flinched, her hand instinctively trying to move from his, but on a sudden split second decision, she held it there.
“Ah was just…Ah was just thinkin’, is all,” she replied at last, breathlessly. Another vision, she thought in confusion. And this time while Ah was awake? What did he mean, that Ah was Destiny…?
His face was full of sympathy, the touch of his hands warm and tender. In the midst of her precognitive vision it had seemed as though his touch was an attack; but now, as the gentleness of his fingers seeped into the pores of her skin she felt comforted, and glad that she had not shied from the contact. She smiled awkwardly, but fully.
“It’s… Ah’m okay, sugah, really,” she tried to assure him.
“You’ve been havin’ nightmares,” he stated softly, encouragingly, cupping both her hands with his own. “It’s okay, you can tell me. I know I haven’t been payin’ much ‘tention to you recently, Rogue, but it doesn’t mean I don’t care. If you want to talk about it…”
Well, this was a surprise. She wondered what had brought about this sudden U-turn. She hadn’t wanted to complain too much about his stand-offishness, feeling it was an apt punishment for the way she had treated him over the past year or so. She still felt guilty about it – and ever since the dream she had had last night, her concern over him had increased. She felt touched that he should be swallowing his pride now, offering her support when she had treated him so cruelly.
“It’s all right, Remy,” she replied after a moment. “Ah know you’ve been havin’ your own troubles too. Ah don’t want t’ intrude upon them.” She paused, lowered her eyes. Her head was beginning to ache, and she frowned. “It was me who was responsible for most of them anyhow. And now Ah feel that… Last night…” She trailed off, not knowing how to explain the vision she had seen of him. How could she explain that what she had seen was the son of Sinister, of the terrible power hidden within him?
“What?” he asked, seeing the hesitation on her face.
“Last night, you seemed so afraid… So different…”
So much like Sinister…
“I’d had a nightmare…” he explained evasively, then stopped. She gave a small, nervous laugh.
“You an’ me an’ dreams… At least that’s one thing we have in common right about now.”
Lightning flashed neon; two seconds later the thunder boomed across the sky, the wind sending the rain pelting violently against the window. Outside the storm swirled, as rough and as free as an untamed sea, the tides rushing inward, outward, this way and that, nowhere and everywhere at once, sending the world reeling…
…You made the wrong choice, Rogue, and now I have the power to take it all away from you… I’ll become the Timestream and take it all away from you like you took everything away from me…
“You’re trembling.”
He lifted her hands gently between his own, so gently it suddenly made her want to sob.
“It’s nothin’… Only a headache, is all, it’s nothin’…”
Nevertheless she entwined her fingers with his, tightly, as if to prevent him from ever leaving her, from ever running off into the future and becoming this thing, this terrible thing, her lover, her enemy…
“Rogue?” He seemed to sense something in her, the subtle change, the undercurrent in her that could not be stemmed. He held her eyes a long moment; then said: “You want us t’ go back now, chere?”
“Yes.” She nodded faintly. “Ah’d like t’ go back.”
Remy sat at the wheel of the car, cursing inwardly, both at the treacherous driving conditions the torrential storm was creating and the manner in which the evening had been curtailed. He took a sharp corner, tires skidding.
“Believe me, I’m gonna have t’ have a word with ‘Ro when we get back,” he muttered. He had meant it to be something of a joke, but Rogue said nothing. She was staring outside the window again, her fingernails digging into the car seat, her teeth biting into her lower lip. So much for talking things over, he thought dismally. She’s still as closed off as ever.
By the time they arrived at the mansion they had both fallen into silence. Once back in the room they shared, there was nothing really left to say, and they’d given up trying to make small-talk. Rogue shunted her damp dress over her hips, passed Remy a sidelong glance. Now it was his turn to be staring out of the window, his fingers unconsciously tugging loose the tie around his neck.
“Storm seems to be lettin’ off,” he remarked half to himself.
“Remy,” she began from across the room, letting the dress slide to the floor. “Ah’m sorry.” She felt she owed him that much.
“Doesn’t matter,” he replied absently, undoing the tie and slinging it over the back of a chair. She sighed and padded into the bathroom, kicking her heels into a corner as she did so. She wouldn’t have minded kicking herself either. Her headache had subsided and she could barely remember what it was that had troubled her so back at the restaurant.
“Yes, it does matter,” she answered decidedly, grabbing a comb and dragging it through her bedraggled hair. “Ah was bein’ irrational. Ah had some aspirin on me. We coulda stayed. Ah know you really wanted us t’ make somethin’ of tonight.”
“Always tomorrow night,” he called back.
“Ah guess.”
He made no reply. After a moment she set the comb down and padded back into the bedroom. Remy was sitting in a chair, brooding.
“Ah’m sorry,” she repeated, this time quietly. He looked up and spread out his arms towards her, his gaze suddenly filled with need. Wordlessly she walked over, curling up into his lap, resting her cheek against his head as their arms went about one another, for all the world like little children seeking out comfort. It’s been like this for so long between us, it’s been like this for too long… she thought.
“You had a headache,” he murmured against her neck; his breath sent her nerves tingling. “I was worried about you, chere.”
“Ah’m okay now,” she whispered back her assurance. His arms encircled her all the tighter, as if to let her go he would be releasing his only lifeline.
“Oh Rogue, I love you, please don’t leave me…” he pleaded brokenly, only faltering when he buried his face against her bare shoulder as though to fight back sudden tears. She rocked him gently, hardly knowing what to say; how could she admit that she feared that it was she that was going to lose him?
“Ah ain’t gonna leave you, Remy,” she reassured him, running her hands through his hair. “Ah made a promise, remember? That Ah was gonna be yours for keeps, that this time there’d be no runnin’, no hidin’, no hurtin’, no more playin’ with one another’s hearts. An’ Ah intend t’ keep that promise.” She paused, kissing the top of his head tenderly. “Ah love you, Remy LeBeau, and Ah ain’t never gonna be able t’ forgive mahself for what Ah did t’ you. After everythin’ Ah did, you’ve made me the luckiest gal alive by keepin’ me. Give me one good reason why Ah should ever leave you, sugah.”
He was quiet a long while, making no movement, no sound. Then he stirred, ever so slightly, as if unwilling to disturb the cocoon of their embrace.
“After what I did to you…” he began, the heat of his breath against the hollow of her shoulder.
“That was my fault,” she interrupted him quickly.
“Maybe, but I had no right to do what I did.” He paused, considering, before he continued. “You don’t know how much I hated myself, Rogue. How much I used to lie awake at night, how much I still do, thinkin’ about dis thing inside me I can’t escape, the me I’ve been tryin’ t’ run from my whole life long. Only thing is, now, dis thing has a name an’ a face an’ it scares me, chere, it haunts me every time I sleep and every moment I wake.”
She said nothing, stroking his hair softly, waiting for him to continue. He needed to talk about it. He needed for it to come out, otherwise there wouldn’t ever be a hope of stopping him from becoming the thing they both saw in their dreams…
“Dere was only one t’ing dat used to comfort me, chere,” he spoke after a moment. “An’ dat was you. A dream of you, Rogue, so vivid, it was like a memory, like I really lived it, like we both did.” He trailed off, and when next he spoke his voice was strangely wistful. “It happened before I left t’ go see Sinister, after you said it was over b’tween us. In de dream you came t’ me while I was sleepin’, dressed in white, like you was mon ange or somethin’… You seemed so different, y’see… so goddamn beautiful, like you wasn’t of dis earth. Thought it was real at first, thought you were comin’ to tell me it wasn’t all over, dat you’d changed your mind, dat you wanted me back…”
He was quiet a long while, as if drowned in the dream, as if his senses were immersed in it; she felt him tremble in her arms at the recollection, and she too shuddered, feeling the sudden and palpable need within him inflame her. Outside, rainwater dripped lazily off the eaves of the roof and onto their balcony below, punctuating each breath they took, counting off each lost moment of their embrace.
“But you said nothin’, Rogue, not a word,” he murmured again, this time so softly, so reverently that she could barely hear him. “Except you said that you had to touch me, as if you knew it didn’t matter, as if you knew I didn’t care, dat I wanted you to touch me. Then you bent over, an’ you kissed me… Just one, single kiss, chere, an’ for the first time I was inside you, really inside you, like it was de closest I could ever get t’ you, an’ you to me… I used to think, afterwards, dat’s how it should be between us… dat way dere are no secrets withheld between us, no lies, no limits, no boundaries…” He sighed; one arm moved downward across her back to rest against her hip.
“Ah absorbed you?” she whispered.
“Hmm.” His lips were on her shoulder, brushing her skin with the tickling softness of feathers. “An’ it was de most wonderful t’ing Remy ever felt.”
He began to plant kisses along the slope of her shoulder, each one braver and more ardent than the last. She wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t have said that; that she knew nothing more horrific than this curse that had afflicted her for so long; that her absorbing him was her worst nightmare and always had been. She wanted to tell him, moreover, that his dream confused her, frightened her even, that something about it felt wrong, dreadfully, terribly wrong… Felt familiar? A memory of her kissing him…?
She wanted to say all these things but somehow found she could not – the insistence of his kisses grew, his fingers stroked her bare thigh with the lightness of a memory, the memory of touch. She moaned softly, the distant recollection of that chaste and artful kiss displaced by that of his fingers, of his hands upon her, of his caresses, of the intimacy that they had abstained from for so many long weeks, caught as they were in their own waking nightmares, their own tortured dreams. Now the child-like comfort they had sought in one another was replaced by that of another kind; she held him close to her and forgot, willingly forgot.
“Remy…” With his name she surrendered, and he heard it, as clear as a bell, as clear as the way her body suddenly moved to press against his.
“I want t’ be inside you again, Roguey,” he murmured; his teeth grazed the curve of her shoulder before he drew back, gazing into her eyes, holding her transfixed in a moment in time, a moment in time that felt so far away, yet so familiar…
I want you; I’ll kill you…
“I want us t’ be dat close again, no more secrets, no more limits, no more boundaries…”
He pulled her lips down to his, no more shyness, their kiss desperate, hungry, as if by kissing one another they could become one another, as if by making love they could obliterate one another, be neither one or the other, but both. And in the kiss, in the embrace, in the rediscovered passion that had eluded them for so long, Rogue felt with a sudden, foreboding clarity that they possessed that potential, to be both but neither, to create and obliterate one another.
For they were both sides of the same coin; and that was what had – and always – made them so dangerous.