Title: This Twilight
Author: Lucia de’Medici
Fandom: X-Men, Marvel 616
Summary: The voice of Rogue’s conscious sounds surprisingly like mom.
Pairing: Rogue/Gambit
Supporting Cast: Mystique, Lapin (in cameo)
Rating: PG
Notes: Written for Ebontien, and set just after the events of “Messiah Complex”. I’m sort of reluctant to post this here, since I usually keep anything under a thousand words relegated to my livejournal account. Suffice to say, I realize this is barely a drabble, but it’s fairly concentrated despite its size. Please do leave a review if you are inclined to do so. I’d be interested to hear what you think. (Title derived from “In This Twilight” by Nine Inch Nails.) Also, this was, in fact, posted here sometime last week. I experienced a very brief, but marked fit of self-consciousness and took it down fairly quickly... which promoted a flood of people looking for it on my LJ (which was pretty cool). So, if you missed it, here it is again: it's still, imho, a trifle, but whatever. Some people like... trifles? Maybekinda?

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This Twilight
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Bare fingers move with particular delicacy over a chapped but unbearably soft mouth. Dry and warm, the lips quirk beneath her reverent inspection.

A ruby on black gaze levels on hers, and Rogue has to blink away the sudden sting the trapped expression draws from her; it’s a familiar feeling, a swelling soreness just below the solar plexus. The good kind of hurting. Remy’s inspired kind of hurting. Rogue knows it tastes equally sweet and bitter.

This is a stolen moment, taken furtively beneath the passing twilight as beyond the window, the sun sinks beneath a Los Angeles horizon. The pollution makes the tops of buildings haze-kissed, but for what its worth, she doesn’t care. The watery quality of light is like planter’s punch; the sun an orange wedge.

If Remy had a drink, he’d likely raise it in silent toast for the things disappearing with the passing day, washed out beyond the windows of a dingy hotel room.

No drinks. Nothing to celebrate.

Fingertips drag over coarse stubble, the edge of her thumb smoothing down the tuft of auburn hair just beneath his lip. She memorizes each line carved into his maturing skin. Smiles – here – at the corners of the eyes, around his mouth. Disappointment etched into the furrows above his brow – here. The pores on the bridge of his nose – slightly crooked – broken in a fight with Emil when they were just boys. A candid bit of information. Coveted. Hers. Hers, she thinks desperately: Once lost. Recovered. Lost again.

She claims ownership of the frown he wears this time.

There are no traces of black left on his weathered skin, and his hair is the rich, smooth auburn she’s longed to run her fingers through time and again.

Her palms tingle with each small, tentative gesture. It’s heady, even though each caress feels appallingly empty.

Rogue continues her exploration with the sort of desperation that recalls the little voice at the back of the mind that doesn’t stop talking to you when you lay your head down at night and try to succumb to sleep. It begs to be heard, knows its voice rings true, even as you try to trade in the pain and the loneliness for a few short hours, only to wake hardened and tired again.

Is his bed as unmade as it was the day he left?

She grits her teeth.

She understands something about Remy LeBeau now, more than she ever has before: It’s a lesson well-learned, out here with the roar of traffic and the constant threat of skin to skin contact on the busy streets and beneath crackling, wilted palms… and all the while with the constant narrative in her head:

It’s the urgency that gets you chain-smoking; that gets you drinking straight from the bottle; it’s the certainty that someday, you’re gonna die and there’s not a damned thing you can do to escape it.

Everything else, you can run from.

Well, hardly everything, Rogue.

She shuts her eyes, withdraws her hands, and fists her hands tightly enough to leave crescents in her bare palms, were they not already so calloused.

“Shut up,” she whispers. The force of the command is in her mind, and it echoes.

Her control is slipping, taking with it her death grip on the moment.

It doesn’t matter that she’s in Los Angeles and not in New York. She’s escaped neither of them.

With this grim realization, she opens her eyes, her vision blurring with a surprising show of force getting choked before it can spill over. It’s enough to shuffle her senses before they cascade into clarity:

The vision of Remy in the mirror staring back at her seems less certain, the eyes bleeding out first from red to green. She’s reaching for the wilting features even as Mystique begins laughing; the psyche’s distaste for the small illusion and the brief respite she’s taken from it is evident.

Remy’s reflection looks back at her sadly, as if wanting to ask, “Why did y’ leave to begin with, chére?” And she wants to answer that it’s because Remy’s not the only one with two perfectly good feet to do the running … But in a moment, even that’s gone, and Rogue is left with her fingers trembling against her own face.

But I won’t leave you, my dear.

Rogue turns, knowing with despairing certainty that her mother is right, and she can forgive Remy no more than she can forgive herself for trying to get away.

-fin-