(no subject)

[blindcut]

WHO: Rogue & Gambit
WHEN: 2/22/25, second day of the Demutanator plot
WHERE: Their suite
WHAT: Kissin'
WARNINGS: None

Feels too early on a Saturday morning to get up, but too late to go back to sleep. Rogue stares at the ceiling and then gets out of bed all at once. Fresh air wouldn’t feel right on her bare arms, so she chooses some gloves to greet the day with. Elbow length, black. Pulls them right out of the drawer and onto her hands so she won’t be tempted to not do it. She doesn’t let herself think about how everyone’s powers are off. That’s what they’d all said yesterday, and that’s why she left without saying. Rogue hasn’t tested it personally. Isn’t quite ready to believe it’s true, because leave it to her luck to touch someone and instantly the lights would come back on. No, thanks.

Leaving felt right at the time. Feels less right now, as she’s standing on the other side of a wall from her husband/best friend, she can’t shake the guilt that she hasn’t even checked on him. All of a sudden, it feels like one more minute would be too long to wait, and so she strides through their shared bathroom. She leans against the door, grinning, like it’s any other day, and also a time when anyone should be awake at all.

“Hey, there, sunshine.”

Gambit looks bad.

Besides the fact that he is undeniably off-kilter without his powers and never unaware of it for a second while they’re gone, he also slept like shit last night. He’s not a morning person on his best day, anyway, and he looks haggard and unkempt with dark circles under his eyes and his hair piled on top of his head in a messy bun. As she comes in he groans, props himself up on an elbow, and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“The hell you been?” he asks. He’d been concerned until she woke him up moments ago, but now he’s abruptly irritated with her. And with himself, a little, for even being worried about where she was in the first place. It’s not like she can’t take care of herself, and he knows she has a more complicated relationship with her mutant powers than he does, but he can’t help but feel it slightly perverse that he’d known more about Jean Grey’s whereabouts yesterday than Rogue’s. “Shit’s been crazy.”

“Well ain’t you as chipper as a sparrow on a Sunday.”

Rogue crosses her arms, snapping back out of old habit. It’s unfair. He’d likely been worried. Probably, she owes him an answer. The depressing truth of it’s just that yesterday, Rogue had gone into the city, indulged in an old habit of walking through the streets, brushing against people’s arms to skim off their moods and memories. Not enough to harm them, certainly. Just enough to remind herself that she could’ve. She’s still a danger. But all of that sounds so sad aloud.

She sits on the edge of his bed, uninvited, to look for herself and see if he looks just tired or actually hurt. And maybe to see what his eyes look like if not glowing red, and set in darkness, if that’d changed too. She relents and gives about three quarters of an answer in the end. “Just went to the city. Came back late, didn’t wanna wake you. What’d I miss?”

“Nightcrawler’s naked,” he mumbles, a little petulant. There’s more he could say, having spent the majority of his day consoling depowered students through their teen dramas, but he can’t bring himself to find the humor in any of this. He sits up fully and crosses his legs so he’s situated right by her side. He hasn’t taken the same time to examine his own mundane eyes yet, but they are indeed a middle shade of warm brown at the moment.

“Oh, that I gotta see.” Rogue says, heavy dose of sarcasm to answer Gambit’s tone. She does catch his eyes, but looks at her lap first. Rogue stares at her gloves for a second, tugs at the fingertips, but doesn’t pull them off, in the end. She touches her covered fingers to his cheek, examining, but also as a small conciliatory gesture.

“How d’you like your own new look, sugar?”

Momentarily he just arches a brow at her, unsure what she means and a little distracted by her proximity. He’s well conditioned to never touch her first, even absentmindedly. She initiates, sometimes, when it’s safe to. But this isn’t typical, and he curls his fingers into the plush fuzzy blanket beneath to suppress his own urge to reciprocate the gesture.

Once he gets his wits about him he realizes she’s probably not gazing deeply into his eye just for the hell of it and puts it together.

“Ain’t had a chance to look in a mirror,” he says, screwing his eyes shut and leaning away from her to jostle her hand off his face. “That’s how crazy shit’s been.”

“They’re brown.” She informs him, removing her hand. She misses how they were before, but bites the tongue in her mouth halfway to clean off before that thought creeps out. She doesn’t let herself look upset over something so inevitable as his pushing her hand away. Just tucks it under her, to not repeat same mistakes twice.

“C’mon, don’t be mad.” Rogue knows she has no real right to ask that, but does all the same, turning eyes up, apologetic without saying. “It was just…you know. Felt like I couldn’t stay here without making the crazy even crazier.”

That does get him to look at her again. Whether or not that’s a good thing, though, remains to be seen. There’s nothing about her being around that he thinks would make things more chaotic, except a single one, which has been on his mind since the moment he’d realized she was gone.

“‘Cuz you think I can’t handle it?” he asks with a false smile. He feels utterly charmless without his hypnotic powers, but decides to just push through anyway. “Or you can’t?”

She narrows her eyes. It’s unfair of him to reduce it to this, when the whole of it is more complicated. It’s the instant solution to problems that have kept her from everything. She was scared she’d cry at the feeling of anyone else’s skin, or that something even more rotten would seep out of her, that this is who she was. Can’t expect him to understand that.

But, she doesn’t explain or apologize, because unfortunately he’s never dangled a piece of bait she hasn’t bit right at. “I can handle myself just fine, Remy.” To prove that to him, maybe to herself, or just to plain be stupid, Rogue peels off the long gloves and mirrors his stupid fake smile. “Can you?”

He looks her in the eye, offers her his own hand, and raises his eyebrows in challenge.

Rogue takes it without hesitation. Nothing happens.

She dares further to link her fingers into his. This is the longest they’ve ever actually touched. She hazards a joke, voice soft, “Dyin’?”

“Not just yet,” he says, twisting their joined hands around and pulling them up to rest the back of her hand against his face, where it had been a moment earlier. He turns his head to rest his lips against her knuckles as he speaks. “How you doin’ now, petite?”

Nothing bad happens, still. His life isn’t sucked out of him. Her breath is, though, or at least it gets stuck somewhere in her ribcage. There’s no reason not to, so she brings up her other hand so her fingers can trace the angle of his jaw, and push back a lock of his hair that had been bothering her this whole time.

“Maybe a little crazy, after all.” She remembers to say, “Unless that’s just a normal touch thing.” How would she know?

He hums against her skin. “Can be,” he confirms. He doesn’t say anything else that could be incriminating for either of them, which is a bit of a futile effort, because her hand is on his face and he’s also feeling reckless.

He leans in to rest his forehead against hers and inclines his head slightly before he stops in place and catches her eye. “You wanna?”

He’s not teasing her anymore; it’s just a genuine question and offer.

She pauses to look into his new eyes, trying to guess what he’s really thinking. If he really wants to. This breaks down about a thousand carefully established boundaries. But if not now, when?

So she grants them both the dignity of a bold little grin. “Never did get to do this proper at our wedding.” She pulls away for a moment to look at him, stroking his face with her thumb. She looks like she’s about to say something more important, doesn’t, and instead presses her lips to his.

Despite all the preamble, he still manages to be caught off guard by this, and freezes for a moment before reciprocating.

This is not a kiss suited to the courthouse wedding they’d had, but that’s also not the occasion here anyway, as he tries to remind himself even as his thoughts wander to the memory of how she’d looked that day. Although in the intervening years he’s always mindful not to touch her, he’s never treated her like a fragile thing, and he quickly moves to wrap an arm around her waist to hoist her towards him.

Rogue lets her body follow his guidance, pressing against him, looping her arms around his shoulders and holding tight. Suddenly she’s under the influence of the kind of desire that defies any caution. Giving into that had always burned her before. Each and every time. She can’t afford that with him.

So before the wildfire takes over, she makes herself pull away and breathe, hands still caught in his t-shirt, which has the Ratatouille rat on it, because its name is also Remy and she thought it was funny. Makes her smile even now, even as she raises her head a few inches and tries to think of anything good and right to say. “I think..” with absolutely no idea for a follow up comes out instead.

No good conclusion to this statement, he realizes with a twisting feeling in his stomach. Kind of the problem with the entire experiment, which he’d already realized when he was thinking about the possibility yesterday. A good kiss, in fact, is worse in some ways than a bad kiss.
Then again, there’s not much point in angsting about it now. He flops back on the bed, laughs, and drags his hands down his own face before looking back up at her. She still looks like she might be at risk of saying something, and his first instinct is to lean up and kiss her again.

“You gotta get out of here,” he tells her instead.

She sits back when he does, shaken out of the moment. She’s put out but also in some ways relieved. Now it’s over. Now she knows. She rights herself, and instead of him, reaches for the nearest cat, who is Figaro.

“Fine here, thanks, sweetheart.” She stays for no reason, reveling in stroking his little ears. Humiliating situation or no, he should know better than to tell her what to do. Maybe it’s a conscious decision to bomb this entirely. Probably not. Either way, she deigns to peer up from behind the cat’s head.

“Knew you couldn’t handle it.”

He doesn’t dignify this with a response, but lets out a disbelieving scoff before he drags himself out of bed and heads directly out the door into the hall. After a second he re-enters the room, grabs a pair of pants off the floor, and once again retreats.