ain't that just peachy?

[mon coeur] sorry bout that, chere [mon coeur] but it’s a good thing i never sleep, then [mon coeur] been sleepin even less since you been gone UNSENT [mon coeur] ah, that i can do! [mon coeur] [image attached]

“  you can talk to me, or not talk to me, but i’m here.  ” // @goinrogue​

Before her death, Rachel could count on one hand the number of times she’d stepped foot in a bar. She’d always hated them. Emotions ran so rampant when people were drunk, were wild and slippery things that twisted themselves into knots and lingered outside her mind, knocking on the door and insisting on being let inside. If she was going to drink, she’d always preferred to do it at home, where the only emotions she had to grapple with were her own.

But her own were so much harder to deal with these days. She found she almost preferred everyone else’s.

And so, bars became a tad more attractive. She sat on a stool, she nursed a fruity drink that Kori would have liked and Dick would have teased her about, and she let everyone else’s feelings drown out her own. She let herself be swallowed up. She pretended two years had not passed without her. She was wound as tight as a spring, but no one was ever sober enough to notice.

At least, not usually.

Tonight, the woman sitting beside her seemed to pick up on it. Rachel shifted, glancing over with a small, uncertain smile. “I don’t know that my problems are the kind you talk about,” she admitted. “You might think I was crazy.” You might be right to.

&

For a long time, she’d been afraid of bars. So many people in such a small space, uninhibited, handsy. It would be too easy to have one drink too many and forget, or stumble and grab the nearest arm for support, or, worse, be grabbed by someone getting a little too friendly. (Although, she supposed the people doing the grabbing may have deserved what they’d get. Maybe.) But as she got older and calmer and braver, Rogue got better at it. And if she had to be the woman in gloves and a jacket in a bar, so be it.

Once, in the before, she would have wanted company. They could have squeezed into a booth and bought each other beers and pretended to be less broken than they were. But a lot had changed in a few months. People were dead. Scott and Jean bore the weight of the world on their shoulders. And Remy was... Anna had left. She had panicked and run from all of this in an effort to find calm, and she had barely even thought about what she was doing to him. 

She had left him.

So she sat alone, cradling a whiskey, relishing its burn on the way down. The young woman next to her looked to be doing the same thing, though her drink looked a lot more colorful. She didn’t say anything; they made no contact, but Rogue knew. She could feel it. She’d been there. Maybe she was there.

You might think I’m crazy, the young woman said.

You have no idea.

❝ I want to say “don’t do that ever again”, but I know you’re going to anyway. ❞ // @goinrogue​

Despite being a hero for…well, a pretty large portion of his life, at this point, it was fairly easy to take Gar off-guard. Even more so when you were and looked like you could break him in half with one precise look. Still, he jumped, throwing a handful of chocolate chips to the ground in his surprise, guiltily looking at the customer who’d just walked in.

“My hands are like, totally clean, I swear.” Like being arrested, Gar held his hands up parallel to one another in surrender. Then, the face sort of clicked. “Hey, you look kind of familiar. Do I know you?” Another handful of chocolate chips from the bin beside him, half-filled and not yet put on the line, and a tilt of his head as he shoved a few in his mouth.

&

She wasn’t his mother. She definitely wasn’t his boss. Hell, she was barely his customer. She just wanted a double scoop of mint chip, sugar cone, chocolate sprinkles in the middle of January (hey, her hands were already gloved; her fingers could handle the cold), and she found the green-haired kid behind the counter going at the toppings bare-handed, and something kicked in. Maybe she’d been gone too long; her people skills had gotten rusty.

“Don’t ya have spoons for that sort of thing?” Rogue teased, looking from the perpetrator to the scene of the crime and back again. The green-haired kid. Who was he? They hadn’t met, had they? "I don’t think so,” she said, pushing a piece of her bangs out of her face. They was distinctive (less now that the girls on the internet had coopted her style); people thought they knew her an awful lot. Usually, they knew her from the photographs. No use hiding. “It’s probably the hair.” 

//

She had left.

He thought they would be past this by now. No–he had hoped they would be past this by now. But Remy should have known better. He and Rogue were too much alike, and always would be. The very thing that brought them close together was the same thing that always broke them apart.

In all fairness, this time he did not really blame her. Everything had gone to hell with the siege, and even if Remy had not felt the attachment to Mystique that she did, he knew losing her mother had to be hard on Rogue. But still he had thought–hoped–that she would have let him in, let him share her anguish…let them work through it together. Because was that not what people who loved each other did? 

Yes, he might well have done the same. He probably would have done the same, leave instead of trying to work things out. That was what Remy had always been used to, after all, why he had never been in a stable relationship before Rogue. It was easier to have a one-night stand, a quick connection without any baggage, and then leave. Trying to develop and nourish a relationship was a hell of a lot harder. But Remy thought they had agreed to try, to give this a real go…to try and be as normal as was possible for people like them. 

Yet, despite all their efforts, there were always barriers between them. The obvious physical barrier, yes, but they both were too used to putting up invisible barriers, too used to keeping themselves distant. More than anything, he wished they could both stop that, but seemingly without even thinking, they were already doing it again. Even before Rogue spoke, Remy was trying to keep his emotions in check, keeping himself distracted by petting Oliver, who had crawled into his lap at just the right time.

“Hey yourself, chere,” he said softly, giving a rueful chuckle at the thought that things surrounding them would ever not be a mess, “Eh, same ol’, same ol’. You know how t'ings go wit’ us. We never seem t’ get a moment o’ peace.” Remy was talking about mutants in general, but he was well aware the same statement could apply to their relationship. “I’d like t’ hear ‘bout dat, yeah, 'cause you know I missed you jus’ as much. I don’–” he began, but his voice caught a little bit, already feeling his emotions rise too much, “So, you find anyt'ing interestin’ out…wherever it was you went? I kinda found some li'l t'ings myself in de interim.” He nodded towards the cat in his lap and at the other two, who were looking at Rogue with curious expressions.

&

She had left.

She hadn’t meant to leave him specifically, not really. It was more of a leaving everything kind of situation. Too much, too fast, too many problems closing in around her ears until she’d panicked and fled before she erupted entirely. But she’d left. And in doing so, she’d left him.

And she always did this.

They always did this.

Things would be good, too good, and then something would hitch and, instead of letting him in, she’d build up her barriers stronger, pull away farther. She’d spent too much of her life with other people in her head, fighting for the hard-won space in her own mind. The idea of choosing to let anyone else share it, of showing what was inside, when she herself barely understood it, when the grip on its edges and grooves was so tenuous and new--it terrified her. She kept so much of herself locked tight, away from Remy. Away from herself.

Not that Remy was entirely blameless. They were alike, too alike. It was why they worked, and why they self destructed on cue. Rogue could set clocks to their cycles: flirt, get close, almost make it, run away. This time, it was her fault. Next time-- would there be a next time? Should there be a next time?

A little orange cat crawled into his lap, and his edges softened. Tender. He was tender. A notorious red-eyed thief, surrounded by kittens. Her chest caught at the contradiction of it, of how perfectly right it was in its wrongness. The cats were new, and though she could never have expected them, they made sense. It was a missing piece clicking into place.

Oh, she wanted there to be a next time.

(She might have ruined any chance they had of a next time.)

“If things went right for more than an hour, I’d start to think the world had ended,” she said. “I completely forgot to get you a tee shirt, I just...”

He trailed off, and so did she. She looked at him, green eyes meeting red, hoping they knew enough by now to pick up what neither of them could say. Then, quickly, she cleared her throat and looked away. 

The white and grey cats watched her. They were probably wondering who this strange woman was, waltzing into their father’s place with her sad smile and emotional baggage. I’m not stealing him from you, she thought. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t, even if I could.

“I can see that,” she said. “I love them.”

She extended a hand, and the grey one stepped forward, sniffing at her glove curiously, then disapprovingly. She smiled. “Right, sorry about that.” 

Of course it was. 

Was she serious? Was she joking? These days, with these people, Rogue would believe anything. They all coped however they needed, be it knives or vanishing to far-off corners of the Earth without warning. Some methods were healthier than others, sure, but she was in no position to judge. Especially not Lorna.

Lorna-- Rogue didn’t know what she had been through, but she knew what it was like to lose a parent. She knew what it was like to realize they were a monster. She knew what it was like to love them anyway (even if you weren’t sure that they’d ever loved you, or if they’d just used you for your fear and your innocence and your powers). She knew what it was like to mourn them.

She looked up and away from the knives and turned back towards Lorna. 

“How are you doin’, sugar? Really?”

She knew the world she was coming back to would look different from the one she’d left. Genosha, where they would be safe and free and able to live as themselves without fear. It was supposed to feel like a breath you hadn’t realized you’d been holding until it was gone. For the rest of them, anyway. It would never be that easy for her (not that it had been easy at all). It didn’t matter where she was; Rogue would never be able to feel that exhalation. She’d keep holding her breath forever.

So she’d left.

And it had festered and fermented in her absence, boiling and bubbling until the cracks were exposed and people were dead and Scott Summers sat in an office that, Rogue thought, fit him strangely. There’s no such thing as a utopia. Anyone could have told you that.

It should have felt like coming home. It didn’t. She felt like a stranger here. A tourist. Her own family wore different faces, carried new burdens. And here she was, slipping between it all.

What had they done?

“I know you do, Scott,” she said. “I’m here now. What do you need?”

@goinrogue

[📱to lonely hearts club ] hi you looked good tod– [DELETED] [📱to lonely hearts club ] did you change your hair care routine?– [DELETED] [📱to lonely hearts club ] hi!– [DELETED] [📱to lonely hearts club ] in theory [📱to lonely hearts club ] if I were to buy new shampoo [📱to lonely hearts club ] would you have any recommendations?

Here. He was here.

Of everything Rogue had missed these past few months--the team, a good bagel, her bed, her mother (don’t think about her mother)--Remy LeBeau had been at the very top of the list. That beautiful face, that devilish grin, those violently beautiful eyes. The way he said her name like everything was going to be alright.

And that was what made him dangerous.

It was too easy to fall all the way in with Remy. It was too easy to drop her guard and forget--that she couldn’t touch him, couldn’t kiss him, couldn’t be his without losing whatever she had of herself, couldn’t be his without ruining him. They’d played this game before. They knew how it ended. They’d playact at being normal and then something would go wrong, and someone would die, and her powers would go haywire, and, and, and.

She’d gone away to get a grip on herself. She’d come back before she was ready because, once again, it had all gone sideways. She hadn’t come back to do this, not again.

But, good God did she want to kiss him.

Instead, she smiled sadly and tucked her hair behind her ear. Her other hand sat in her lap, nervously balled tight into a fist. “Hey, Cajun,” she said. “You wanna talk about the whole right mess I walked back into?” The part where my momma’s still dead, and now Magnus is, too, and I could still kill any one of you? “Or the part where I missed ya an awful lot?”