Rarely, lately, did Bash stray far from his bed before noon — he was a creature of the night, these days, a ghostly sprite prone to prowling the halls of the estate after dark and riling up the family portraits when the moon was too bright and his mind too restless to surrender so easily, lest it be one of the nights the terrors came. Even rarer still was the sobriety that currently sat upon his shoulders like an ill-fitting coat, and without the comfort that the stifling of his senses provided Bash found himself at the mercy of the morning’s elements — of the Spring sun, sweating through his riding coat and assaulting his eyes, of the loudness and the smell of the beasts their family had always been so fond of, snorting and stamping and rustling and flapping in the stables.

His fingers massaged dully at his eyelids like it might diffuse the tension throbbing behind them, but without the warmth of something to dull the whispers in his brain he felt like an exposed nerve, being prodded at. It was a familiar feeling he had largely come to associate with being in Rodolphus’s company. “Rolf,” even his name was wielded as a complaint, born of all the practice a bratty younger sibling could muster over forty-two years of life, “Would you just pick a damned horse already. You know that I’m going to—” two lengths ahead, the impatient stallion at the end with the mean kick “—win, no matter who you pick.”

Bash had always had the knack for picking horses. 

It was certain in the same way that Bash had already found his riding jacket, hanging on the back of his wardrobe door this morning. A curious and unacknowledged truth that Bash would cheerfully not notice beyond a stroke of luck after being improbably ousted from a fitful two hours of sleep to be beckoned to the family’s favoured (and most lucrative) pastime. 

It had been too long since they had done this. That, in part, was Rogue’s fault. It was no secret that the X-Men -- while incredibly fulfilling -- had also dominated her life. Her time for her husband had dwindled, and as a result her marriage had fallen to the side. It hadn’t been deliberate or on purpose; maybe that was the worst part of it all: the fact that Rogue hadn’t even meant to slide away.

It wasn’t anything that couldn’t be fixed, however. They remained firmly in love and cared deeply for each other. Rogue had fought to find enough peace with her body and powers so that she could learn to love another fully, and that wasn’t something she would let go of.