Roguesboobfreckles!! This one's for you. A two-parter, because it just got slow all put into one chapter, so another chapter here is all yours, too. Bless you for the perfect gift giving ideas, cuz lord knows, I'd have never gotten it right on my own!

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"Yeah, shug, I'm workin' a bit late again tonight. I told you this morning, I still got all those end of the year papers to slog through," Rogue laughs into phone, the lie easily flying out of her mouth. So long as she doesn't have to actually look at anyone, deception isn't difficult, and her husband isn't anything special in that regard.

He makes up for it by being remarkably special in every other way, including his remarkably obnoxious talent at guessing gifts. She'd learned long ago that you can't simply wrap a gift at home when he's away and hide it in the closet til the tree is up. He's a grade A master thief clear down to the marrow in his bones, he'll notice the slightest tells that a present is in the building, and ferret it out within an hour.

One can't actually just leave his gifts under the tree til Christmas morning, either. Not unless you want him to sit down with it five minutes after setting it out, and spend some quality time figuring out what it is. And damn the man, he's good at that game.

She'd gotten to an exasperated point one year where she'd wrapped his gift in an odd shaped box with noisy 'stuffing' to throw him off, shit like his half-drank Coke bottle she'd swiped when he wasn't looking, a handful of marbles, and crunched up newspapers. The asshole had answered by charging the tape on the wrapping to open it up without tearing the paper, seeing what was inside inside, and wrapped it back up so that no one knew he'd opened it in the first place. Had Betsy not been irritated enough at him at the time to poke in his head and snitch on him, Rogue never would have cottoned onto it.

All that leaves her with no option but to put his Christmas gift together at the school, well away from their apartment in Manhattan. Well away from him in general, seeing as how he's been thoroughly tied up getting the Guilds straightened out since Belle's warning at the party.

"Ummmhm, yeah, I'm about done, just gimme another thirty, forty-five minutes to wrap it here and get gone," she answers his question as to how much longer she'd be, grinning and nearly snorting out half her brain at her own joke. "I'll pick up grub on the way, I'm kinda feelin' like wings and fried sides tonight. Sound alright to you?"

Of course, she's definitely not only thirty to forty-five minutes from done, probably closer to a couple of hours, and she bites her lip in a dither as she eyes the complete disaster that is her classroom.

She could stay later tonight and finish it up. It'd make life easier in that she could breathe a sigh of relief and be done with it. She's thoroughly enjoyed the process in the making, but time's cutting it close—only two more days til Christmas.

Buuut...

Well. She's a newlywed, for heaven's sake! A newlywed to an utterly mouthwatering man she's been head over heels for near as long as she's known him, and she'd spent so many of those years shoving him off, away, out of her air so she could breathe and panic at the same time. Now, he's all hers, and she wants to go home and enjoy him.

And eat dinner, too, she thinks as her stomach rumbles, reminding her she hasn't eaten since lunch.

"Alright, I'll see you in a bit." She pauses for a second, fiddling with the ring sparkling around her finger, a shy sort of smile on her mouth. Then, "love you, sugar."

"Love you, too, beb. Now, don' make me wait on your sweet ass to get home, Anna-Marie. I got plans for that ass, and I been makin' 'em all day, y' hear?"

He blows a kiss and hangs up, and Rogue is left staring at her phone with a stupidly huge smile, cheeks flushed a little at his flirting.

And to think she'd considered herself well past that, those days of being all young, and all that silly blushing she used to do on account of one Remy LeBeau so much as looking her way!

"Maybe I did get past it," she mutters to herself , looking back at her handiwork. "Maybe it wasn't a good thing, either, and all's it took to right it was a trip down memory lane," she adds, eyes sweeping over boxes and piles of said memories.

A scrapbook. A scrapbook jam-packed with hundreds of mementos of their roller coaster of a relationship, slated for hilariously tacky and cheesy Christmas wrapping because she loves that kitschy kind of shit, and she knows he does, too.

As soon as they'd gotten back together after Paraiso, she'd had the idea to amass it all and sit down with him, hash out in the name of a fresh start all those things she'd thought and felt for him throughout the years. And then…

Well! Then, they'd gotten married on impulse, jettisoned off into space, had their honeymoon crashed and completely hijacked. Then, came back, had a party that her husband's Guild and ex-wife crashed (rude) and oh hey, it's five seconds til Christmas!

She'd immediately hopped to it, thinking this was absolutely perfect for his first Christmas with her newly communicative self!

And so, she gone out, found the perfect book, purchased the pretty, expensive paper, markers and pens and stickers, and everything a craftsy person would ever want for such a project, and she'd excitedly started piecing it together, filling up it up with pictures, pressed flowers, movie stubs, beer caps, notes he'd left her. Pictures she'd printed off of screen-shot texts he'd sent her. Lighters she'd found here and there during times he'd left, and one she'd pilfered during their time in California, a bag of sand from there, too. Random cigarettes she'd pulled from his pack when they'd talked on the roof, all of them fiddled with, but none ever smoked. And so much more, just sentimental things she'd squirreled away in a box over the years, spilling out of journals she'd written and crudely sketched in, out of envelopes stuffed too full, jars, coin purses, even his old wallet when it'd finally bit it and fell apart.

Just a bunch of weird, mundane little odds and ends really, odds and ends that'd meant something to her, made her feel things she'd been unable to communicate to him, and here she's sat the last three evenings, reliving each and every moment all this stuff signified to her. Remembering and feeling exactly what she'd thought and felt back then, when she'd just begun to realize that this insanely hot, smooth, bold charmer actually seemed to give a damn about her, while carelessly shrugging off all her baggage everyone else (herself included) wanted to hold her to the fire for.

God, had that really been such short a time ago? Only a handful of years? She's only twenty-seven, she'd met him at barely twenty. And he'd been so young, too, only twenty-two, so impulsive, and just as weighed down with problems as she'd ever been, he'd just been better at hiding it.

She goes a little sad at those thoughts. Had neither of them gotten so torn down by their own dramas, they could've been great this entire time. She doesn't really regret the angst, the reality checks, or the fallouts, but…

She sighs, shakes her head, and reaches for a post-it with a scrawled note he'd written her one time she'd missed dinner after an especially nasty absorption. This one hadn't made it into the book simply because she'd had better ones to put in there, but she still remembers this occasion like it it's still happening. It'd been in the early days, and she hadn't yet discovered any real techniques in coping with a new psyche. Last thing she'd needed was a crowd, and she hadn't banked on being missed, anyway.

"I hadn't banked on that blasted swamp rat at all," she murmurs with a soft smile, gently smoothing the curled edges of the post-it, just as she'd done so many times before. "Hey, Roguey. Saved you something from dinner. Eat it still hot, it tastes like shit cold. -Remy"

She laughs softly at the words. Not the most romantic thing he's ever written, and definitely not the most romantic gesture he's ever made, but lord, if she hadn't treasured that note!

"Heavens, he's gonna laugh himself stupid when he realizes what I loser I was, gettin' all worked up over a plate of food and over-analyzin' a little note like I did," she huffs a laugh and carefully puts the sticky note back and continues sifting through her shoeboxes of goodies to add to the book. "More like, gettin' all worked up and over-analyzin' everything he did."

And she had! Little naive, inexperienced, touch and affection starved, twenty-year-old Rogue hadn't known what to make of having a man like Remy pay her any mind. She'd known objectively that she was pretty, but she'd also known pretty only got you so far, and for a long time, she'd thought that was all she could bring to the table. Once she'd figured out Remy was actually interested, was legitimately pursuing her…

Well. It was a lot. And she hadn't known anything, despite have absorbed everything there was to know. She'd fallen so hard, so fast, and he'd caught her as best he knew how, and when all the chips had fallen after them…

She'd been devastated. She'd been scared by that, too. And she couldn't—didn't know how to—show it, deal with it. And then the only thing she'd had left of him was all this shit in front of her, and she hadn't known how to deal with it, either.

She'd tried more than once to toss it out like yesterday's trash, during insecure times and flat out heartbroken ones. Thankfully, she'd failed quite spectacularly at it, because as she'd scrambled to get this together, agonizing over ordering everything just so, she'd felt that old warmth, those girlish butterflies, that nervous new excitement all over again. And the thought of giving it to Remy, telling him about it, showing him just exactly what huge a part of her life he's been is both exhilarating and terrifying.

Laying herself wide open isn't a habit of hers, and she has a feeling this will always be something she'll struggle with.

Kind of like him, too, and bless the man, he's trying.

"A real pair, ain't we, Mr. LeBeau?" She chuckles to herself, reaching back for that note. What the hell anyway, this one's one of her favorites, he'd made the smallest gesture with one of the hardest-hitting impacts that day, it's going in the book. Even if it is out of order.

"Definitely a bad thing I got past it with you, Cajun. And definitely for the very best I'm right back in it, for keeps this time, huh?"