She and Pyro had slept late on account of her waking up every couple of hours not used to sleeping next to someone else, having foregone her own room to slip between his sheets. The feeling of his skin was an addiction that was only growing inside of her.

She thought he'd be annoyed at the constant interruption, but instead he seemed equally pleased to be waking up with her in his arms every time, a lazy smile gracing his lips that had a soft boyish sincerity she couldn't ever place in his smirks and innuendos.

She could tell from the feel of his touch that he loved her in a soft way, but it was rare that she could see it too, and she found that she didn't mind her peppered wakings either.

When they'd finally rested enough, having slept well past breakfast, she managed to convince him to blow off trainings with her kisses and caresses. Pyro luxuriated in the silky feel of her skin wet with sweat and excitement. She let his hand trail all over her, memorizing her between her thighs, pinching her nipples, teasing her and bringing her to ecstasy again and again. She begged him to return the favor as he insisted that they had time enough for that later. The hard swell of him against her was a temptation and promise she desperately wanted, but had no idea how to explore without his guidance and certainly couldn't without his consent.

"There you go, darling." he'd breathe into her ear as she gasped and withered again and again underneath him. "You're beautiful."

"You're a god." she moaned into his shoulder, kissing every inch between gasps and writhing.

She called him John during a particularly hard climax, and he found he barely minded. With his fingers inside her in these sleepy moments locked away in his room, he felt more like John than he had thought would ever be possible again, and when he came himself just from the pleasure of having pleasured her, he called her Marie.

"What is he doing here?" she asked upon seeing him. Remy cut a magnetic figure among the array of new recruits the Brotherhood always had coming in and out. "He's an X-Men. He shouldn't be here."

Pyro watched her watch Gambit, his breath even and eyes intent. He ran his fingertips down her sleeve, and she shivered with the feeling of being caught. "We were both X-Men once."

She turned to him with parted lips, ready to say… something .

"Hey!" Pyro called out to Remy before she could register his intentions. Remy turned and took stock of Pyro, his lips taking the jealous curve she'd come to know too well. There could be something sinister in his grin sometimes, too friendly. He sauntered over to them with all the charm his well-toned body always seemed to have ready just beneath the skin.

"I hear you knew my girl during her X-Men days."

Remy chucked at Pyro, looking him right in the eyes, before turning his attention solely on her. "We had some good times, didn't we, my river rat?"

She always felt warm when he focused on her like that, and she could feel her mind slipping, feel the edges of everything but him begin to fade. "What're you doing here? Why don't you go home?"

"Been a long time since I've been to the Quarter. You want me to take you there, give you a tour?"

She hated when he did that, intentionally twisting her words to suit what he did and didn't want to talk about. "What are you doing here?"

Pyro watched her carefully, tugging at her sleeve as she grew more irritated with Gambit, and the other man shuffled under her attention, like foreplay. "He's just doing a job, not staying." He was just guessing, praying maybe.

Gambit caught his words without looking at him. "He's right. Don't know where I'll be next, but there's always another something that needs doing." His voice turned thick and low. "Not happy to see me, petite?"

She could feel her skin getting hot, because she was not happy to see him. He didn't belong here. He was supposed to be a better man than all this, right? His dark side, his mistakes as he liked to call them, wasn't that all supposed to be in his past?

"Your forgetting I know what kind of man you are."

Remy recoiled from her words like a strike in the heart. She felt satisfied as his eyes narrowed.. He shot a look at her, gesturing at the larger expanse around them.

Pyro took pause. These two clearly had a history he needed more information on fast. "And what kind of man is that, exactly?"

Gambit glared at Pyro, at the question, his expression turning grim.

"He'll be useful." Rogue answered for him, turning to look at Pyro finally, her stance all fire and lightning in a way that had nothing to do with him, and she stormed off, leaving the two men behind. Pyro reflexively dug into his pocket and pulled out his zippo, the one comforting thing he seemed to have always had. The click hit his mind like a match. "You-"

Gambit hissed hard air out between his teeth, and turned on his heel quickly, taking off to his own bunk, hands buried deep in his own pockets. Rogue crossed her arms in turn, shutting him out if still being physically present.

Pyro felt the hard emptiness of an outsider having witnessed something surely intimate and meant only for the two of them.

Pyro followed Rogue to her room, pulling the door open without knocking. She was sitting crossed-legged on her bed, facing the windows. She had them open, but the curtains were undrawn, and they blew into the room illuminated with the midday light, brushing against her face. She needed it, the fresh air whipping into her lungs, against her bare skin.

"Do you think it'll ever happen, that I'll ever be able to choose who I can touch?" She said the words without looking at him. He was comforted that she must know it was him having followed her and not Gambit, right? "Hell, who I can hurt, too." She wrapped one palm around the fingers of her other hand, tugging the bare skin up lightly enough not to crack the knuckles.

She'd made a lot of progress, and he wasn't in the mood to indulge her just this second. "Ex-boyfriend?" The word came out with hard edges.

She made no move to look at him, and he saw her body tighten and grow rigid. "No."

"Then what the hell was that?"

"It was nothing."

"Like hell it was nothing."

"It was nothing!" She had turned to look at him, her weight on one arm and her mouth twisted in a grimace. There it was again, a fire entirely her own.

He shook his head, his eyes steady and his lips set into a deep frown. He'd thought maybe he'd do something to screw everything up, but he hadn't done anything at all. She simply belonged to someone else. Didn't she always? Didn't everything good always?

She uncrossed her legs with another heady sigh, reaching her arm out for him to come to her, to touch her, to comfort her. "Don't waste your time thinking about him."

He nodded, uneasy, and crossed the threshold of her room to take her offered hand. He needed to touch her now, needed to sink himself through her pores.

She relaxed when he reached her, when his fingertips slid across her palm like an itch, and just as his palm fell flat against her and his body sank into her bed, she felt it. The pull of her powers always started off subtle, but the rise of their veins never did. Pyro let out a groan from the surprise of the pain of it, and fell flat on his back.

She pulled her hand away fast and hard, and his body ached a little from the drag her powers left in his muscles and from the want of her. He looked up at her with tired eyes as she shook in horror, and he understood something. Trust. That was the key underlying her powers. She had a secret now that she was purposely withholding- she didn't trust him- and now they couldn't touch.

The laughter tasted like metal in his mouth.

They found out in the meeting that Gambit had been brought in to break into the location she'd gotten, and to steal all the files so they'd know what exactly the human's had developed. He'd scooped it out the day before, but the mission ended up more complicated than anyone expected. Gambit had gotten to where the files were kept only to find that the humans had been tipped off somehow. They'd disappeared with their files and all that was left was the competition.

"Nothing in that room to steal but a woman's heart." Gambit chuckled. "Their protection is no thing neither. It's a person."

"A woman." Rogue cut in, understanding exactly what the canter of his voice suggested. Not just a woman, but a beautiful woman, a woman he thought attainable for him.

"That's right," he gave her a wicked grin, "and Gambit can break into a woman as easy as any safe, but we don't got the time to take things slow."

"Who is she?" Magneto asked.

"Name's Carol, a mutant. She's strong, and she's not keen to let us have our way with those files."

"Makes sense that the superhero types are catching on to us." Pyro lamented, laughing when Mystique blamed his own lack of subtlety.

"You got her name before she tossed you out the window like a sack of potatoes?" Rogue cut in, turning all attention back on Gambit, her eyes fixed on him and her muscles tense. Gambit merely chuckled again in response.

"Well," Magneto called focus back to the job, lips turned up just a slight. "We have just the right team to break through that kind of security." His eyes fell on Rogue, and bile twisted and turned inside her.

Pyro smiled, proud of Rogue for earning her place, if disgruntled for the tension between her and her ex. He almost got lost in the conflict, but as the meeting began to end in a shuffle he spoke up. "Her powers. We've figured out the on-off switch." He paused, feeling shame in admitting it. "It's trust." Pyro dug his unsteady hands into his pockets, fingering the hard surface of his lighter.

Gambit scoffed, loud. He kept his eyes on her intense. "Sorry to hear that, chère. I know you're no good at trusting."

She whipped her body toward him, glaring, meeting Gambit's own hard expression. Pyro grabbed hold of her gloved hand. Gambit's eyes lingered before he excused himself in a huff.

Rogue went down to the new recruit hall afterward, slipping out of Pyro's hands and away before he could protest. Her own room had been here not long ago, and though he'd been assigned to a shared bunk, she found Gambit hunkered down in the single they'd made for her.

"Like the new digs?" he teased her. "Found us a little slice of privacy."

"Don't start with me, swamp rat." The teasing in her pet name for him was tainted with actual malice. It twisted his gut like a knife.

He snapped, angry about everything that still hung between them, even here and even as she shared herself with a known terrorist. "At least I feel shame, non?"

"You're not exactly seeking redemption, though, are you? You think you're gonna find that at the Brotherhood?" she scoffed.

"That must be why you're here too." he replied with a large grin, all ego. The hurt in his eyes had been replaced by a friendly shine, and she recognized again the bravado he used to lash out against the world.

Rogue got a chill in her arms. "I have a right…" she started, the words drifting out. A right to touch? To love? To freedom? What was she after now? The Brotherhood had turned to feeling like a fact of life.

"Don't you worry about me, chère. I'll do what I came here for and be on my way." His grin slipped down then.

She felt herself going soft despite her best efforts. "Just stay out of our way."

"Gonna be hard to do that in the meantime, petite, but you got my word once the job's done."

Rogue measured him. He seemed sincere in the pledge, if hurt. She was surprised he was hurt, and in considering that, she couldn't help but be taken in with his eyes, as she'd always been before. They were beautiful in all the terror they should provoke, not unlike her own skin, she supposed. "The job…" she started. "The humans think they're better than us. They're trying to cure us again, trying to steal everything about us that makes us." Her drawl was slow. "And here we are talking up a storm about how we're better than them, like all of it's good and like all of it's controlled." Her fingers twitched at the sympathy his eyes shone at her, at the lean of his body toward her, and the softness of his lips as they parted. "The way I see it, we're all the same. We're equals, not a drop of humanity between the lot of us. We're all just mercenaries."

The last words dripped from her mouth, and he could taste the forgiveness in her spit across the distance between them, a kernel of understanding. Here with the bad guys, she'd learned that life had an inherent cost. He didn't like how the weight of it looked on her. He missed the optimism of their X-Men days.

His gaze was heavy on her skin, and she could feel the hairs on her arm bristle like he'd touched her for real. She let the feeling linger a while. "Never thought I would see you here." she admitted.

"Not planning on staying." He replied. "You're right. There's no redemption here." Regardless of her forgiveness, it was something he still desperately needed. He was thinking she had already started needing some herself.

"Fair enough." She turned and left him to weigh the moment.

Pyro was quiet when they met up later. He seemed resigned from her dash after Gambit with the same kind of stillness he'd had when she'd been dating Bobby.

She couldn't find the words to explain it to him. She wasn't the person she'd been when they'd dated, and they hadn't even dated long. She was his, completely. She was a version of herself molded from between his expert hands, and there was no her and Gambit anymore. There was no X-Men anymore. There was only the Brotherhood. There was touch, and hope, and loyalty.

There was only loyalty and Pyro. Everything else was just details. Remy was just a memory from a curdled opportunity.

She laid carefully in his arms. He insisted on donning a love sleeved sweater and sweatpants so that she could be free in one of her nightgowns. She could be free, but not careless, not that he would have minded. He stole kisses on her neck, on her hairline. He hovered over her skin in invitation.

She caught pieces of him, impressions of his love for her, his fear of Remy, his resentment at her lack of trust, the broken promise her powers had brought clear between them. She wished, in the moment, that they could trade powers so she could communicate to him how much these things didn't matter without words, purely distilled into his mind from hers. But then she bristled at the thought, because he would get all the pieces, all of her, not just her love from him. He would get the memory too, and he wouldn't be able to reconcile with it.

"Marie." he called to her, as if she wasn't complacent with his body wrapped around hers.

"Yeah?"

"Who is he to you?"

She paused. No more secrets. "We dated," his arms tightened around her, and she wondered if it was a conscious act, "briefly."

"How brief?"

"Very. We dated off the tail end of Bobby and I. He just…" she trailed off, details. "It's not like us. We never…" Fell in love? That wasn't true. But they'd never shared their bodies, and that mattered.

"The Cure." His voice was definitive as he figured out the pieces. His grip was a vice.

"Yeah, but it failed when…" Details…

"When what?" he insisted.

"Our first kiss."

His eyes closed, and he could hear his blood pumping from the intensity of the stress.

"I'm not just with you because we can touch." she said, starling him. "You know that, right?"

He wasn't sure he believed her. She hadn't picked him before she could touch him. She'd picked Bobby when all else had been equal. "Have you tried touching him yet?"

"No."

"Well-"

She cut him off. "And I'm not going to." She shimmed out of his arms to lean over him so he could see her face. "This is why I didn't want to tell you. I love you. I wish you wouldn't be this way."

He paused a while, thinking of how beautiful she was and how unbearable losing her would be. "No more secrets?"

"No." She offered, mostly true.

She held her breath as he reached a hand to cup her cheek, wondering if her body would betray her again, but it didn't. Her lips fell on his hard, and his mouth was rough and greedy where it was usually yielding.