Care

When this memory had first surfaced in her mind, sharp and painful and so very obviously Remy's, she had curled up on her bed for an hour and gasped in the long, ragged sobs of a little boy's violated pain. When the images had receded, however, her own anger had bubbled past the Cajun's fear and Rogue had uncurled from the bed with a sudden jerk of motion, hands tight and eyes tighter.

She had gone to Forge first, bursting into his workshop without so much as a 'by your leave' while he tinkered with something or the other and demanded his attention. When that hadn't worked, Rogue had lifted the shaman bodily from his spot by the shoulders of his uniform and slammed him against the wall, voice growling. She was, when she wanted to be, a hard woman to ignore.

It had taken a lot of arm-twisting--in both the literal and figurative sense--a lot of threats and even a lot of pleading, but eventually Rogue had gotten her way and Forge's attentions in the workshop shifted from one project to another.

It also took time, of course, and in the interim she found herself skimming over every memory from Remy's childhood, growing more appalled and incensed by the moment. She wanted to take him close and smooth away the hurts, but her powers and his stubborn pride made that impractical, and Rogue knew if Gambit even once caught wind of what she was doing, he would find a way to stop her. He wouldn't understand why she had to do it. He wouldn't understand how much she cared.

That's what it boiled down to, in the end. How much she cared. She couldn't tell him, because in that fragile way that their relationship worked and didn't work all at the same time, an upset of balance would only lead to one or the other of them breaking someone's heart. It was always how it worked out, and this time Rogue meant to see it happen differently. In the back of her mind, she knew it was because she thought that maybe--just maybe--if one of them had lived with a decent childhood, then one of them could manage to do right by the strange love between them.

She didn't want to admit that she thought, maybe, if she righted the wrongs in his life, he would know what to do with their lives. She didn't want to admit that she had no idea what to do with her own, alone.