A/N: There's a Brigitte Bardot song that was quite the scandal, Je t'aime moi non plus. (Okay, it's not hers exactly, but her version is the best version and it was written for her anyway.) I'm referencing it in this one. It's worth the listen, but FYI it's rated E.
The sun was down, and there was nothing to counteract the nip of the winter wind. He couldn't feel the chill, but she had bundled herself tight in a wool blanket. He started a fire to get her warm, and she made a joke about campfires and past lives.
He passed her a cigarette, and just watched her for a while. Her skin was lit in the dark, her hair auburn in the glow of the fire, and her eyes shone while she watched the stars.
"It's nice, you know, that the moon is the same no matter where you look at it from." Her voice was wispy, and he watched the smoke trail from her mouth in an exhale.
She had a warmth to her too, something less literal than his own. He'd come to admire it.
"Not to ruin a moment with shop talk…"
She smirked. "Like you don't love talking shop."
"Guilty." He moved closer to her, brushed her cheek with his thumb. "What did you get off of Carol anyway."
"Nothing."
"Come on, nothing?"
"Yeah." She said the word slow, soft, but he just kept staring at her. She scoffed. "I already told all of this to Magneto."
"It's just…" the campfire danced. "...just, since when do you get nothing, you know?"
She blinked, and he wondered if it meant she was lying to him. Her shoulders squared as she sat up a little straighter. "I was just focusing on knocking her out." Eye contact. "Mystique's in the field to get the info." She let the sentence trail off, waited for the moment to end.
"Thing is," Pyro started. "we don't want to maximize the risk she's taking out there. If we can arm her with exact knowledge, it's faster, safer."
We. "I guess I know that now for next time." Her accent got thicker sometimes when she was annoyed, and despite the tension of the moment, he decided he liked it.
"You realize next time is whenever you want, right? She's just in a holding cell."
She rolled her eyes.
"Super close by…"
"I thought this was supposed to be a romantic."
He smiled, small and earnest. "This is romantic. It's our life." Her cigarette had gotten short, and he didn't want the fire to singe her fingers. "Do you need another?"
She followed his eyes, let the nub fall on the floor and put it out with the heel of her shoe. "Yeah."
He moved closer to her, let his thigh brush against hers. He put the pack onto her lap, kissed her cheek. "Promise me you'll think about it?"
She focused on the feel of it, the soft weight of his lips on her cheek, the velvet of his kiss. Her eyes closed and she turned into his body a slight on instinct. "Of course." She looked away, at the stars and the grass disappearing into darkness. "I'll see you in there, okay."
He understood he was being dismissed, and couldn't quite understand why. "Hey." He touched her arm through layers of fabric, and when she didn't react much, he touched her hair. "We okay?"
"Yeah." It was such a simple thing. There had been a time that everything other than skin-to-skin felt like a consolation, but there was something tender to it that she could appreciate now. She thought of all the times people had done this to avoid her skin, the bitterness she'd tasted in her mouth, how much she'd missed of what the touches had been saying. "Always." She smiled at him, a little tight and a little false, but still. "I just need a second." To not be Brotherhood, to just be a girl in the grass, in the dark.
He squeezed her arm, kissed her temple. "I don't sleep right when you're not there."
Her smile widened, loosened. "Me neither."
"Does he have to be here?" Rogue eyed Magneto, and he smiled back at her. She hated that about him, how warm his smile was, how his eyes seemed to endear trust when there was nothing trustworthy about him.
Pyro tensed a little, looked between them. He laid a hand on each of her shoulders. Stop, you have to stop. He's our leader. "Carol's tied up in adamantium. He controls metal. What do you think?"
She rolled her eyes, looked at Magneto again, and then settled back onto Pyro. "Okay." She watched him nod to his boss in assurance. He had everything under control. She felt a bit outnumbered. "I think you better bring Gambit down too. We can get a right crowd gathered." Petty, maybe.
He rolled his eyes then. "Fine." He kissed her atop of her forehead. "You both can wait here for me to get him, together." He smirked.
She watched him leave, turned her eyes onto Carol through the two-way mirror. The woman seemed to be sleeping she was so still, except her eyes were open. She laid there on the ground like something ready to die. And yet, there was something in her eyes. They were bright, and they seemed to be dancing.
"I have the utmost confidence in you." Magneto's body was like a straight line cutting the room into pieces.
"You better." There was something like a growl in the back of her throat, something that lent a deepness to her voice. "I can do this." She watched Carol lie there with her bright, dancing eyes. "Just make sure to keep her still."
He let out a few pitched breaths that she supposed passed for laughter.
She went into the other room as Pyro and Gambit entered.
"We'll be listening in." Pyro shouted after her as she breezed by. She heard Gambit complain that he didn't like this plan.
Carol's eyes darkened when Rogue approached.
"I'm not going to lie to you, honey. This is going to hurt. You just try to breathe through it, okay." A pause. Rogue moved to put her hand on the other woman, but stopped just light of actually touching her. "Why don't we try sitting you up? You can't be comfortable like that, lying there."
"You care if I'm comfortable?" Carol braced against her shackles a little, let the metal clink as it moved for effect.
"It'd be easier if you just told us what we want to know."
"Go ahead and read my mind or whatever it is you do. I'm not a traitor." Her blonde hair swept at the floor as she play-struggled.
It has to be playing. "Like me?" Who is playing with whom? "No one is coming for you. No one knows where you are."
"They'll know I'm with you."
"You think the compound is discoverable? What, you think Magneto's got this place under his own name? We have a shapeshifter on staff." Rogue's hand grabbed her face with all the grace of fire iron. The drain was quick to hit. The woman struggled, but the metal didn't move with her, seemed to squeeze around the wrists. "I think we've talked enough." Rogue's voice was feathery and she realized the drain felt good, satisfying when embraced without hesitation. .
Rogue closed her eyes, focused on bringing the drain back into something softer, on keeping Carol awake while trying to rote around the pisces filing into her mind. Filing was too kind a word.
She found Carol laughing as a child with parents, found her with her first boyfriend, found her graduating college with honors. She felt the woman's head struggle in her hand, heard her gasp as if the air was being sucked out of the room.
"Nothing yet!"
Rogue opened her eyes, and saw that Carol's skin was pale pale. Her blood seemed to have rushed somewhere deeper inside of her. Her veins were as prominent as Rogue had ever seen anyone's. Carol was early for her first day as AIr Force and it was a dream come true. Carol wakes up with powers and pulls a Clark Kent. Carol is flying through literal space. Rogue opened her eyes again, studying the woman as she slipped out of consciousness, and let go.
"Did you get it?" Pyro's voice came through the intercom.
"No." Rouge let out a hard exhale, realized she was exhausted. "She just gave me her greatest hits." She heard Remy laugh through the microphone.
"Okay." Disappointed.
Magneto's voice was next. "Rogue, we need you to touch her again."
What? "She's already out." Confused.
Pyro again. "Just touch her again. We think your powers will still work."
Rogue looked at Carol's unconscious body. It felt worse somehow, but she wasn't sure why. "I'm not sure what'll happen if she's already out."
"Hold on." Pyro came into the room. "Listen, maybe you'll get something more useful if she's not thinking pretty thoughts really loud."
Rogue hesitated, her hand twitched over the body. "You're probably right."
"Ms. Danver's not going anywhere. What's the harm in giving our Rogue here some time to think?" Remy's words were a comfort to her.
Rogue looked at Pyro and her eyes were all hope.
"Yeah, okay." Pyro relented. He looked toward the mirror. "There's no harm in sleeping on it. We'll reconvene tomorrow."
She let out a breath.
"Listen," his voice was a whisper. "it's going to be fine. You don't have to be afraid of what you can do anymore. You know that, right?"
She nodded. "Right."
Rogue wished Mystique was there to bounce her worries off of. Mystique had a way of making things make sense when they felt confusing at first. But, she wasn't not there. She knew what Pyro would say. All Rogue had left was Gambit, and when she found him in the new recruit wing, he was packing.
"What're you doing?" Her voice wasn't steady.
"Job's gotten a bit too thick. Got to go." She watched him stuff a few loose ends in his pocket, grab his staff. He travelled lighter than she did now. He traveled like she did when she was still a runaway, like someone still used to flitting from place to place, someone without a home. "You coming, chere?"
Rogue looked away. She couldn't bear to catch his eyes, knowing she's doing the wrong thing. But she couldn't bear to leave Pyro anymore. They were too entangled together now, every bit as much as he was entangled with the Brotherhood. Magneto's always good for a plan.
"Marie," he sighed her name with a tenderness that reached for her skin. "you don't got to finish every job you start. Sometimes it's better to cut your losses and turn back."
She could feel the bits of him inside her rage at the words, trying to turn back too late in a tortured memory he couldn't seem to stop reliving, and she thought she understood it now. It could be so easy to make the wrong choice again and again, even knowing something was wrong, something was off. Wrong, bad, evil were the sorts of things that get easy with practice.
"Not to sound like a broken record, but I don't know what leg you got in this fight. You took the Cure."
"That's not fair."
"It's not?" He cocked his eyebrow like he caught her in a trap.
"Well, what're you doing it for?" She shot back. "You didn't exactly mind the Cure back when we met either."
He forced a chuckle, but it sounded sad bouncing off the cleared room. "Jobs like this pay the bills and I've got expensive taste." His smirk was almost earnest, but it was sharp and painful too. "You just doing it for him?"
The question was a little too earnest for her, scraped at her hard edges, and she remembered why she had been so drawn to him. Underneath the cocky smile and corny lines, he was raw in a way she hadn't been since she became a runaway. "I love him." He tried to hold back his grimace, but he had too honest a face when it was just them alone. "And it's not just him. Mystique..." she started, but his eyes were dark and tender, and full of understanding.
"Look's like you've got yourself a whole family."
Family was a lot of words, but there was something here at the Brotherhood.
It was unfair, really. She had barely dated Remy. They had gone on a few dates, but had mostly just hung around each other. The whole affair had lasted only a few months, maybe four, a little hand holding and a lot of cheeky words. So, it was completely unfair that in that little bit of time, they'd come to love each other at all. Well, at least she loved him. She couldn't be sure of anything else. They'd barely had a first kiss. She felt like what they'd had shouldn't count. They never said the words. Her feelings were just bigger than their history. She supposed it was like that sometimes. "Remy-"
He cut her off. Je t'aime. "Moi non plus."
She wondered if he was just talking to himself when he talked to her in French like that, not a string of English for context. "I don't know French." There was an 'I love you' stuck in her throat. He didn't want to hear it, she could tell that much. She knew she shouldn't say it anyway. She settled for that smaller declaration that carried the exact weight of unbridgeable distance between them.
"Best be going now."
Remy stood in front of her, too close for proprietary, and she was struck again by how glad she was that Pyro wasn't seeing this. They weren't doing anything, she reminded herself, and yet it felt a lot like cheating. He offered his fingertips to her, bare at the ends of his gloves. The gesture was something too intimate. "Remy." Her eyes were wide and pleading for something she couldn't live up to.
He didn't miss her refusal. "See you around, mon coeur."
"Remy." She called his name again like a prayer, but he teared himself away from her anyway.
She had something solid going on here and there wasn't room enough for him even if he wanted to stick around for this mess. "Hope you get what you're looking for."
She wanted to call his name again, wanted to beg him to stay by her side even, but the cruelty of it was getting harder somehow. "I'm starting to." She tried to let him go, tried to get the sticky thoughts and memories and desires out of her that she swore belonged to him and only to him, but hesitated on the landing. "I didn't say I would do it."
"You will. If you stay here, you will." He left.