Banishing Red
by
Diebin
ARCHIVE: Usual suspects
NOTES: 1) Remy had a reason, he's not a complete jackass. 2) No sequel. 3) I'm sorry. 4) I posted this to W/R, so all of you who wonder about all those 'ships listed--have faith that I wouldn't drop it to W/R if I weren't relativly sure I'd survive the experience.
THANKS TO: Shana, who understood, and Gowdie, who didn't kill me. :)
He had made her come three times on three different nights before he realized that what he was doing might not be right. And it was three more nights, this time with her driving him over the edge, before he realized that it was quite possibly very, very wrong.
And it had seemed like such a good idea at first, giving her something that the man she seemed to love was too afraid or too nervous or too hesitant to give her. Showing her how to make other people feel just as good. Making her feel things because she asked him innocently one night, while wrapped in a blanket on his bed, what it felt like to have someone touch you and how you were supposed to know what to do in return.
He'd been surprised. Everyone knew that Rogue and Remy were names spoken with the same bit of air, because he had chased and she'd gotten caught and Logan had come home, given the man a once over, and decided that anyone who could make the girl with the untouchable skin smile was worth the effort of keeping him in once piece.
Two years, and it seemed strange that Rogue was asking him what it felt like to be touched because he knew better than anyone that the two were rarely apart, and it seemed to him that with all the touching and brushing up that Remy did in public, it would have been long since that he did a little more in private.
But Remy hadn't, so Logan did. And Rogue spent most of her time with Remy, and Logan still stiffened when he caught the scent of shampoo recently washed into deep red hair, and sometimes they forgot all that when they closed the doors--but most of the time they didn't. And Logan knew it was wrong.
He told her that it had to stop, and her eyes looked dull and she nodded and gave him a shaky smile before leaving his room, and later he saw her talking to Remy outside her door, gesturing frantically and pleading with the taller man with her eyes. And it was enough for Logan to see the way Remy touched her, his fingers stretching out but the rest of him staying far away.
It was enough, but he could smell the fear as well, and for a moment he regretted every time he'd saved the Cajun's life over the past two years. Regretted it because he was letting him live to make Rogue happy, and it didn't seem to be happening anymore.
He waited until later, when the hallway had cleared, and he went to her. Knelt by her bed and ran a hand down her body in the way that only he felt comfortable doing, because no matter what else happened, she'd already nearly killed him twice, and the old adage of the third time being the charm meant nothing to him. He wasn't superstitious.
"Why do you touch me?" She stared at the ceiling above her and hardly responded to his caress, and he let his hand rest on her stomach as he thought about the question.
He thought of a lot of things to say that would have been nicer, would have been cleaner. But they'd never lied to each other before, and the brutal honesty cleared the air. "Because you let me."
Unspoken were the words, 'And she never will.'
He was afraid it might have hurt her, afraid because the whisper of a memory came floating up, the face of an angel staring down and telling him that a baby girl was taken with him. But she just laughed, let her gloved hand slide over his and shook with laughter.
"You touch me because I let you, and I let you because he never will." The laughter cut off in a low sigh. "Maybe it's good, Logan. Maybe you're lucky. Because if you did--you did get to have her . . . nothing is ever as good as it seems. At least you still believe."
She was silent for a long time, and he let his hand pick up the caress again. His knees were falling asleep, kneeling next to the bed, and he wondered why super-healing didn't save him from the tingling feeling.
"I used to believe." Her voice was a low, sensuous sigh as his hand touched her. "I used to believe that nothing could be as bad as unrequited love." He looked up when he heard the slither of her hair sliding against the pillow, and she was facing him, her eyes wide. "Unrequited love is hope, Logan."
"Oh." He didn't want to talk. He wanted to close his eyes and pretend the curves were a little flatter and that he couldn't smell the mango shampoo, because mango shampoo brought visions of brown hair with white streaks and that wasn't what he wanted to see.
"But then I don't know if he loves me anyway, so maybe I'm wrong."
His hand froze again, and he tried to pull his mind from fantasy to reality. Tried to listen to the girl who was in pain and talking to him the way she used to before they'd started using each other for dirtier things than just emotional support.
"Why do you say that, Marie?" It was the sign that he was listening and serious and ready to help her, using the name that she'd discarded so long ago. Rogue was a woman who stood equal with him, who he smiled at in the hallway and sat next to at dinner and sometimes touched in the darkness, but Marie was the girl who was so insecure and shy that she only showed herself around him.
"He has this ring. He's never told me about it, but Kitty found it. She was in his room for something, and it was on the desk and I don't know why the hell she did it but she put it on--and then she heard him coming and tried to phase through the wall and ended up with a nice batch of bruises and one really angry Gambit demanding to know what she was doing with his stuff."
Logan listened and kept up a slow, soothing caress up and down her arm, but when she stopped talking and the silence grew, he was forced to admit ignorance. "I don't get it."
Brown eyes met his. "It kills powers, Logan. He's got a ring that could turn off my skin, and for the past two years he's been pretending that touching me is something he'd do if he could, but all this time . . ."
She sighed and turned her face back towards the ceiling. "You can't touch me but you still do. And he could touch me and he won't. You have to wonder why I love him and not you. Y'know?"
Rogue was willing touch him in ways Jean never would.
He did know. He knew all too well.
"I should--" His knees were almost numb, and he forced himself to his feet and was amazed at how quickly the tingling faded as his blood started circulating again.
"You should go," she whispered, curling up on her side. "I know--I know this helps you sometimes, Logan, but I don't think we should keep doing it."
They were the words he'd wanted to say, but for some reason he couldn't stand to hear them. "Why?"
She rolled over and gave him a little smile. "I'm not telling you. Because if I do, you'll get your back up and stay here just to be difficult. Just go."
And because it was obvious that there weren't going to be any more fantasies that night, he did. He went back to his room and spent a long time thinking about touching Rogue, and how much Remy should want to.
It occurred to him, before he fell asleep, that maybe all the thought of touching Rogue would make it so that his dreams would be about a woman he could touch instead of one he couldn't--but the hair wrapped around his fist in the hazy darkness of fantasy was red. Always red.
He went to her that night and found her alone, brown hair tousled and brown eyes sleepy. "Just one more time?" he whispered, and she slid over and made room for him on the bed, and as he clutched her hips to his and groaned with the feeling of her legs wrapped around his and her body thrusting against his in the darkness, he wondered almost frantically if Remy could be convinced to part with his damned ring for long enough for Logan to feel what it was like to touch skin again.
But there was a kind of safety in the barrier of clothing. Lying in the bed next to her, feeling her clothing against his own and knowing that no skin, no heat, no emotions could break thorough--it felt better than the sex had.
"That wasn't the last time, was it?" she whispered without looking at him.
"It could be." He reached out along the bed and groped until he found her fingers and wrapped them in his own. "It could be, Marie."
She was silent for a few moments. "Does it--does it help you, to know that someone is willing to touch you?"
If he said no, then it would be over. If he said yes, he'd be admitting that something was wrong with him that needed helping. He was too smart to do either, so he grunted and turned the question back on her. "Does it help you?"
"I can't hate him." It wasn't the answer to the question, but he understood anyways. "I can't hate him, because I am what I am. And I can understand how he wouldn't want to--"
"Hey."
She exhaled. "Hmm?"
"Don't talk like that." He squeezed her fingers slightly.
She squeezed back and murmured, "Okay," and for a long time they sat there, fingers entwined and thoughts far apart as night crept slowly towards dawn. Finally, just as he was shifting to leave, her fingers tightened on his again. "Promise me something, Logan."
"Hmmm?" Promises weren't something he liked to make, because he always felt like he should keep them.
"Promise me I'll never fall in love with you." Her voice was scared and the grip on his fingers tight enough to hurt. He could hear her heart beating, could hear the way she was breathing in erratic bursts.
He didn't know what to say. Didn't know how he could make a promise that wasn't even his to keep, so he slipped from the bed and whispered, "I'll try," as he let the door slide closed behind him and promised himself it would be the last time.
But Rogue broke it off with Remy the next day, and cried in his room for two weeks straight before she finally climbed into his bed and begged him to make it all go away for a little while.
It was like that for a long time. For a year and a half they lay back to back in one bed or the other, eyes closed and both pretending as hard as they could that the person stretched out behind them was someone it wasn't. He ignored the smell of mango, and he knew that she tried hard to picture him taller and lankier.
It was foolish, but he knew it was all they had, and as time stretched out into the second year, they stopped turning their backs on one another as soon as they were finished.
One time, waiting for her to catch her breath, he traced the line of her arm and asked her a question. "Remember the night before you ended it with Gambit--when you told me we needed to stop doing this?"
Her breathing nearly stopped. "Mmhmm?"
"What were you going to say? That you said you couldn't tell me?" He kept stroking her arm softly, waiting.
She didn't stir for a long time. "I didn't want you to keep touching me, because I was afraid that I would--I would get used to it." She shifted awkwardly, twisting to look up at him. "I couldn't let myself believe that people wanted to touch me."
"I'll always touch you." It sounded coarse and lewd, but she took it the way he had intended it and smiled slightly.
It was the first genuine smile from the girl who loved the red-eyed man, and was returned by the man who loved the red-haired girl, and somehow they both understood that if they could ever banish the red that haunted their dreams . . .
Maybe a new dream could begin.
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