Gambit And Rogue

Not all the best stories happen in the middle of a battle.

Some of them happen on a rooftop, in the evening, with two cups of tea.

Rogue had been at the Xavier School for several months, and in those months she had found her place in the team — she was brave and strong and people depended on her in a fight. But when the missions were over and everyone came back to the mansion and the regular noise of a shared house started up again, she retreated.

She went to the roof garden.

The roof garden was a strip of wooden planters and low stone walls along the back of the mansion's third floor. You could see the Westchester hills from up there, and the oak trees in the front drive, and on clear evenings the sky went through every possible shade of orange and pink before settling into blue. It was a good place to be alone.

The other students liked her. She knew they liked her. But her power — the one that absorbed memories and abilities and feelings from any person she touched with bare skin — meant that being close to people required constant care. The long gloves she wore were part of it. The distance was the rest of it.

It wasn't sadness, exactly. It was just the shape of her life.

Remy LeBeau had been watching this for two weeks. He was from New Orleans, where Remy had grown up learning to read people the way other people read weather — by feel, by small signs, by the particular quality of a silence. He was easy-going and patient, and he never rushed at things.

One Wednesday evening he climbed to the roof with a deck of cards.

He sat down on the planter box across from her. He didn't say anything. He just took the cards out of the box and started doing a trick — a simple one, where a card disappears from between two fingers and reappears at the bottom of the deck. He charged it just slightly as it moved — a faint pink glow, quick as a blink.

Rogue lowered her book.

"What's the trick?" she asked.

"No trick," he said. He looked at the card. "The card wants to be somewhere else. I just help it get there."

She looked at him for a moment, checking if he was making a joke. He wasn't.

He showed her three more tricks. She watched carefully, the way she watched things when she was genuinely interested. She did not reach out to touch anything, because she never reached for things she hadn't decided to touch. But she stayed, and staying was something.

The next evening he came back with tea — one for her, one for him. He set hers down within easy reach without commenting on the distance. She picked it up.

They talked about small things. The card game the others were playing two floors below. Whether the oak trees at the end of the driveway were old enough to have been planted by someone with a reason. Whether Hank would ever be satisfied with the boiler. Comfortable, ordinary things.

The evenings became a habit.

Remy was always careful about contact. He never reached for her hands. He never touched her accidentally — and with Remy it was never accidental, because he was far too precise for accidents. He didn't announce his carefulness or make it into a speech. He was just careful, quietly, the way a person is careful when they understand that something is delicate and worth treating gently.

There is an enormous difference between treating someone as fragile and treating something as precious.

One evening, about three weeks into their rooftop habit, Rogue said, "You know that even with the gloves, if I squeeze too hard, it can still—"

"I know," Remy said.

She waited a moment. "Most people find that—"

"I know," he said again, simply, without any drama. "I'm not most people."

She looked at him. He dealt himself another card — it pulsed faint pink between his fingers and settled. The sky above the Westchester hills had gone gold and deep amber. Below them, the sounds of the others drifted up: Jean laughing, someone shuffling cards, Hank's voice explaining something with great enthusiasm.

Rogue held her tea in both gloved hands. She looked at the sky.

She didn't say anything else. Neither did he.

The next morning, when Remy came downstairs for breakfast, there was a seat at the table with a cup of tea already set at the place. Her chair was still empty — she usually came down five minutes later.

But the seat was saved.

She had set it there before she came down.

That was how she answered.

Goodnight. Sometimes the kindest thing is simply to sit nearby.