Rogue
Once upon a time, there was a girl who could not touch anyone.
Her name was Anna Marie, and she went by Rogue. She had been living at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters for two years by the time Remy LeBeau arrived, and in those two years she had become very skilled at being close to people without being close to people.
Her power was this: when Rogue's bare skin touched another person's skin — a handshake, a brushed shoulder, anything — she absorbed their memories, their personality, and any mutant ability they possessed. She couldn't turn it off. She had worn gloves since she was fourteen years old. She sat at the end of benches, kept her arms close. She had learned to be present with people through words and humor and fierce opinions, while her body stayed carefully wrapped.
She was loud and funny and capable and brave and deeply, privately lonely. She did not tell people that last part.
When Remy LeBeau arrived from New Orleans — long coat, deck of cards, glowing red eyes, a smile that suggested he knew something pleasant — Rogue watched from across the dining room and made a quiet assessment.
Charming, she thought. She had known charming. Charming wanted things.
She did not go out of her way to talk to him.
Remy went out of his way to talk to her. Not with big gestures — he just appeared. Near wherever she was reading, with a book of his own. In the kitchen when she was making coffee, asking if she'd tried the chicory blend he'd brought from New Orleans.
She had, in fact, liked it.
He learned, somehow, which songs she liked. One afternoon she walked past the music room and heard a truly dreadful piano performance of a song she had loved since she was twelve. Wrong notes. Wrong tempo.
She stopped in the doorway.
Remy was at the piano, squinting at his own hands.
"That's not how it goes," she said.
"I know." He looked up, genuinely helpless. "I can't figure out this middle section. Could you —?"
She sat down beside him, leaving a careful four inches of space, and showed him the right chord. They stayed on that bench for forty minutes.
She thought about it later. He had played badly on purpose. Not because he couldn't do better — she'd heard him play fine elsewhere — but because he had wanted her to come in. He had made himself slightly incompetent, held out the door, and waited.
It was the kindest, most patient thing anyone had done for her in a long time.
They had arguments, eventually — real ones, raised voices, long walks to cool down. But then one of them would leave something outside the other's door. A playing card glowing faintly pink, or a warm bowl of gumbo, or once, memorably, both.
What Rogue had always needed was not someone who felt sorry for her. She needed someone who looked at all of her — fierce, funny, guarded, capable — and decided she was worth the particular shape of friendship she could actually offer.
Remy never looked at her gloves with pity. He sat beside her at the right distance and talked to her like she was exactly who she was.
She did not let him know how much that mattered. But he seemed to know anyway.
For his part, Remy was good at being liked. What he was not always good at was being known. He wore charm like a comfortable coat — useful for keeping his own feelings at a safe distance.
Rogue saw through it. She could see exactly where the charm ended and the real person began: the boy from New Orleans still making peace with his past, who cared genuinely and sometimes wasn't sure he deserved to.
She chose him anyway.
On quiet evenings they stood at the window at the end of the second-floor corridor, looking out over the school's gardens and lawn. Both of them in gloves. Shoulders nearly touching.
It was not everything. There were things they couldn't give each other that other people gave freely.
But it was warm. And real. And it was theirs.
And in a life full of explosions, Remy had come to believe that this quiet warmth — chosen carefully and kept carefully — was the most extraordinary thing he had.
He would not have traded it for anything in the world.