He is stuck with her.  A long, long time ago, eons maybe, she thinks, he made a promise to a girl with trust in her heart and a naive belief in the innate goodness -- however deep down it may have been -- of her fellow man.

You'd think that because that girl doesn't exist anymore, the promise doesn't either.  It should be void, nullified by the people and the memories and the solitude of being a rogue, a killer in the body of a girl.  But Logan is far too honorable to break a promise, even if it is to her, the girl who destroyed his life and colored his future in shades of black and bleak bitterness.  And she isn't strong enough to make him stay away, to give him his walking papers and tell him he's free to go.  Free to leave.  Free from her.

So she sits in the mansion and waits for the Blackbird to fly in, and when the X-Men troop in, tattered and torn with brave smiles on their faces for the children who've stayed awake just to make sure they got home safely, she rises and goes to him, stares at the slashes in his uniform until he says, gruffly, that he has to take a shower, because he's dirty and he's beat.

"Waiting is the hardest part," Ororo says, quietly, her voice transparent as water as she questions the choices made before slipping away.  And Rogue remains, solitary, waiting, and the hunger to *be* somebody wells within her and floods her throat with salt.

She stands still and he brushes past her, and she wishes she could turn back time, could erase what had been said years before.  Wishes that they'd never promised each other impossible things, things that destroyed whatever hope there might have been for anything beyond their inexplicable and unasked-for bond, and their understanding of what the other person needed and couldn't be allowed to have.

Wishes she could become the woman she's always wanted to be, to carve out her identity in granite, to join, to belong to something greater.  Wishes he would unmake his promise so she could release him from his, because maybe then he'd be happy.

Maybe then he wouldn't hate her for tying him to a place he doesn't want to be, with people he doesn't want to be with.  For tying him to her.

She could go to him now, she thinks, and tell him that he's free of her, but she can't, and even if she could, he probably wouldn't see himself as being free, really.

Because though that haven't spoken much since their agreement was made, haven't touched each other since that last, life-changing handshake, that damnable bond is still there, will probably always be there, even through the anger and bitterness and hatred.

And the knowledge that neither of them would have agreed in the first place, would have remained at the mansion if not for the feelings they didn't want to have, and would never express or even admit the existence of.

So she lies in bed at night, solitary and lonely as he is, as both will always be as long as the other is alive, and listens to the silence, to the sudden, sharp sounds of struggle.  She tenses but does nothing, and though she aches to wake him and stroke his hair back and hold him, soothe him 'til the memory of what was slips away, she merely wraps the upper sheet around her body, effectively locking her in place, even as her now-acute hearing picks up his steady movement from the bed to the wall they share.

And she burns with a fever of longing, can all but feel his hand on the wall, hears the whisper of his voice as he rasps her name, a quiet wish of his own, and one she probably wasn't meant to hear.

When the gush of water through pipes indicates his use of the shower, she sits up in bed, turns and kneels so she's facing the wall.

She sighs and breathes and exhales love, hopes it permeates the wall and eases his dreams, and she stares at the spot she knows his hand touched on the other side.

Then she reaches out and when her fingers are mere millimeters away, she hesitates, wonders if he'd be able to sense her touch as she had sensed his, and the thought forces her hand to drop by her side.  She allows herself one last glance at where his handprint surely was, then slips back down into bed, because their lives are no fairytale, they've seen to that, two halves of a twisted whole that should've fitted together perfectly, but don't.  Can't.

Their edges are jagged and broken as cliffs that taunt and seduce, and leave her bleeding as she waits to fall.
 

~end~