Any Kinda Breath

by Kaylee

His forehead rested against the cold porcelain, which seemed to be trying to leach enough of his body heat to take on its own warmth. Given how long he'd been here, that probably wasn't going to happen if it hadn't already. Remy wasn't sure what the heat-exchange-rate was for flesh-to-toilet-rim -- it wasn't a mathematical problem he'd pondered often -- but it definitely wasn't an even trade. It seemed that he was getting colder while the porcelain stayed cheerily chill.

He thought the words with some vehemence, just on principle, but there was no particular inclination to actually go about obeying their order. He'd been successfully not listening to them for nearly twenty minutes, though for about fifteen minutes before that he'd been too busy fighting with (and losing to) his upset stomach to think much of anything beyond not again not again oh shit again oh shit and the like.

This was getting to be almost routine.

He heard the not-quite-melodious singing moments before the door opened, and he jerked himself back from the toilet and fumbled for the flusher with one hand as he stumble-staggered to his feet. By the time Bobby's off-key tenor performance made its debut in the doorway Remy was spitting mouthwash into the sink and reaching for a towel to dry the face he'd just stuck beneath the running faucet for a few seconds.

"Remy!" Bobby called, singsong, obviously in an enviably good mood. "You in here?"

He caught a breath, finished toweling his face, and made his unsteady way to the bathroom door where the door frame itself was quite willing to offer him support. He found himself smiling despite his wooziness at the brightness of the face he was greeted with.

Bobby's grin seemed nearly unwilling to be bound by the stretch of lips. "You'll never guess what happened today," he said in something rushed enough to almost be a babble. "Try. Just try to guess. Try." He half-bounced, half-walked over and tipped his chin up to brush a kiss across Remy's unshaven cheek.

And then the exuberance faded abruptly. Bobby's left hand lifted to trace across his other cheek while concern darkened the sky blue of his eyes. "You're cold and clammy."

It took an effort for Remy to keep from rolling his eyes. He twisted the smile wryly instead. In the month since the surgery and the week since he'd started chemo Bobby had become quite the medical technician. Remy couldn't count the times he'd woken to find his lover tap-tap-tapping away at his computer keyboard late into the night, eyes endlessly scanning lines of text that covered everything from assorted brands of cancer to potential side effects of the kind of chemo Remy was undergoing to warning signs of recurrence of adenocarcinoma. A week into chemotherapy now, and hardly a day went by without the sweet-if-still-irritating observations about his health. 'You didn't sleep as much last night.' 'You threw up twice this morning. Twice.' 'The Oncology Newsletter said you can have all the clear Jell-O you want.' 'You're not, um, experiencing... what's it called... pyrexia, are you?' And worse.

At least his focus had all shifted toward encouraging as much activity as possible instead of restraining it. He'd caught on fast to that much.

Maintaining the smile, Remy caught the curious hand and kissed the back of it quickly before letting go. "Just splashed m' face. Stop worrying."

Bobby didn't look entirely convinced. "We could take your temperature..."

"Bobby. Cut it out." He was amazed at how patient he sounded. Then again, he'd always been fairly good at patience when it was needed to misdirect someone. He didn't like Bobby to play even belated witness to these periods of nausea. "What happened t'day t' get y' so excited?"

"Huh? Oh." That grin came back readily. Bobby twisted his fingers neatly and caught the hand Remy had caught his own with, swinging it a little. "I was at the grocery store, right? With Jean? 'Cause Scott made me?"

Scott consistently 'made' Bobby do many things these days. Sometimes it was the only way to get him out of the house, and totally coincidentally, out of the mother-henning role he kept falling into with Remy. "Right. Y' don' gotta make everyt'ing a question, Bobby."

A quick flush of embarrassment that didn't even dim the grin. "Sorry. Well anyway, I was at the store with Jean, and this guy comes up to us and says, just outta nowhere, 'Excuse me for being so forward' -- he said it just like this, I swear -- 'Excuse me for being so forward, but I couldn't help noticing your distinct physical presence. Would you consider modeling for me?'" The guilelessly charming face couldn't decide between pink and pure crimson. The grin, however, was firmly fixed. "Wanna know the funniest thing?"

Remy blinked. Bobby was still swinging his hand endlessly as though full of energy that needed the outlet. "Funniest thing?"

"He was talking," Bobby told him distinctly, "about me."

Remy blinked again.

"Me," Bobby said again after a moment, grin fading into a slightly perplexed look. "That guy. He was talking about me instead of Jean. And using words like 'distinct physical presence.' About me."

Remy blinked again. "He was hittin' on you."

The smooth brow furrowed. "No. I mean, he was an artist, right? He was just, y'know, wanting me for... art. 'Cause guys don't just walk up to you in a grocery store and... and..." Something dawned in the baby blues, slowly. "I mean... they don't, do they? Just walk up to you? In the grocery store? That wasn't in any of the books..."

"Did he say nude modeling?"

Bobby shook his head dazedly. "No, but... but Jean was awfully giggly afterwards..."

Remy realized distantly that he wasn't even thinking about his stomach anymore. "Y' never been hit on by a guy b'fore?" His lips twitched involuntarily. "Other than me?"

A quick cough and a flash of returning blush. "Um. No. No guy other than you." Another cough, and then Bobby was freeing his hand and walking over to sprawl with a thoughtful grunt across the lower half of the bed. "Huh. You really think he was hitting on me?"

Only Bobby could find doubt in this situation... "I t'ink if he'd been hittin' on y' any more he'd'a been down your pants."

"In the middle of the store??"

"Well he wasn't, Bobby..." Suppressing the automatic sigh that wanted to go with the movement, he pushed away from the door frame and paced steadily to the bed, sitting with a bit more caution than Bobby had used. Maybe he wasn't quite as over the nausea as he'd thought. "What'd you say t' him?"

The head rolled and brown hair, growing longer now, fell untidily over Bobby's face. "I said something like, 'Um, sorry, I have somewhere to be.' Which means that if you're right I came off as a totally clueless jackass."

Remy tipped back slowly and tucked his hands behind his head, lying parallel on the bed, staring at the ceiling. He wasn't sure he liked the idea of another man hitting on Bobby. Especially not when he really wasn't feeling up to being proper competition most days. "What'd he say?"

"He didn't. Jean sorta glared at him and he said 'okay' and 'bye' and left. I thought she was, y'know, maybe a little jealous? She's the model and all..." He blinked a few times behind the hair. "Wow. I'd heard about 'Gaydar,' but this is the first time I've seen it..."

"Read about it in one a y' books?" Let him say 'yes'... Remy didn't want to think what other part of Bobby's life he might've missed in recent weeks. Not that Bobby had particularly had a life other than worrying over Remy, not that he'd seen, but now there was this whole area of Outside that Remy couldn't touch as easily as he had once, and he realized with a little jolt that Bobby still had a presence there. An independent Self.

An independent Self that was evidently attractive to other gay men.

"Yeah." A hand suddenly reached up and caught Remy's again. "God, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to run off with that. How're you feeling?"

How was he feeling? Uncharacteristically competitive, outclassed, and uninformed. None of those were particularly comfortable things for a thief to feel. He forced a smile and squeezed the hand in his, then released it. "Great." It wasn't a big lie. And besides, he was beginning to think that he could use a little more outward focus here. "Tell me more 'bout your day."

***

He hated watching this.

He hated the thought of Remy having to go through it alone even more, though, so he put on an attempt at a smile and pretended to be comfortable and tried very hard not to think about just what was being pumped into his lover through the port into his chest.

Uncomfortable enough to look at, that. It had been a minor surgery, but the results were a constant reminder that no matter how well the lobectomy had gone, Remy's health was still a concern. Twin tubes ran out of the port. Hank handled the several-times-weekly administration of the chemotherapy, which was injected slowly through one or the other of those tubes and sent into the body to come out near the superior vena cavae. Chemotherapy, Dr. Niles had explained, was very hard on a person's veins: The least stressful way to introduce the chemicals into the body was to skip the smaller veins in the arms and go straight to the area around the heart.

Dangerous chemicals being fed almost directly into Remy's heart. Oh yeah. No problem.

These sessions took about an hour. Usually Jean would come join them, sitting and chatting amiably through the process as if she didn't notice that they were busily poisoning his lover. A few times Scott had.

Bobby preferred to have just the two of them. There was this look Remy got sometimes when they had an 'audience'... this wary, defensive bearing that he couldn't seem to help. Hank was Bobby's secret weapon in figuring out the confusing psychological variables that made up his lover, but even Hank's sensible explanations of Remy's fear of vulnerability didn't really help Bobby figure out how to ease that. What did he say? 'Don't worry, they don't bite'?

He rather thought that Remy would consider leaving him in Antarctica a little worse than biting.

Hank talked companionably through the awkward few minutes it took to set up the chemotherapy. Bobby joked back nervously. Remy was mostly silent. This was the second round of the treatment; the first had lasted two weeks and had been tolerated fairly well, and the two-week break in between had helped, but a few days into round two already had Remy sick. Hank and Dr. Niles said the same thing: It was a normal side effect, nothing to worry about. He was still holding up remarkably well under it all.

Bobby wondered where the cutoff point between "holding up remarkably well" and "we're gonna lose him" was.

Stop that, he told himself sternly. He's fine most of the time.

Remy had settled into the recliner that Jean had sent down here for just this purpose. As was becoming tradition for medlab furniture, it was hideous. Where Hank's chair in the corner was a particularly loud shade of blue and the sofa complementing it mingled more hues than a psychedelic rainbow, this cushiony thing was actually... fuchsia. Bobby had been horrified when he'd first seen it, thinking for a few seconds that Jean was making fun of them. Remy, however, had laughed until he'd clutched his chest in pain.

When exactly had Remy's sense of humor become better than his?

Bobby reclined on his sofa, feet up on the armrest, and flipped through a medical text that he thought he could use for weight-lifting exercises if he were so inclined. 'Dry reading' didn't begin to describe it. He'd read worse, though. He'd survived getting a degree in Accounting, and after that this was a piece of cake.

Remy flipped through the newspaper, as casually interested as always in keeping up with current events. For a short while there was no sound but the almost inaudible hum of the machinery running the chemo, the soft rustle of papers turning and the comfortable sigh of slow, relaxed breathing.

When Rogue came in, the leisurely atmosphere became abruptly strained.

Remy greeted her with a nod and her name, sounding courteous, but Bobby didn't miss the way his eyes flickered to the IV-pole and the bag holding the chemicals that hung there.

"Howdy, boys," she said congenially enough. "Just thought I'd come keep ya company for a bit."

Reflexively Bobby glanced at the monitor set up to display Remy's pulse. It was a habit he'd acquired during the first two weeks of chemo, and in this latest round it had proven more enlightening. Maybe it was the chemicals, maybe it was the sickness caused by them, but something was making his partner jumpy on a regular basis.

From the climbing numbers displayed on the monitor, it looked as if Rogue's arrival definitely didn't help. His lover didn't show it, not on the surface, but her very presence raised his heartrate. The Cajun's jaw was set a little too hard, his smile a little too forced. No, this wasn't helping at all.

Which meant that it had to go. Or, more specifically, she had to go. "Rogue," Bobby said as politely as he could manage. "Maybe that wouldn't be the best idea right now."

Remy shot him an openly surprised look. Bobby didn't often breach social protocol like that. He didn't particularly care if it was atypical, though, and just stared at her with pseudo-patience while waiting for her answer.

"I just wanted to talk t' Remy, sugar. Won't take but a minute." Her voice was still quite friendly as she settled casually into Hank's chair. Her eyes were uncompromising. "Actually, I was gonna ask if you would excuse us."

"He's not hurtin' anyt'ing by stayin'," Remy said quietly, folding the newspaper and setting it aside. "Leave be, Rogue."

"I need t' talk to you 'bout a few things. Private things, Remy."

Bobby's eyes flicked to the monitor again. Another little jump upward in pulse. He thought he saw a muscle tick in Remy's jaw.

"This ain' really de best time." A humorless smile as a long-fingered hand found the IV-tube and flicked it in indication. "Catch me later; we'll go f' a walk or somet'in'."

You can't, Bobby wanted to point out. The chemo would hit him a little while after administration and he'd be lucky if he could even really get out of bed for a bit. Remy didn't like to be reminded of his weaknesses, though, and he particularly hated having them exposed in front of anyone who could be kept in the dark about them. Was this then Remy's way of putting Rogue off?

Her lips curved into a wistful smile that Bobby wanted to tear from her face. Didn't she see what she was doing to him? "Y'know, swamprat... I remember days when you'd be on your feet in a heartbeat t' walk me anywhere."

Green eyes flicked toward Bobby as if she'd heard the thought. Her smile was fixed and fake. "But things just change all over, don't they? In the strangest ways imaginable."

Remy didn't say anything, but his pulse shot higher and the automatic blood pressure cuff hissed softly as it was called into action.

"Yeah," Bobby said when his lover stayed tensely silent. "Things change all over. Look, you heard him... this isn't a good time."

Eyebrows arching, she fixed him with a more direct look. "Sugar, I didn't come down here t' argue with you. Why don't ya go for a walk an' let me an' Remy chat on our own?"

The blood pressure cuff relaxed with a long sigh and a reading was displayed in blocky illuminated letters. Bobby's jaw hardened. "I really don't think he needs what you've gotta say right now."

"Bobby." Low voiced, from Remy, with hardly any inflection.

"That ain't for you do decide," Rogue put in irritably, scowling a little. "Go on, Bobby. I'll call ya when we're through."

He jabbed a finger at the monitor. "Look at what you're doing to him already! If you think for one second I'm gonna--"

"Bobby." Real anger that time. Remy's face was masked so blankly that he had to be livid. "Arretez-donc. Stop that."

"Look at your blood pressure!" he protested. "The second she came in here--"

"Ferme ta guelle!"

Bobby wasn't sure exactly what that meant but it sounded pretty adamant. He choked off his next words. Didn't quell his glare. Get out of here, that expression was meant to tell Rogue plainly. Couldn't she see? Didn't she care even a little?

She looked from one to the other, then slowly unfolded herself from the chair and stood. "I'll come find ya later, Remy," she murmured. Another glance at Bobby, then she strode through the door. The latch clicked solidly.

Remy stared in stolid silence at the chair she'd occupied.

"Remy," he began hesitantly, "I didn't mean to--"

His lover tipped his head back and closed his eyes. That jaw didn't unclench much. "Just lemme 'lone, Bobby."

"Wh-what? I was just trying to--"

"I wanna be alone."

And Bobby realized with a sudden sinking in his chest that Remy only _said_ that because, hooked up to the IV, he couldn't leave himself.

So Bobby did.

***

"I can't figure him out. Am I just blind? Hopelessly clueless? Why the hell is he nice to her?"

"She is a teammate," Hank pointed out mildly as he adjusted some knob or other on the microscope he was peering into. "How else would you have him relate to her?"

Bobby was pacing restlessly, reflecting absently on how he seemed to do this a lot in recent months. The auxiliary lab where he'd found Hank didn't really have room for it, but he managed. "I had the proof right there, Hank! She walks in and boom, his blood pressure goes up. I just don't understand it. He's uncomfortable around her. He doesn't like being around her. So why is he nice?"

"Analyze the question, Robert."

"What?"

"Analyze it. Why would he be so congenial to our displaced Southern belle?"

"That's what I'm asking you!"

A sigh, but not an especially deep one. He wasn't really annoyed yet. "Your partner burdens himself with an unseemly amount of culpability."

"You mean guilt? Yeah." He could swear that he felt his heart twang at that. "I know he does."

"And what is the companion for guilt?"

"Uh..."

"Remorse. Contrition. Penitence."

"Huh?"

"He feels bad and tries to make nice with the people he thinks he's hurt."

"Ooh." He paused in his pacing and rubbed irritably at his head. An ache was forming somewhere just inside his skull, tap-tap-tapping merrily at his nerves. "But Hank, he... he really shouldn't be doing that right now, y'know? It's not good for him. And he..."

Hank glanced at him after he'd trailed into silence and stayed there for a minute. "Did you intend to finish that thought?"

With a sigh that he tried to suppress Bobby sank down on the folding chair set in one corner. "I wish I spoke French."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. He said something, and I don't have any idea what it meant, but it sounded... bad. And he was so... angry." He swallowed hard, stared at the incomprehensible tangle of equipment on the table beside him. "I wanna help him, Hank, but I can't seem to figure out how. It's like he's tackling this... this thing, all by himself. I-I know he doesn't need me, but now... Y'know, I can barely keep my shit together when I hook up with an accounting job or, or as an X-Man or when I'm talking to my dad or--"

"Is there a point to this self-castigation?"

"Yeah." A breath. "This thing is pushing him; making him see what he's capable of. What if he's seeing... seeing those ways we're different and maybe getting sick of my... limits."

"Your limits?"

"I could never have fought this the way he's doing," he breathed out, painful honesty. "Hank, can you just imagine what it must feel like? And how sick he's gotten, and the cure being worse than the disease--"

"The cure is only worse than the disease if the disease is halted in its tracks," Hank cut in. "I assure you, had he chosen not to undergo treatment he would have been far less comfortable or drugged to the figurative gills."

"But that's just it! He could've decided to just let go and not fight, and you would've put him on drugs, and he'd've just... just faded away, y'know? Without all this knowing and being sick all the time and wondering if there's even any point to it." That was more than he'd meant to say. He forged on before Hank could pause him on those words. "I don't... I don't know if I could do it, Hank. I know the question would've entered my mind early on about whether or not to even try. But somehow he just... did it. No questions, no hesitation, like there wasn't even another option. And some part of him's gotta know that I wouldn't have the guts to just face it like that." The words dried out then, without even really saying all that he had to say. Despite the regard he held for Hank he also had to believe that now would come the false reassurances... now would come the big words that he'd have to look up later that would be meant for no other purpose than to mislead him into thinking that he had 'strength waiting to be tested' and that Remy had 'hidden vulnerabilities' and that everything was okay, he had no reason for concern, Remy didn't think less of him for his weakness...

Slowly, face thoughtful, Hank sat back from the microscope, chair squeaking beneath him. A large hand found his spectacles; pulled them off and rested them in his lap as he stared at his teammate. Bobby wanted to squirm, but damnit, he'd meant all that and Hank wasn't gonna make him take it back just by looking at him.

"Oh, Bobby," Hank said finally in a voice much lower and softer than the distracted version from moments before. "I fear I have done you a disservice."

Wha...? "I don't follow."

Warm eyes, a little sad. "Sometimes it is still far too easy to gaze across the bridge of time and see you as the boy you were when we all first came to be here."

He knew that tone of voice; that was storyteller mode. Hank had something he believed Bobby needed to hear, and it wasn't a simple something. "I'm listening."

"I think I wanted to protect you in those days, Bobby. Restrain your embarrassment for a moment... You were small and frightened, younger than all of us and plunged into a terrifying situation. On some level, despite my moral abhorrence for the practice, I believe it became natural for me to attempt to... shelter you, when I could. To at the least not burden you with knowledge that you could do nothing to alter. I had no desire to agitate you needlessly and pointlessly."

Some of the fuzz of anxiety was clearing from his thoughts. Bobby didn't say a word, but nodded shortly in encouragement. Whatever Hank was working around to, something told him that he wanted to know.

His friend glanced down briefly at his glasses in thought, then looked up again, seeming almost resigned. "You're laboring under a misconception. Remy is not superhuman, any more than you are something less. He has not faced this without his own share of uncertainty or fear or... indecision." A louder creak as the heavy weight settled more comfortably into the chair. "Let me tell you about the morning after we informed him of his illness, when he came down to... discuss treatment."

Bobby nodded more slowly, put his milling thoughts on hold, and listened.

***

He'd made an attempt to talk himself out of anger. He really, truly had.

When it failed, he didn't feel too bad.

Remy had wanted to refuse treatment. He'd wanted to give up, resigning himself to death, claiming it his due in that horrible, guilty way of his. The morning after they'd been together--

--so together--

--his lover had gone down to the medlab to tell Hank to let him die.

Humanity. Courage and fear, strength and weakness. Despite the fact that Remy had entertained the notion of giving up, Bobby couldn't fault him for it. Aborted past decisions didn't tarnish the admiration he held for the man who was currently wading through hell for nothing more than a chance at survival. Even if it was now a good chance after the surgery, the possibility was still there that this was all for nothing.

Since Bobby's opinion of Remy couldn't fall he found himself reevaluating a lot of the preconceived notions he'd held to be true all his life.

It was so different from what he'd imagined. He'd seen the movies, watched the television shows, read some of the books. A person going through an illness like this was supposed to hit certain stages -- his loved ones were supposed to feel this at this juncture and that at the next. All laid out, all somehow satisfyingly choreographed. There had been limited roles in his mind for each of them to fall into and that hadn't seemed a bad thing at all; merely an expected truth.

Reality was... something else entirely.

How could he have expected to find himself laughing uncontrollably one night when Remy had dryly observed that he should ask Hank to leave the port in and acquire himself a nice heroin addiction, just to keep the port from going to waste? It wasn't even funny, not a little, but it came after a session of holding Remy's hair away from his face, rubbing his back, trying and failing to think of words as the man wretched painfully over the toilet for the fourth time since lunch. And what could have prepared him for the conversations that carried so naturally and paused so abruptly when one or the other of them mistakenly tossed out a mention of long-term plans, forgetting in the normalcy of the moment that those plans were still in question? Smiling over irritable grumbling, biting back tears when Remy tossed that offhand Cajun grin his way, losing himself in music he'd never even listened to before, staring up at jeweled stars in a nighttime sky and honestly wondering what happened to a person when the heart finally tripped to a halt...

No. It was something that those diluted, twisted, melodramatic portrayals that he'd always taken as truth... couldn't capture. Couldn't even touch.

Remy -- bold, daring, face-every-challenge Remy -- had been ready to lie down and accept his fate... and Bobby was forced to reconsider everything he'd based on his own false assumptions.

The first thing he was reconsidering was something that had happened just over a year back. Something that he'd let himself lose sight of in the maelstrom of confusion that had surrounded it. Something that had contributed to the decision that Hank hadn't allowed Remy to make unchallenged.

"Rogue," he said flatly, breath pluming in the outside air. "We need to talk."

Her motions didn't pause; she continued rubbing a cloth over the hood of her convertible casually. "What about, Bobby?"

"You know what about."

She glanced over her shoulder. Met his blue eyes with her green ones and held the gaze mildly. "No offense, but I think what I had t' talk to Remy about needs to stay between me an' Remy."

"Fine," he said shortly. "We still need to talk."

Slowly, indolently, she curved her body, turned, leaned back against the freshly polished crimson car. She exuded lazy Southern style, but her eyes were sharp and stared hard. "What've we got to talk about?"

Still angry. Hurt? Still wounded over the choice Remy had made, the man he'd taken to his bed. And even Bobby knew that a wounded animal was that much more dangerous.

But damnit, he couldn't let this go. He couldn't. Remy was in there, sick and nervy and altogether miserable, and she was contributing to that, intentionally or no, and it didn't matter that he was confronting possibly the most powerful teammate he had, because he was mad enough to almost manage to forget that, and besides, hadn't Logan once said something about an animal defending a wounded mate being more dangerous still...? "I want you to leave him alone."

And with those words, that confidence in his rightness was abruptly back.

"Excuse me?" A trace of that tone that grated on his nerves every time he heard it from her. "That ain't your call to make."

Well. So much for the vague hope that this would be easy. "I'm not ordering you, Rogue. I'm asking you. I'm asking whatever part of you cared about him once. He can't take what you do to him right now."

"What do you know about it?" She hadn't really raised her voice yet, but her eyes were flashing enough to warn him that it was coming. "There's no law saying he an' I can't still be friends, Bobby. He's a grown man. He can make his own decisions."

"Decisions like blaming himself for what you did to him?" he all but hissed, thinking that his eyes might be flashing as well. "Decisions like thinking that he owes you somehow for having cared about you?"

She drew up, stood straight and tall. "Don't go there. Don't you dare go there."

"Or what? Leaving me in Antarctica isn't really gonna cut it, I don't think. Try the Sahara, maybe?" His throat was so tight that the words were said even more harshly than he heard them in his head, but he didn't care at the moment. No one-- no one had really addressed this. No one had confronted her. Storm asked her about it once, Bobby thought, and he was pretty sure than Hank had made plain his horror, but Rogue had yet to be held accountable for what could so easily have been murder. Why? How had they all let this go? Was it so easy to fall victim to Remy's determined abandonment of the issue?

She looked ready to cry or scream. Her voice was choked. "You got no idea what really happened there... you weren't there... you didn't hear what he told me in my head, Bobby..."

"Tell me, then! Tell me what the fuck gave you enough reason to leave him there!"

"You... you wouldn't understand..."

"Try me."

"I can't... it's not..."

He clenched a fist. Unclenched it. "Why did you leave him there?"

"Because he told me to!" She turned in a motion so fast and fluid he could barely follow it, her hand slamming down, denting and mangling the carefully tended hood of her convertible with a screech of metal. "He was in my head, he made me see what he was feeling, and he told me to leave him there. You got that? Can you swallow that, huh?"

His mind was whirling around it all, but somehow the information was still, amazingly, falling into order in his brain. Like numbers lining up, information making sense even when it was presented so chaotically. This belonged here, that belonged there. She couldn't lead him into contemplation of abstract concepts if he cut down to the core of truth behind them.

"He told you to let him die," he said unsteadily, as if waiting for confirmation.

"Yes."

"You gave him what he thought he wanted."

"I didn't want to... I know this ain't easy to understand, but he made it so clear..."

"Uh huh." Numerical alignment. "Did you know he told Hank to let him die, too?"

She went still. Very still. "What?"

"When he was diagnosed with cancer. When he found out how bad his chances were. He thought he deserved it. He thought he was supposed to have died when you left him in the snow, and he told Hank that he didn't want treatment."

Rogue didn't turn. Her fingers curled against the already twisted metal of her car's hood, making it bend and warp even more. "It... it ain't the same..."

"No person of any sorta conscience is gonna just accept that decision from a man in that condition. No one." And now he felt tears of anger and something less easily defined trying to start up in his eyes. It was so easy to get caught in conflicting emotions nowadays. He took a step closer and dropped his voice, hearing it go rough. "Everything that'd just happened down there... everything that'd been said to him and about him... all of it was just stacking up, making him feel like he couldn't take it anymore. If you ever cared about him... if you were even fucking human at heart, you wouldn't have done that to him."

A tremble passed through her. "Back off, Bobby," she said hoarsely, not turning.

The warning in her voice was plain, but he didn't back away. She might touch me. Yes, she might. Steal his mind, steal his memories, see what he felt and thought and believed. He didn't want that -- he certainly had no desire to share himself or any of the tender moments he'd had in Remy's arms with her -- but he wouldn't let this go, either. At the very least, if she dared to do that, then she'd be forced to see how it all looked through the eyes of someone who loved the man she'd abandoned.

"What was he to you?" He felt sick even heading in this direction. "Did he feed your ego? Make you feel pretty? Was he property, Ro--"

She'd turned and shoved him back before he finished saying her name. A shove from Rogue wasn't something to sneer at, either. His torso snapped back, dragging his legs through the air after him, and he spared half a heartbeat to wonder if whiplash via angry Southerner was covered by his insurance...

And then he was ice, caught and slowed to a halt by a ready slide that formed beneath him, and in almost the same thought he was guiding a pillar of crystal water to erupt beneath Rogue's feet, launching her skyward, flinging her into the air with enough speed and force to even catch her by surprise.

She recovered quickly, spun in the air in a catlike motion, and dove for him with a shouted word that he couldn't make out. Instinct and anger mingled for once: He sheeted ice around her outstretched form with less than a thought, thickening it automatically, springing back as the ice boulder started to fall to earth.

Rogue broke free a few yards above the ground. Ice shattered, quieter than glass, and began to fall as she regathered herself for another lunge for him.

He gathered the ice, fused it with more and encased her again, thicker this time.

Another fall, all the way to the ground, and another spray of crystalline water outward. She was livid now, madder than before, and the expression on her face gave him a chill.

It didn't even touch the anger in his chest, though. Frozen teeth bared, he sheathed her in ice again, leaving her head free and trapping the rest of her more securely. The ice trembled immediately under the strain of her struggling but he thought he had maybe a moment, maybe two, in which to make her hear him.

"I could trap you in a glacier," he told her in words made level and uninflected by the very truth they reflected. "I could bury you in Antarctica, deep enough that you might never get out." He barely heard the words and had no idea where they were coming from. "If I were the sort -- if I were the sort, I could send ice crystals through your arteries directly into your brain." She was panting raggedly, not struggling anymore, listening to him. "I could fill your heart with ice. I could kill you, Rogue."

Deep beneath the words and the sentiment he sat inside himself and watched his actions in timorous awe.

"I know that if you touched me you could steal my mind and my powers." Icy lips twisted. He took a shaky breath that he didn't need. "But you'd have to touch me first."

She said nothing. Glared with enough heat to figuratively scorch.

"All I was trying to say was leave him alone. All I care about right now is that you stop trying to put your shit off on him and just let him focus on getting better. If you wanna have a heart-to-heart with him, wait until he comes to you." His voice thickened. "You don't have a right to reach out to him. Not after what you did. And... and you can't justify that. You can't. He may not see that, but I do, and I'm not gonna let--"

The ice quivered and shattered. Rogue was trembling from head to toe; with anger or some more worthy emotion, he couldn't tell. "Stop," she said flatly. "Just stop."

"Not until you--"

"Bobby...?"

His frozen heart felt even harder and colder suddenly. He turned his head slowly and tried not to panic. "Remy... what are you doing out here...?" He'd just taken chemo... it would be hitting him at any moment and then he'd be sick again, and he was already barely standing straight, swaying a little, with a hand braced against the brick wall just outside the garage, staring at Bobby with a dazed look, and... "You should be taking it easy..."

A little tremor ran through the long body wavering there so unsteadily. "I heard..." He shook his head. Looked past Bobby at Rogue, who appeared more frozen than she'd been encased in ice. "Cher, why...?"

"Don't call me that," Rogue said hoarsely.

Remy blinked slowly. "I was talkin'... t' Bobby."

Ice transformed to flesh. Bobby barely spared a moment to be relieved that long habit had caused him to don his uniform pants beneath his clothes, just in case something unexpected happened. The daily clothing had cracked and fallen away, leaving him now bare-chested and clad only in the second-skin leggings.

Mind on more important matters, he ignored that fact and went to Remy, leaving Rogue standing motionless in the winter grass.

"I'm sorry," he said when he was close enough to be heard only by his lover. "But I don't take a word of it back." His stomach fluttered uneasily, doing lazy flipflops, but he didn't dare let this surety in his actions escape him. He'd meant it all, even if he hadn't known he'd meant it until it was out.

Remy stared at him as if looking at a stranger. Crimson and midnight eyes were too full of surprise to show anything else he might've been feeling. "I... Oh."

Bobby took a breath, extended a hand. "Can we... shouldn't we get you to your room?"

The eyes dropped to his hand. Blinked. "What happened t' y' brace?"

"My...?" He looked. "Um." Those little bones in his hand had still been sore after his altercation with the wall, and the brace had been worn to remind him not to use it. But now they... didn't hurt? At all. He'd actually forgotten about it. "I guess it... broke off." Forgotten. When he hadn't transformed to ice for months simply to avoid risking misaligning those bones. "It doesn't hurt..."

Remy nodded faintly, then closed his eyes suddenly and swallowed hard. His hand against the wall was trembling, sending shivers up along his arm and all through the increasingly leaner body. He didn't say a word; Bobby had seen these signs enough to know them by now, though. Quickly he slipped an arm around Remy's waist, hating the flinch away from his colder-than-usual flesh, but not taking it to heart. He murmured, "Come on," and waited until fingers slipped from the wall to slowly creep behind his neck, over his shoulders, letting him reach up to take the hand in his to offer more support.

Out of his peripheral vision he caught a last glimpse of Rogue as they turned. She still hadn't moved. She still watched them silently. She was crying.

A part of him almost felt sorry for her, but the part of him that really mattered was busy with thoughts of Remy, and she didn't rate so much as a concern next to that.

[next part]

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