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Her presence in his life is spoken of in rubber bands.
There is only a vague hint of her existence in any of the rooms he shares with her. Rogue keeps her clothes in the dresser in the room she inhabited before she moved into his, and despite a frightening array of bath products she keeps on a shelf in the shower one would never even know she was there.
Except for the rubber bands.
It is perplexing only because he finds them everywhere and yet she never seemed to run out of the damned things.
She wears her hair up most of the time, and if it’s down, she has one on her wrist. At night he watches the way she pulls it from her ponytail and tosses the circular black elastic band on the dresser, and he sees her in the morning grab the same one and put it around her wrist again.
How then, do they manage to appear everywhere?
Erik finds them in his chair in the study, left on the sink in the bathroom, hidden beneath the pillows of the bed. One was wrapped around a shampoo bottle in the shower, another on his desk.
“Do you hide these away in case you might need one at any given moment of the day, regardless of what room you happen to be in?” Erik asked her finally, unnerved to discover yet another one in the sheets of the bed.
“What?” She looks at him, confused, lying on her back. Rogue's eyes focus on the rubber band he is waving at her and she grins a little. “No, I just lose them a lot.” She reaches out immediately to take it from him.
He gives her an aggrieved expression and puts the offending object on the dresser, noting in consternation there is already one there. “How many of these damned things do you have?”
She makes a small noise that might be a laugh. “They come in packages,” she explained.
He gives her a cross look.
“Of what? A thousand?”
A surprised giggle escapes her; the sound is girlish and not one usually heard in this room. “No. About twenty. I have like two packs.”
Erik snorted at that.
“I think I’ve found thirty-nine of them, so you best keep track of that last one.”
“Okay,” she agrees, giggling some more, and he thinks fleetingly that she is very pretty when she laughs.
“You don’t even wear your hair up in bed,” he informs her later, when she is sleepy and curled warm and tight against him.
“Erik,” she admonishes him in a soft voice, as if he’s being childish.
He has his hand in her hair and tugs on it for using that tone with him. “Marie,” he answers her, though he’s smiling in the dark as he says it.
The fortress is freezing and she doesn't have any sweatshirts. She'd borrow one from Pyro, but she doesn't trust the frequency with which he does his laundry. Or more appropriately, doesn't.
Rogue finds herself nervously opening Erik's closet, tentatively turning the knob with her gloved hand. She almost expects him to be on the other side and chastise her for her audacity in going through his clothing and attempting to borrow something without asking.
He's not there, of course, and she really hadn't thought that he would be, but she gives a little sigh of relief nonetheless as she surveys his clothing, hearing the roar of the sea far below through the window. It's such a familiar noise by now, she's surprised she even notices it.
Erik is very neat—he has everything hung up or folded on the small wire shelves in the closet. He's fond of gray, red, and black; most of the clothes are solid colors, very classic. She reaches out and grabs a black, thick wool sweater off the shelf and pulls it over her head. It's too big for her, the sleeves hang past her hands but at least she's warm.
His scent clings to the wool, and as she breathes it in she finds herself both comforted and frightened; skin tingling as if she's about to fight, heartbeat speeding up, breath coming a bit too fast. Her body is reacting as if she's in danger, and maybe she is, and she feels herself flush as she stares at the bed with the mahogany wood headboard. She's always thought it was out of place in this island fortress of rock and metal.
As she turns to leave, she sees herself reflected in the mirror, wrapped in his black sweater. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and her eyes seem very dark in the paleness of her face, pupils large and dilated. She brings her hands up and rubs the wool of the cuffs on her cheek, finding a curious comfort in the scratch of it against her skin, and in the indefinable scent that elicits both fear and that peculiar fascination she associates so strongly with him.
Rogue leaves the bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her. She does not see him until dinner, and a small smile curves his mouth as he takes in the sight of her in his sweater, but he does not remark upon it.
Later that night before bed, she opens the closet and reaches down for the hem of the sweater, intending to pull it off and return it to the shelf from whence it came.
He stops her with a hand wrapped around her wrist.
“Keep it, you'll only be cold tomorrow.” His fingers tighten further and he pulls her to him slowly, and she feels a bit like he's unraveling her. Like she's a stray bit of wool that's come undone in his hands, and maybe she is. She knows that if he keeps pulling, she'll lose herself; at least for a little while.
She doesn't understand the pleased, rather smug tone to his voice, and she doesn't ask him about it either. She does fold the sweater carefully and lay it on the dresser for the morning.
*****
The following night, Erik takes her out to dinner for her birthday. Rogue likes seafood, which is something he didn't expect. “Did you think I'd want fried chicken and biscuits and gravy?” she asks him, laughing.
He would have taken her to task for her tone of voice, but it was her birthday. Perhaps a little leniency would not be amiss.
They go to restaurant on the mainland for seafood, and it's the type of place that has paper towel rolls instead of napkins and paper instead of linen covering the table. She orders a dozen Maryland Blue crabs and an order of hush puppies, and a Red Stripe. He rolls his eyes at her beverage selection but says nothing about it, ordering the same thing for dinner, minus the beer. He has water instead.
“Is it your daughter's birthday?” the waitress asks kindly as she hands Rogue her beer and him his glass of water, and Rogue snorts a laugh at that.
“Mmm,” he says blandly, neither agreeing or disagreeing with her, and when the waitress leaves he gives Rogue a stern look.
“What?” she says innocently, wide-eyed. “It was funny.”
“I think it best if they don't know anything about us, don't you?” His eyes are remote as he says this, reminding her that when she joined the Brotherhood she agreed to their life of rather complicated deceptions. “Rather less conspicuous if I am your father.”
She raises an eyebrow at him in a familiar gesture.
“Sure thing, daddy,” she drawls, and he can't help but laugh.
They are mostly quiet as they sit there, staring out at the sea, which looks different somehow when one's looking at it from the shore and not from a rocky island in the middle of the sea. He drinks his water and watches her, noticing the way she tugs at that lock of white in her hair constantly. She's not wearing her gloves, which he finds admirable, even if though she tenses every time the waitress stops by the table.
When the waitress brings the platter of crabs, Rogue looks at them with a very nervous sort of expression. He's amused because it occurs to him she has no idea what to do; she picks up the mallet and turns the wood over in her hands, obviously perplexed. He's about to offer her instructions when her eyes sort of glaze over, and with expert precision she dismantles the crab to get at the meat inside. He's so captivated that his own lays untouched on his plate as he watches her eat the crab as if she's been doing it for years.
“I wasn't aware you knew how to do that,” he says blandly.
She looks up at him, and in that moment he thinks she very well could be his daughter. It's his smile that curves across her face, subtle and sharp. “I don't,” she says in a low voice, the inflection almost perfectly mimicking his. “But you do.” She turns her attention back to her dinner.
Erik picks up his own mallet, eyes predatory as he stares across the table at her.
“Convenient.”
She looks up at him again, and nothing about her slow, pleased smile makes him think he's her father. “Yeah,” she says in her own voice, and somehow this makes him feel a bit better about what he's planning on giving her for a birthday present when they get home. Suddenly, a question came to mind.
“Would you put me in that machine, now?” It’s the first time she’s mentioned Liberty Island in a while.
“What do you think?” Erik responded.
She’s quiet for a moment. “Marie doesn’t want to think she sleeps every night with a man who would. Rogue doesn’t want to think she gave her allegiance to a man who wouldn’t.”
“I think that this time, you would volunteer,” he responds, and reaches out to squeeze her hand in his.
She makes a small sound between a laugh and a sigh.
“This is demented, you realize.”
The first time he’d seen her, he’d seen nothing beyond the means to an end, an unfortunate sacrifice. His apology to her on the Statue had been sincere.
The second time, she wanted to kill him. He could see it written on her face, as sincerely as his apology had been.
She sits before him now, not trembling from fear and exhaustion, and no longer looks like a child. His eyes are drawn to the shock of white in her hair—before, it was evidence of his failure.
Now it is something else entirely. Now, it marks her as his.