Rogue: Touch of Fate by Jade Gretz

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Rogue: Touch of Fate ANIMATION

Heir to Her Touch

She had always been told that power leaves traces like perfume — faint, lingering, a thing that clings to cloth and memory. For Rogue those traces were heavier: fingerprints of other people's lives pressed into her skin, echoes of laughter that were not hers, shadows of skill and sorrow that sometimes arrived without warning and never entirely left.

The night he returned, the traces coagulated into a breath that tasted like rain on concrete and the last cigarette she’d ever promised to quit. He stepped out of the alley with a gait that was all wrong for a man who had no name to begin with. He was stitched from her—threads of stolen strength, a bruise of a memory, a discarded impulse—but he wore himself like a new suit, tailored into something both obscene and meticulous.

“You always did take what you wanted,” he said. His voice licked at her like a remembered song. It carried the baritone of a man she’d once known, the tenor of another; the cadence shifted and reshaped, a carousel of lives she’d touched. She felt the tilt of her head and the sudden, involuntary remembering of a hand that had smelled like motor oil and winter.

Rogue’s fists closed. The darkness behind her ears hummed with other lives — laughter of children she’d never borne, the steady breath of strangers. She felt the impulse to pull back, to wrap herself in the practiced armor of distance she’d learned in years of being a repository and a wasteland both.

“Who are you?” she asked, and heard the flatness of the question, a technician’s efficiency. It was not the first time she’d asked that; it never would be. There were ways to name the pain. The trick was not to feed it.

The man—if man he had to be called—smiled like someone who kept stolen things in a drawer labeled For Later. “Names are such fragile things,” he said. “Call me what you called me, once. Call me what you made.” His hand feathered across his chest, and the gesture tugged at a memory she’d hoped to smother in whiskey and the steady trust of friends. The recollection flashed: a darkened cell, hands on her, a squeeze—power siphoned with clinical cruelty. She had been a girl then. She had been afraid, and then she had been colder.

“You were never mine,” she said, but her voice cracked with an old, abiding apology. The patchwork man bowed as if accepting an offering. Around the alley, the city sighed. A dog barked twice, then was quiet. Above them, the moon smeared a thin, yellow smear along the rooftops like a bruise.

“You took everything,” he said. “You took my warmth, my blood’s small dances, the music of my thoughts. You pulled me out like a splinter and left the pieces to rot inside your marrow.” He reached out, not touchingly but theatrically, like an actor demanding a curtain call. When Rogue read the extremes of him—anger braided with a theatrical hunger—it felt as if the world refocused: no longer the familiar contours of an X-Men safehouse or a city that had learned to tolerate its miracles, but a stage designed to dissect her.

“You were gone,” she said. “I— I didn’t—” The words arrived in a stutter of shame. She had been young, recklessly heroic, then unmade by a single mistake that had offered her another’s life as refuge. The truth was always blunt: to save herself or another, she had taken more than she intended. The echoes of that act had never stopped ringing.

He smiled, and where his teeth met his lips she saw, for one absurd second, her mother's small, astonished grin. It set her teeth on edge. “You never finished me,” he said. “You left the harvest incomplete. You walked away with my coat, my manners, my mistakes. But I'm not grateful, child. Gratitude is for those who are granted mercy. I want restitution.”

Rogue swallowed. The alley felt suddenly too small. She felt the old itch in her fingers, the ancient and forbidden hunger that could light up a man’s heart with a touch and then snuff him like a candle. She thought of those she loved—the warmth of Gambit's hand, the brassy laughter of Storm—and she thought of the long list of names she had accumulated inside herself like a hidden garden. To touch was to take, and she would never risk someone she loved to the hunger inside her.

She tried the old weapon: humor, a deflection wrapped in a drawl. “Honey, you’re a lot of things, but ‘child’ ain’t one of ‘em.” Her accent softened her like sugar. She watched his face for a crack.

He laughed, and it was a sound
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