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The bayou had dressed itself for a wedding.
It had done a poor imitation of one.
There were no church bells hidden among the cypress trees, no white aisle stretching toward an altar or neat rows of pews. The swamp had supplied its own architecture with ancient trunks rising black and crooked from the water beneath. Spanish moss drooped from their branches in long grey veils, stirring occasionally despite the stillness of the night. Roots broke through the wet earth in pale, knuckled shapes that made Rogue think of hands trying to claw their way out.
Candles had been placed everywhere.
Dozens of them burned along the waterline and over the broad remains of old cypress trunks, their wax spilling in thick white ropes down the bark. Some had burned so low that the flames seemed to float directly upon little pools of melted tallow. Others leaned at impossible angles and continued burning anyway. Their light was warmer than the moon and somehow less comforting, turning every hollow in the trees into a mouth.
The moon itself hung high above the clearing, violet behind a smear of cloud.
Beneath it, Rogue descended.
For one breathless moment she might have belonged to another story entirely.
Her veil caught the night air and opened around her like translucent wings, pale lavender where the moon passed through it and almost black when a cloud obscured it. The white streaks in her hair shone silver beneath the gauze, braided away from her face before disappearing into auburn waves loose down her back. Her dress was the colour of old wine and darkened toward black at the hem, its fitted bodice leaving her shoulders bare, the skirt opening in long drifting panels around her legs as gravity slowly remembered her.
She looked as though she should have been floating down toward music, laughter and Remy waiting beneath an arch with a nervous grin.
But alas, there was a corpse waiting to be made. And the man watching her descend had already been one.
Rogue slowed several feet above the ground.
Death stood beneath her. The thing Apocalypse had made from Remy LeBeau had preserved enough of him to make taking a look at him worse than grief.
His body remained lean and long beneath a heavy familiar coat. His posture was still carrying that lazy elegance he had never entirely lost even when exhausted or wounded.
Everything else had been leeched toward death. His skin had become ash grey, bloodless over the sharp features of his face. His hair, once warm auburn beneath sunlight, was now white as bone and fell untidily across his forehead. The familiar black of his eyes remained, but the irises burned through it in a crimson so bright they cast faint light beneath his lashes.
Yet when he looked up at her, his mouth softened.
Rogue's stomach clenched. That expression belonged to Remy, not whatever spectre he had become.
It was the look that always travelled over her before returning to her face, pleased and a little awed.
Death looked at his bride the same way.
"Chère."
His voice had become another wrong thing.
It left his mouth quietly and then returned to her from several directions at once, whispering along the surface of the water, repeating itself among the trees until the word seemed to have been spoken by several dead men standing just beyond the candlelight.
Chère.
Chère.
Chère.
Rogue came down until the toes of her boots hovered just above the grass.
The candles nearest her bent, but she could not feel the wind. Remy extended one bare hand. For several seconds, Rogue only stared at it.
Once, the sight of his uncovered fingers would have meant danger. Now she could touch him freely.
She wished there was something between them.
"Come," he said.
The word drifted outward through the bayou. Rogue lowered to the ground and placed her hand in his. Cold travelled immediately through her fingers.
She had expected coolness. What she felt was a temperature that seemed to belong underground. His skin carried the chill of stone, completely untouched by the humid Louisiana night.
Her first instinct was to pull away. Instead, her fingers curled tighter and Remy's thumb passed once over her knuckles.
It was such an ordinary gesture. She could cry.
Beyond his shoulder, the rest of the clearing waited. Figures stood between the trees. They seemed to have been placed in a loose crescent around the altar, their eyes lit by the same dim red influence that had poisoned so much of this place. Their bodies barely shifted. Even their breathing seemed shallow.
Kurt stood closest.
His blue face was drawn and expressionless, his yellow eyes clouded beneath Death’s control. His hands were clasped solemnly before him, fingers folded together with an obscene approximation of prayer.
Rogue stopped.
"Kurt."
Her brother did not answer. She tried again, quieter this time.
"Kurt?"
He did not reply.
"He'll serve his purpose."
Her head snapped toward him. "He's my brother."
"And tonight he'll marry us."
The sentence landed with such calm certainty that for a second Rogue could only stare at him.
There should have been something in his face to soften it. Some tiny lift at the corner of his mouth. Some sign that Remy understood the insanity of standing in a swamp surrounded by hypnotized mutants and candles while discussing matrimony as though they had simply been delayed on the way to City Hall.
Death regarded her patiently.
"He wouldn't want this."
"Everybody's always wanted somethin' different for us."
His hand rose. Rogue stiffened as his cold fingertips found the side of her face. They were cold enough that she could feel it spreading through her cheek.
She couldn't help but lean into his palm. Remy's expression softened.
"Didn't stop us before." His voice reverberated softly.
Damn him. Damn Apocalypse for leaving him that voice. Damn whatever fragment of Remy still lived inside this creature and remembered precisely which parts of her were weakest.
The whole scene felt like a blur. One moment she was looking at him, the next a goddess emerged from the onyx water below
She did not look old, although something about her face made the word young equally absurd. Time had passed over her without leaving any evidence behind.
At her throat hung the relic. Gold caught the candlelight.
Rogue had imagined something grander when Remy first described it. A crown, perhaps. Something large enough to look properly mythological. Instead it resembled a simple large round pendant. A violet stone sat in the centre of the golden setting. It looked too ordinary to be a remnant of Apocalypse's power. A mere gift once given to the woman he loved. One that she had used to betray him.
Rogue's gaze went from the relic to Remy.
"You sure this is gonna work?"
He looked at her.
"I died once."
Her stomach turned over.
"I know."
"That enough uncertainty for one lifetime."
The woman laughed. The sound had no humour in it. It echoed loudly in the clearing and several nearby candle flames flickered in answer.
"You speak of eternity as though it belongs to you, thief."
Remy's head turned slowly. Rogue knew the movement. She knew the tiny adjustments of his shoulders and the almost imperceptible lowering of his chin. Once, that expression had appeared across card tables when someone had made the mistake of thinking his jokes meant harmlessness.
"You got somethin' I need."
The Xternal looked past him, straight at Rogue. Her contempt changed, morphed into something that looked like pity.
"He cannot give you what he promises."
Rogue's throat tightened.
"He can only make you as dead as he is."
Something flickered across Remy's face.
His right hand opened. Energy gathered in his palm, swirling and taking shape. Rogue had spent years thinking his power was beautiful.
She remembered magenta light crawling across playing cards. Purple sparks between his fingers. The low hum that raised the hairs along her arms before he sent something flying and grinned at the explosion. That power had always contained movement. It was life at its purest form.
This was something else entirely. Deep purple seeped between his fingers with threads of black winding through it. The air seemed to pucker around him. Leaves lifted from the ground and began circling his wrist. The water surrounding the clearing trembled in perfectly round rings.
The woman stopped smiling.
"Remy."
Rogue heard the warning in her own voice. He glanced back at her. For a heartbeat, she saw her scoundrel. Then the crimson in his eyes brightened.
Death closed his fist, and the energy around it surged in the shape of a scythe, mowing down the ageless woman who had begun glowing electric red with her own power in defense.
Her screams ripped through the bayou.
Her body bent violently forward. The purple-black energy bloomed beneath her skin, following the pathways of her veins in branching flashes, pulsing through her throat, her arms, her face.
Remy was charging her.
No.
Rogue understood with a sick lurch. He was charging what was inside her. Blood moved. A heart beat. Lungs expanded. Every living body depended upon motion. Death had learned to touch all of it.
Rogue was frozen in place as she watched the woman disintegrate in front of her eyes. Only the purple stone remained.
The sound stopped. So did everything else and time stood still. She had seen death before, many more times than she cared to count. This one felt intimate.
Remy walked toward the relic with the unhurried manner of a man retrieving something he had left on a table.
"Forgive the manners," he murmured. "Never been good at waitin' my turn."
His fingers closed around the gold.
Rogue flinched. For an instant, Remy stood framed by the cypress roots, candlelight gathering beneath the hollows of his cheekbones and the relic glowing faintly between his fingers.
A bridegroom at his altar. A murderer at his sacrifice. Both wore Remy's face.
He turned.
"Come here, chère."
Rogue did not move. The swamp seemed suddenly much larger than it had before. The trees crowded inward. Their branches tangled overhead until the clearing resembled the rib cage of something enormous that had died here centuries ago and never entirely decomposed.
"Rogue."
Her gaze dropped to the jewel.
"You said it'd make me immortal."
"It will."
"You said it was part of Apocalypse."
"It is."
"And you expect me to let you put that thing inside me after what Ah just watched?"
Remy considered her, his face a mask of calmness.
"You afraid of me?"
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Something wounded moved briefly across his face.
He crossed the space between them. Rogue stood her ground because retreating felt impossible. Some treacherous part of her still knew the rhythm of his footsteps and wanted to believe they meant home.
"Look at me."
She did. His eyes were terrible. She couldn't help but love them anyway.
"Ah don't know what you are anymore," she whispered.
His jaw tightened.
"Yes, you do."
"Remy..."
"You know exactly who I am."
He took her hand and pressed it against his chest. Nothing answered beneath her palm. She willed herself to feel warmth, a heartbeat, anything. All she could feel was death.
Rogue stared down at her hand.
"I was dead."
His voice travelled softly through the clearing.
"I know."
"Left you here."
"Don't."
"Left you cryin' over a body you couldn't bring back."
"Remy, stop."
"And when I opened my eyes again, first thing I knew was you."
Her breath caught.
"First thing I wanted."
"Stop."
"First thing I loved."
The last word returned from the trees, echoing through the clearing.
Loved.
Loved.
Loved.
Rogue's eyes burned. Remy lowered his forehead to hers. His skin felt like winter.
"You know what death taught me, chère?"
She shook her head.
"Forever ain't romantic when you think you got plenty of time."
His thumb brushed over the back of her hand.
"It's cruel."
A tear slipped free.
"All those years we wasted. All the times we walked away. Every time we thought we'd fix it tomorrow." The echo beneath his voice trembled now, the spectral distortion doing nothing to hide the human ache beneath it. "There ain't always a tomorrow."
Rogue shut her eyes.
"Ah don't wanna lose you again."
The words were quiet.
"You won't," he said. His fingers slid beneath her chin. Rogue opened her eyes.
"You wanted a life with me."
Her mouth trembled.
"You got one."
His crimson stare held hers.
"You wanted to wake up beside me without wonderin' when somebody was gonna take it away."
Another tear reached her jaw.
"You wanted all the years we never thought we'd get."
His fingers drifted into her hair.
"Grey hair."
A ghost of a smile touched his mouth.
"Wrinkles and some ugly little house full of cats."
A broken laugh escaped her before she could stop it.
Remy's expression changed. For a second, the corpse vanished. Her scoundrel looked at her through dead red eyes.
"There she is."
Rogue bit down on another sound.
"You wanted me."
The relic brightened between them.
"And I wanted you."
His gaze moved across her face with something frighteningly close to worship.
"Still do."
Her breath shuddered.
"Even like this?" she whispered.
Remy glanced down at himself, his gaze stopping on the ashen skin of his hands.
Then he looked at her again.
"'Specially like this."
That almost made her smile. He raised the relic and settled against the centre of her chest.
Her entire body locked.
"Nobody gets to take you from me."
The gold began to glow.
"Nobody gets to take me from you."
Rogue could feel its glow seeping through her skin.
"Time don't get you."
It felt warm and inviting.
"Age don't get you."
Red light unfurled between them.
"Death don't get you."
Rogue stared into him.
"And if the whole damn world burns?"
His smile took the shape of a monstrous grin.
"Then we'll watch it together."
The bayou waited. Rogue could hear the candle wax running and water dripping from the moss.
She looked at the relic then at Kurt, standing still beneath the cypress.
Finally she looked back at Remy.
Her chin dipped. A movement so small it might have been mistaken for trembling.
Remy's eyes flared at her silent confirmation. He plunged the relic through her chest.
Pain arrived with red light.
Rogue screamed. The bayou answered. Every candle went horizontal at once. The black surface of the water rose in concentric rings. Birds exploded from the trees in a shrieking cloud as crimson light burst from Rogue's body and lifted her from the earth.
Her arms flung wide.
The relic sank through flesh and bone without passing through them in any way her mind could understand.
Something opened within her. Rogue had spent her entire life carrying other people inside her. Fragments stolen through touch and packed away in the dark chambers of her mind.
Now every one of them woke.Thousands of lives surged through her at once.
The crimson light travelled beneath her skin in delicate branching patterns, tracing veins from her chest to her throat, down her arms and across her face. Her pulse stumbled.
Rogue's eyes opened.
The world had become unbearable. She could hear Kurt's heart. She could hear the blood moving through the thralls standing behind him.
She could hear the frantic pulse of a rabbit somewhere beneath the roots twenty yards away. She could hear things inside the water.
All these living and oh so warm things. Every body in the clearing had become a little furnace. Each heartbeat was suddenly calling to her.
She gasped. The sound that left her mouth was too low.
Her strength disappeared and Death caught her. One arm slid beneath her knees, the other around her back, gathering her against his chest with almost absurd gentleness after everything that had happened.
Bridal style. Of course.
Rogue's head fell against his shoulder.
Her skin had become pale beneath the moonlight, its warmth draining with each second until his dead cold no longer felt cold at all. Black veins flickered at her temples before receding beneath the skin. At the centre of her chest, the violet stone emerged, set into her flesh like some obscene engagement jewel.
Her eyes opened and she studied His face. His expression held none of Death's solemnity now. She could only glimpse a flicker of wonder.
"Beautiful.”
Rogue lifted a shaking hand. Her fingertips touched his cheek. For the first time since he had returned, his skin felt right.
"Ah can hear them.”
Her own voice frightened her. There was an undertone beneath it now, something velvet-soft and cavernous, as though another Rogue spoke from very far underground whenever she did.
Death smiled.
"I know."
She turned her head. The clearing was beating to the rhythm of heartbeats.
Her lips parted. Death's gaze dropped to them and the red in his eyes deepened.
"Later," he murmured.
A soft, almost embarrassed laugh slipped from Rogue. Its sound echoed across the clearing. She stopped. The thing that laughed back from the swamp did not sound embarrassed at all.
Death carried her toward the altar. Kurt stepped forward. Rogue watched her brother take his place beneath the hanging moss. The moonlight sharpened his silhouette until he looked like something painted into the window of an abandoned chapel, hands folded neatly before him, eyes vacant.
Remy set Rogue on her feet. He kept one arm securely around her waist. Perhaps because she needed the support or maybe because he had no intention of letting go.
Kurt looked at them.
When he spoke, his voice was flat and strangely ceremonial.
"Before God, such a union would be called profane."
Rogue's breath caught. Death’s smile returned.
"Before nature, it would be called impossible. Before death, it would be called arrogance."
The candle flames trembled.
"Yet there are loves which do not ask permission from heaven."
Rogue looked at Remy. He was already watching her.
"There are devotions which survive the grave and return from it changed, unwilling to surrender what death has already tried to claim."
The water surrounding them began moving again.
Slow circles spread outward from the altar as though something beneath the swamp had turned in its sleep.
"Tonight, two souls reject the boundary appointed to all living things."
Remy's hand tightened at Rogue's waist.
"They choose no ending."
The stone inside her chest pulsed.
"No parting."
Rogue could hear the people around them breathing.
"No final breath between them."
She wondered whether she would ever draw one again from necessity.
Kurt turned to Remy.
"Remy LeBeau, Horseman of Death, do you take this woman beyond sickness, beyond age, beyond mercy, beyond the grave itself?"
Remy answered before the question had finished echoing.
"I do."
The words moved over the water.
Kurt faced Rogue.
"Rogue of the X-Men, do you take this man in death, and promise to walk beside him long after every mortal vow has crumbled into dust?”
Rogue looked at Remy, at Death with his pale hair, grey flesh, and crimson eyes.
Perhaps love had always contained something monstrous. The desire to keep, to possess and demand one more morning from a universe that owed them nothing.
Death had merely stopped pretending otherwise.
Rogue slid her fingers into his white hair.
"I do."
His eyes closed for a single heartbeat. Relief passed across his face with such intensity that something inside her still managed to ache.
Kurt raised his hands.
"Then what death has joined..."
The wind arrived. It moved through the clearing in one long exhale, stirring moss and the skirts of Rogue's dress together.
"...let no living thing divide."
Remy bent toward her, and Rogue rose instinctively to meet him and when their mouths came together, the kiss was almost unbearably gentle
Then the relic woke.
Crimson light burst between their bodies. Rogue gasped against his mouth. His arm tightened around her. Her hands caught in the front of his coat. Their powers answered each other immediately, black-red ribbons of energy spiralling outward before folding back around them, threading together until Rogue could no longer tell which pulse belonged to him and which had begun inside her.
The candles died. The darkness arrived so completely that the altar and all the witnesses disappeared.
For several seconds, there were only four red eyes suspended beneath the cypress trees. Then the moon slipped free of the clouds.
Rogue stood beside Death.
The crimson of her gown seemed black at the folds, with red appearing only when she moved. The jewel burned beneath her sternum, faint tendrils of colour travelling outward beneath her skin before disappearing beneath the neckline. Her face had become paler, the contrast making her hair look almost violently red, and when she smiled there was the smallest glimpse of something sharp behind her lip.
Remy offered his hand with an almost princely formality. Rogue looked down at it and caught a glimpse of her brother still standing enslaved beneath the trees.
The water surrounding the clearing reflected a moon the colour of a bruise. There should have been horror in all of it. Rogue simply discovered that horror no longer frightened her quite the way it had before.
She placed her hand in his. Their fingers intertwined.
Nothing would tear them apart again.