Chapter Text
It’d been a little over two weeks since Rogue had arrived at the Monastery. Those two weeks were filled with him kicking his feet up on their couch, stuffing his face with any and everything that tasted pleasant enough.
Occasionally the Ninja would visit him but would end up leaving the room with all their energy drained. The living room contrasted what used to fulfil its purpose, due to Rogue.
Yet he knew he couldn’t stay trapped inside all day. Not when one persistent person would not stop visiting him. Even after the harsh treatment, the scoffs and tuts, the dismissive words, she still came pouring back into the room with either a strained smile or a saddening one.
It was more than infuriating, even more so when she would brush up against him on the couch, speaking to him with a soft tone before growing agitated at his impolite attitude. Somedays she would lean in, fluttering her eyelashes—as if she was trying to hypnotise him. He hated how his cheeks would flare up, and despised how she was somehow causing a physical reaction.
He couldn’t stand the idea of seeing her today. All of their interactions slowly began to build up over the days and it felt as if she was luring him into a trap with her face, her voice, her lies.
Before she could enter the living room, he had whisked himself away. Rogue was sprawled across a hill outside the Monastery grounds, unmoving like a man would after being slain.
Nature was unappealing at the moment for him. The breeze fluttered between his greasy locks, the pointy ends of grass tickling his waist, and even the sunlight gleamed across his freckled cheeks. It was all so intruding.
It was better than being distracted by her.
It was peaceful. Until it wasn’t.
“What are you doing out here?” A voice disrupts his silence. He recognises the shadow looming over, hiding the sunlight, he can even identify that smell that clogs the regular freshness of the breeze.
Rogue opened his mouth, ready to snap out a witty response, but faltered. He hadn’t picked up on her sneaking up on him.
She really was a crafty, sneaky Ninja.
Absentmindedly, he responds with a half-hearted response, “Nothing.”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to come outside, you’ve been indoors for so long just lazying around on that couch. I almost thought your legs had run away.” Nya teases playfully, but it goes unanswered.
She repeats his previous response, taunting him from the sound of her tone. “Nothing, huh?”
“Nothing.” He snaps back, glaring forward. Yet he could feel the harshness of his eyebrows begin to simmer, and it came to a halting stop as his eyes flickered back to her.
Her raven hair ponytail was drooped over the side of her shoulder, her lipstick shined where the sun met them, and she looked…
She met his gaze, pausing his search for a word that would fit her description, a word that would do her enough justice whilst not showing any signs of weakness—or attraction.
“Are you okay?”
This is why he refused to look at her before.
Dismissively, he waved her off, hiding the blush that began to cover his scarred cheeks. “I just need a moment.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” She leapt forward within a second, a look of clear worry painted across her face. It pained him to see it, but he also resented that very look. It wasn’t for him. Well, it was for the old him.
“Nothing! God, I can’t just have a moment to myself huh?! You Ninja just have to stick your heads into everything, even if it’s absolutely nothing!” He tuts, waving an arm in her direction scornfully.
From the corner of his eyes, he could just about make out the loss of hope in her arms, as she fell back to her once comfortable position. That look of concern morphed into something recognisable.
He’d seen that exact look across her face, a look that he would have identified as sorrow and loss, but she was a Ninja. What did she have to lose? Why was she bearing the weight of sorrow?
She pushes her lips inwards, licking them nervously before leaving a tiny gap between them. There’s a moment of silence that builds expectantly, a wall that suffocates her—or so it seems.
Rogue doesn't understand how she could sit there so casually as if she wasn't suffocating his soul, as if she wasn't drowning out any logical reasons from the waves of her essence. Yet he knows the plans that she's devised are working, every single one of her schemes is taking effect.
He knows this because, within seconds, his hands are on her, crowding her in. Nya blinks rapidly, her messy strands from her fringe now covering her expressive eyebrows and Rogue takes her in. He stares at her, watching as her lips part—how she practically pleads for this closure—and how her eyes beg—how she’s still drowning within her ocean of loss, the loss of her Yang.
However, his eyes are occupied on her lips now, his pupils forever loitering on the way they look similar, to something he’s seen before, tasted, touched before—but their lips, everyone has lips. Not hers though.
Hers are different. They aren't like other lips he's touched out of pure lust, not like other mouths he's kissed to please strangers who were only looking for a one-night stand. Everything about her is different; from her eyelashes, to her nose, to the way her feet squirm in between his. Nya's appearance has been embedded in his mind, ever since that fierceness of her was unleashed during the Tournament.
He hates it, hates how he views her lips differently from ones he's previously tasted. He despises how he wishes to know how different she tastes, how she'll wrap her arms around his neck, or perhaps his waist or maybe she'll let her hands tremble above his body, scared to lay her slim fingers on his wrecked self.
Even so, none of this prevents Rogue from diving in, harshly, chasing after the look of lust—a look of love—that he pleads she’ll hold for him. And not who she believes Jay Walker is.
His hand rushes towards the back of her waist, gripping tightly whilst his other hand pushes her defiantly closer towards him, whilst losing his focus on the strands of hair on her neck.
All of his questions have been answered, how her taste differs from the ones he had devoured before. How he’s aware that physically there is no difference—she’s the same as everyone else, he could find someone with the same lip shape, shade and taste and still only be thinking about how hers is so unique. How Nya’s lips can’t compare to anyone else’s, how Nya cannot be replaced.
It’s not fair though. It’s cruel for her to barge into his life and make a fool of his shrivelling heart, how she stomps across his ego—all that pride that he had built up over the years. In reality, she’s just a lady. A lady who he had never met before, just a lady who might have a little crush on him or just scheming to use him for her selfish desires.
However, she’s still a woman who has stolen the remaining hopes, the embers of his heart and the last echoes of temptation that cause impulsive actions. He can’t help but want more.
Rogue’s lips are pressing bitterly on hers, draining all of the love she’s eagerly lending him. He’s begging to suck out all of her goodness, to leave her dry like a vampire would after their prey. On the other hand, he wants to keep her around, knowing that she has more to give.
Nya has made her step into his mind, showing that she wasn’t just a lady who pleaded to get the man she loved back, but a Ninja with a stubborn attitude and an endless heart.
She’s been invading his thoughts, and his privacy and Rogue is fairly certain she had the same effect on his old self. She must have, she was so alluring. Breathing much more deeply through his nose, he carries on with his lips on hers, losing all the thoughts that would be racing through and finding himself pushing even closer, pleading for more.
Until she yanks her head back, her curls slipping out of his fingers.
“Jay- wait. Hold on.” She waves her hands frantically in front of him, shaking her head whilst her cheeks blossom a flushed red, now matching with the taint of red across her lips.
“What?” He bites back, his temper burning away as he snatches breaths of air, unapologetically.
“This isn’t like you. Just, take a few deep breaths.” Her eyes flicker towards him, and there’s that look again, but it’s mixed with hope.
And Rogue almost wants to punch his old self. He wants to curse at himself for falling for the schemes of this woman and he wants to dive right back to this woman’s lip once more.
What he really does is push her back, abruptly shoving her out of his reach and back into the grass that intruded on their moment.
“You don’t know me.” He seethes, spitting at her face.
The way her face moulds into a look of confusion, towards anguish has given him the answer he didn’t exactly need, but expected. She doesn’t believe that this is coming from him, because she doesn’t know who Rogue is.
Nya doesn’t know who he is, and she certainly doesn’t like him either.
The whole time the two had been stuck together, it was always followed by some sort of scheme to form him back into someone he used to be. Or back into someone he would despise, for her gain. Just like the others.
“I know who you used to be.” She whispers gently, so softly as if she was trying to hide that revelation with the dust of the wind. That’s not like her.
For the past week, she has been scoffing, essentially screaming at him with proof that she knew who Jay Walker once was.
Rogue whips his head in her direction, observing how her face pinches into a soft expression. She looks…
As if on instinct, her hand reaches out to him, hovering over the dusty sleeves of his new suit. A suit that’s starting to smell from the amount of procrastinating he’s been doing at the Monastery.
“Yeah, and you liked HIM. Is that what you're trying to say?” His eyes glower, an annoyance bubbling within his veins. She didn’t want him for who he was, she wasn’t trying to get to know him. She only wanted the man he used to be, or once pretended to be. “How do you know I wasn’t just faking it? How do you know that you truly knew who he used to be?”
The remark he makes is cold. He admits it may have been an overstep as she scrunches up her eyebrows, a dimple appearing beside her lips pulling that simple contemplating expression—one that Rogue is sure she would have pulled many times with him.
“I loved you for who you were, and I still love you. No matter who you are, faking or not.”
The words that spill from those cherry lips are so cliché. Rogue’s certain he’s heard them from a movie he watched only this week. His mind is pressing for him to tut, to turn his head and to leave her alone with her heart tumbled in the scatter of the dead grass.
His heart is saying otherwise. A heart that Rogue was certain didn’t speak and didn’t beat.
“So if you met me, without any of that bullcrap about me being a Ninja. Would you still try this hard to ‘save me’?”
Rogue knows this answer, he can hear the words echoing, thrashing against his ribs and squeezing his now-beating heart dry.
“Even if I didn’t know you, I would have tried something.” The response is bland, it’s not what his ears pick up. Rogue listens to the hidden meaning where he’s being rejected, where it’s not Rogue that she wants, but rather that irritating Jay Walker. “Ninja never quit,” she adds.
“Nice lines, what movie did you pick those up from again? Or let me guess, is that some tacky rubbish the Ninja, Jay Walker, spewed out?”
“No. That’s what we told each other, it's what I told you and what you told me.”
“I told you already—” He’s feeling the rise of frustration. Nya’s not listening to him, or choosing to ignore the obvious signs of the fact that Rogue is not Jay. He’s nothing like Jay Walker. He’s not goofy, their humours are distorted.
“You’re not him, I know.” She finishes it for him though, sinking her fingertips into the truth of her own words.
Nya falls silent, with a thud filling the space. Her hair is spread messily across the grass, tangled between some daises and the verdant green grass, that’s beginning to grow back from the water seeping from her palms.
Her eyes finally meet his, her chocolate bright eyes, filled with determination, and hope but filled with a different kind. Something his electric one didn’t fully understand before.
“But you’re still similar.”
“You’re only saying that out of ignorance.”
“Ignorance or not, I still want you. Even if you’re not the man I fell in love with, you’re still similar. You still make the same horrible puns, still smile at the same catastrophic events, you still chew your lip when you have nothing to say.”
“That’s so—”
“Unoriginal?” She finishes it off for him, lifting her head to meet his distant eyes.
“I want the love of my life back, I want you. You want your memories, we want the same thing.” She bargains, inching close, stepping into territory that was once so familiar.
“No.”
Her lips are sealed, but her eyes speak a confusion of words that are locked between her teeth.
“No, I don’t want those memories back. I have my memories. I have everything I need. I don’t need you, I don’t need your memories and I certainly don’t want them either.” He spits out abhorrently, as if every word he uttered just now was the truth he felt and the only truth. As if this was the real him, this was Rogue—no more sweetness would be slipping from his unfinished jokes.
“Jay wait.”
“Rogue.” He cuts her off, finishing off any remains of hope that resonated within her. “I’m not Jay. I’m Rogue.”
“Please.” Nya’s pleading, verbally pleading. It causes Rogue’s breath to hitch because he’s never heard her speak so desperately, to ask him of anything this heavy.
She’s been poking her head over the wall she’s built around the new version of himself occasionally. However, she’s never plunged herself this far—this deep.
There were moments where the two enjoyed living vicariously through the scenes in a movie, or where she would bring him food, or turn on his favourite video game. Sparking a contrast, there were moments where she shunned him out, due to his coldness or the banter that Rogue found comical. She would whisper under her breath how Jay wouldn’t pull such a ‘prank’, or she would squint her eyes, pulling a disappointed expression.
A subtle facial expression, that almost looked disdainful.
Rogue wants to bark out a rude remark, or just a careless “what?” He wants to, needs to, but doesn’t.
Her pupils are dilated, speaking volumes without needing to mumble anything. “Rogue.” The words sound so distant, her tone fights the distance of his new name. Nya’s trying to hide her discomfort with the name—trying, but fails miserably.
“Nya.” Her name feels enlightening on his tongue, how the letters begin to slip out of his mouth. It feels right to say it, it feels as if he’s found a missing piece that can fill up his soul. That she is the reason why he’s been missing in the first place.
No, this is exactly what she wants. She wants to lure him in, she wants to captivate him and trick him, to force him into someone he isn't, to someone he can't be, to someone he despises.
Rogue began to shake his head vigorously as if he were snapping the shackles of her captivation on him.
"I just want-"
He cuts her off the second the word, "want", echoes in his brain. "I'm going inside. It's cold." He bluntly interrupts, striding backwards with a waft of air following timidly behind him.
He peers behind him for a glance, watching how her shoulders drop entirely. She's allowing the knife of the wind to graze her cheeks, letting the dying grass circle around her, entrapping her to the position she's frozen to.
The very image makes Rogue want to turn back, to apologise to her and ask what she wanted, to bend to her fingers. Some part of him wants to craft himself into the man she loves and another part—a more raging part—shrivels up out of disgust at that very thought.
"Come inside." The words slip from his cracked lips before he can string them into a coherent thought. "Or don't. I don't care." He adds, finally shoving off the remains of her touch before heading inside.
He doesn't look back. She remains looking forward.