Rogue Cheney x Reader

Chapter 43: The Things We've Lost

[a/n]: guess what this story isn't dead and i ain't dead either please enjoy this mess of a chapter ily guys why do you even stick with me

xx

"Do you really have to go?" Rogue's fingers pause, like his brain wasn't fast enough delivering the signals to the joints, or maybe because he hesitates when he reaches out to you.

"I think this is. . .something I have to do," you choose your words carefully, and the knowing blink of Rogue's eyelids suffice.

"Okay." Rogue's lips fall short on letters and words, and his hands still fail to grasp your wrist, to pull you near him and empty his bottled sentiment. "But promise me you're going to return? Alive and- not too demon."

"I promise." You fear you can't link pinkies and search for truthfulness in each others eyes, while smudging dirt onto each other's shoes anymore- because you've grown out of your shoes and your childhood, and they both sit far back, dirty and long forgotten. Instead you smile at him, a little bit more on one side than the other, but it makes Rogue smile a little too.

You slink back into the decay and the collapse not soon after, stepping over the corpses of buildings and the plants that bend to the ground like aristocrats stripped of their gold and made to surrender. Gray leaks further into the sky, and walls of what once were kept you from turning around and nurturing any doubt in your gut.

You hear only the sound of your feet passing over stones and pebbles and hardened dirt, and a pile of cement fragments with wire appendages that crumble further into the earth. You taste only dryness when your tongue presses onto the roof of your mouth, your throat constricting in thirst.

There's nothing ahead of you that keeps your gaze longer than a flick of your eyes because it's only stone arranged on more stone like statues of wingless angels draped across the floor in flowing togas with their faces carved into an eternal petrification; except the stones were less ornamental, serving only to remind you of how close to the clouds the great buildings grasped.

Everything that mattered was behind you, in a loose group, heads tilted, questions sounded, battered and dirtied but alive. 

When you turned your head a bit too sideways for a forward glance, the thin branch of a tree shriveled at the roots and sickly brown in the bark obscured your view; as if, in one last attempt with a silent dying breath, it pushed you forward.

You took another step.

>> Rogue's P.O.V <<

There's a clap on my shoulder, and Sting's blinding grin behind me, as if he could lift the blanket of grimness with his own gloved, scraped hands.

"She'll be all right, you should stop worrying so much. You're gonna get ugly and wrinkled real soon," is what Sting says.

I exhale a laugh that never continues into the bubbly sort, and I hit Sting in the breastbone; weak enough it doesn't send him staggering but strong enough his nerves can't recognize the gratefulness behind the weak curl of my fingers.

"Everybody knows you're going to be the ugly one when we're older." And Sting hits me in the shoulder, strong enough that my feet shuffle, his fingers curled a little tighter than mine. It's all in fairness, because when Sting pulls his hand back, we all allow ourselves the laughter we thought we'd lost.

>> Time Skip, Reader's P.O.V <<

"Ah, I was late." You click your tongue once, steadying your arms in time to catch a Natsu Dragneel that stumbled over nothing. A Natsu Dragneel dressed in torn clothes similar to the poverty and wounds that lamented fresh blood; down his face and through the nails of his fingers. Red, and all too clear among his clothes and the dark, dirty scrapes that occupied his face more than the horrible try of a smile.

You finger a torn piece of cloth, worn to worrying thinness when you ran the pads of your fingers through it, thinking far too many things on the stand of dirt you dug your heel into. When Natsu rights himself, the fabric slips in between your fingers soundlessly, and you can't grasp it once again.

Strangely, you feel as if you lost something- as Natsu passes you by without a greeting, breathing far too heavily, leaving footsteps far too loud; as the building of Fairy Tail's guild, a true rarity of a being that stands unwavering amidst everything crashing in their executions, but even through it's golden elusiveness, it squeaks under the strain of one too many unhinged materials, of one too many blows, of damage far too severe for its newness to withstand.

You look at a pair of doors, and then the pair of past lovers that lay behind it.