Wastelands; Epilogue: In Paradisum
Title: Wastelands: In Paradisum
Rating: PG13
Arc: Wastelands
Fandom: X-Men
P/C: Wolverine/Rogue
A/N: Finally, I give you the lovely little bow on Wastelands. It took me a long time to finally be able to write a happy ending and a happy ending that didn't feel contrived or false. I hope you enjoy this and once again, I just want to thank you all for reading and sticking with this story from the beginning.
They sat on the roof, looking out at the endless gray in the mornings, wrapped up in blankets and each other. It was always cold in San Francisco. It was easy for them to disappear there; the city itself was freak, full of life and all the strange things and people that came with it. They hid together in the fog that came and wrapped itself around the spires of the Transamerica pyramid and the North Beach Tower. Almost no one knew them. It wasn’t perfect.
They lived on Avenue D, in the Richmond above a Chinese restaurant. During the day, it did roaring business with college students and clucking old Chinese women. Their apartment always smelled like cooking meat and sesame oil, but the couple that owned it charged them next to nothing for rent and were always giving them food at a discount for fixing all the leaks and paint chips themselves.
On nights when either of them felt trapped by walls, they would go to the roof and feel the world expand, and the two of them with it. After doing this, neither of them would worry about waking up alone to find the other gone.
Sometimes they fought. She threw a plate at him once and it had shattered on his head, leaving him with a stunned expression on his face that made him look all of eleven years old. The gashes on his forehead had immediately begun to disappear, signaling to her that their argument should be likewise forgotten. She had started to laugh realizing how ridiculous it had been in the first place. He had stared at her for a moment, before he started to laugh too. They laughed so hard that they cried and cried so hard that they took their clothes off. .
They worked separately, hiding with others who wanted to stay invisible: illegal aliens, whole families of people struggling to look American when only the youngest could speak English, women who had escaped from violent men, who looked out windows and longed for freedom only to be chased back inside by their own shadows, men who never spoke to anyone, content to converse with hungry eyes that were ringed with violet and red instead. It wasn’t perfect.
That day they sat and watched the light fade away, spiraling with pink and orange over a backdrop of blue and gold. It was clichéd and sappy, but neither of them cared. They’d been too jaded to care about clichés and who was watching. For once, all the little things were going right for them.
Rogue looked at Logan. “Are you glad we came here?”
He had his arm around her and was staring out to sea. He turned his face so it was resting on the top of her head. He mussed her hair slightly. She smiled at nobody in particular and thought how odd it was that this was where she had ended up: where Jean died, where the Cure had come from. Here, at the edge of the ocean, where, like everywhere else, it wasn’t perfect.
“Yeah. Me too.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it was more then enough.
Rating: PG13
Arc: Wastelands
Fandom: X-Men
P/C: Wolverine/Rogue
A/N: Finally, I give you the lovely little bow on Wastelands. It took me a long time to finally be able to write a happy ending and a happy ending that didn't feel contrived or false. I hope you enjoy this and once again, I just want to thank you all for reading and sticking with this story from the beginning.
They sat on the roof, looking out at the endless gray in the mornings, wrapped up in blankets and each other. It was always cold in San Francisco. It was easy for them to disappear there; the city itself was freak, full of life and all the strange things and people that came with it. They hid together in the fog that came and wrapped itself around the spires of the Transamerica pyramid and the North Beach Tower. Almost no one knew them. It wasn’t perfect.
They lived on Avenue D, in the Richmond above a Chinese restaurant. During the day, it did roaring business with college students and clucking old Chinese women. Their apartment always smelled like cooking meat and sesame oil, but the couple that owned it charged them next to nothing for rent and were always giving them food at a discount for fixing all the leaks and paint chips themselves.
On nights when either of them felt trapped by walls, they would go to the roof and feel the world expand, and the two of them with it. After doing this, neither of them would worry about waking up alone to find the other gone.
Sometimes they fought. She threw a plate at him once and it had shattered on his head, leaving him with a stunned expression on his face that made him look all of eleven years old. The gashes on his forehead had immediately begun to disappear, signaling to her that their argument should be likewise forgotten. She had started to laugh realizing how ridiculous it had been in the first place. He had stared at her for a moment, before he started to laugh too. They laughed so hard that they cried and cried so hard that they took their clothes off. .
They worked separately, hiding with others who wanted to stay invisible: illegal aliens, whole families of people struggling to look American when only the youngest could speak English, women who had escaped from violent men, who looked out windows and longed for freedom only to be chased back inside by their own shadows, men who never spoke to anyone, content to converse with hungry eyes that were ringed with violet and red instead. It wasn’t perfect.
That day they sat and watched the light fade away, spiraling with pink and orange over a backdrop of blue and gold. It was clichéd and sappy, but neither of them cared. They’d been too jaded to care about clichés and who was watching. For once, all the little things were going right for them.
Rogue looked at Logan. “Are you glad we came here?”
He had his arm around her and was staring out to sea. He turned his face so it was resting on the top of her head. He mussed her hair slightly. She smiled at nobody in particular and thought how odd it was that this was where she had ended up: where Jean died, where the Cure had come from. Here, at the edge of the ocean, where, like everywhere else, it wasn’t perfect.
“Yeah. Me too.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it was more then enough.