Everyday Fiascos
Title: Everyday Fiascos
Author: Alsike
Rating: PG
Pairing: Emma Frost/Emily Prentiss, Deirdre Frost-Prentiss
Fandom: X-Men, Criminal Minds
Apologies: Halloween fic is important! And look, I have made my deadline! It's rather thrown together, not really a story, but whatevs, it's done.
If you really don't want to be spoiled for some later developments in Fake Empire, don't read it, but really, not major plot points involved.
Emily had discovered a whole new exciting list of skills that she wasn’t any good at since the four-year-old dimension hopper arrived on her doorstep. Most recently, sewing had been added.
Deirdre had learned about Halloween at school, and it had been the most thrilling idea she had ever encountered. And she wanted to go as an Empress.
Jubilee had abandoned her, because her university club was running a haunted house, and they were working their asses off to get it finished.
And as always Deirdre had a very particular idea of what the costume should look like, and none of the commercially available options were satisfactory. So she drew it and proceeded to describe it to Emily in detail. Emily managed to find an old bedspread of suitable quality, and approached the construction with determination and a large roll of duct tape.
Deirdre was not pleased by the duct tape, so Emily found an old travel sewing kit and did her best, but after several bleeding fingers and feral growls of frustration, the robe was shapeless and rather lopsided.
This isn’t going to do. Didi’s expression said.
Well, this is as good as it’s going to get. Emily glared.
Didi narrowed her eyes. If you don’t fix it, I’m going to cry.
Emily called JJ.
“You!”
Emily froze. “Um.”
“Do you have any idea what that demon spawn of yours has done now?”
“Um, no?”
“Do you know what she has convinced Henry to be for Halloween?”
“No?”
“A slave, Emily! She wants him to go as her slave! And I thought he wanted to be a ghoul or something, because he kept on going on about chains, but now he is prancing around in his underpants with a ball and chain around his ankle, pretending to be a slave, and I know I have lived in Virginia for almost ten years, but I am still a Yankee, and I am so not okay with this!”
“Um… are you any good at sewing?”
There was a long frozen moment. Then JJ growled into the phone, “I am not talking to you anymore, call Garcia.” And she hung up.
Emily called Garcia.
Garcia was over in minutes, her sewing kit in tow, and with only the barest of instructions from Deirdre (and not a single reprimand), managed to turn Emily’s mess into something actually resembling Empress robes (if the particular style they involved had ever been seen before on this earth, which they hadn’t, but at least they looked like something that could be interpreted as Empress robes, if worn with the right bearing and style.)
Garcia shook her head in horror when she found out that Emily wasn’t planning on dressing up, and shanghaied her over to her apartment where she found a pirate hat and a cutlass that would fit the bill. Didi picked out the red sash and eyepatch. Emily stood in front of the mirror and wondered if she had grown up in the states, whether this would be any less embarrassing.
Morgan hosted pumpkin carving in his apartment. He even convinced Hotch to bring Jack, although at almost twelve, he felt far too old to be hanging out with children. But he liked Morgan.
JJ was ignoring Emily, but when Emily ducked off into another room to avoid being splattered with pumpkin innards, she spotted JJ dropping into service, wielding the knife to cut out Deirdre’s design. Emily shook her head. Why did she always get so worked up about Henry being subservient to Didi when it was obviously learned behavior?
There were only a few close calls involving small children and knives, and in the end Morgan was the one who ended up with a bleeding finger, but he smiled and waved as they all left.
Didi frowned as she stood, half toppling backwards with the weight of the pumpkin. “We don’t have a step.”
Emily blinked, totally bewildered as she was unlocking the door to the apartment. It took her a good minute to figure what the problem was.
“Oh, maybe we can put it in the window.”
Didi considered this and nodded her approval.
Deirdre slept like a baby. Emily was sick all night from mixing red wine and candy corn.
JJ brought Henry over that afternoon and they went to visit Jubilee’s haunted house. Emily stayed outside, because she knew better. Deirdre and Henry enjoyed themselves immensely, managing to pull the cloak off of an axe murderer and throw candy at a ghoul until he ran away. JJ staggered out a few minutes later, utterly horrified. Emily gave her a look.
“You have no idea how much worse those things are after you’ve seen the things we’ve seen.”
“And this is why I stayed outside.”
JJ’s neighborhood was a madhouse of small children as dusk started to fall. Will was standing on the porch passing out candy to the groups of tiny tots being carried around by indulgent mums. Didi and Henry changed quickly but noisily in their costumes, acquired pillowcases, and begged to begin.
JJ came out of the house wearing a pair of pink rabbit ears and a Mia Hamm soccer uniform, and Emily’s hand shot to her mouth.
“Don’t you dare laugh! If you laugh I will talk in pirate speak to you all night!”
One of her neighbors wore a mask and popped out of the doorway, making Didi and Henry yelp.
“Finally,” Emily hissed under her breath, and JJ gave her a wry look, her ears bobbing as she turned.
“You’re hopeless, you know,” she said. “She just walks all over you.”
Emily did not comment on the carefully tattered slave costume that was at least a bit warmer than Henry’s first plan of just his underpants. But JJ had apparently decided to speak to her again.
There were floods of kids in the neighborhood, devils and witches and … turtles, and Harry Potters, but Emily thought the people would probably recall the exchange that went:
“And what are you, little girl?”
“I’m an Empress, and this is my slave!”
“Hi,” Henry would add shyly. JJ would elbow him. “Trick or treat,” he would murmur, his head down. Deirdre would stick out her bucket, which after a few houses she would empty into the pillowcase that Emily had slung over her shoulder. She carried Henry’s too. Didi said it looked like booty, but it mainly meant she could stay four or five feet away from the action.
After an hour and a half, Emily felt like her elbow was going to fall off. JJ gently herded them in the direction of home, and the last stop was at her house, where Will happily dropped candy into their bags.
Then came the sorting, where Henry and Didi poured out their loot on the living room carpet and separated it into types, then began the arduous process of trading. JJ played the arbiter, not wanting Didi to cheat Henry dreadfully, but also knowing that she would probably have to dole it out carefully (just like her mother had, sometimes she hated herself for becoming her mother) so that Henry wouldn’t eat it all at once and then be unhappy that it was gone.
Emily took over on the porch for a while, while Will chased the older kids throwing rotten eggs with a broomstick.
“Are you Jack Sparrow?” a small child of indeterminate gender inquired.
“Um, I was thinking more Yolanda Roccanera.”
The child frowned. “Who’s that?”
“The daughter of the Black Corsair?”
“I don’t remember her from the movie.”
Emily shook her head, gave the kid some candy and kicked it off the porch.
It was late, and even with all the sugar (which JJ had strictly limited to two pieces), Didi fell asleep in the car on the way back. Emily carried her up the stairs and put her to bed, wiping off her sticky hands and face.
Jubilee came in late, make up smeared over her cheeks, and exhausted. She collapsed on her bed, barely managing to kick off her shoes. Emily brought her a washcloth so she wouldn’t get greasepaint on her sheets, and Jubilee gave her that hesitant look that Emily had learned to read as, “you’re not my mother, you will never be my mother, but I want this so badly, and hate myself for wanting it.”
Emily sat backwards on a chair and asked her how the haunted house had gone. Jubilee scrubbed her face and told her about how Jeremy, one of the Linguistics grad students, had been dressed up as a mummy and tripped over one of his own bandages and nearly fallen on a small child who wet his pants in terror.
And then Emily took the washcloth, and Jubilee looked up, too tired to shut out the need from her eyes. Emily smiled and rubbed off one last spot on her nose, and kissed her forehead almost automatically.
“Woo, Emma would kill me if she knew what you did!” Jubilee finally found words to tease as she was half out of the room, and Emily glanced back with a mock glare.
“Well, you’d better behave, or I’ll tell!” Jubilee ducked her eyes, smiling, and pulled the covers up over her. Emily turned out the light and shut the door with a soft click behind her.
She dropped the washcloth in the sink and leaned against it, wondering when her life had become something she couldn’t recognize, and why all these kids could break her heart.
“Have a good time?”
“Yeah,” Emily yawned. Talking to Emma always made her sleepy, and Didi had crawled in with her sometime tonight, a softly snoring hot water bottle curled up against her side. “But no one reads the Black Corsair anymore.”
There was a pause. “Reads what?”
“Il Corsaro Nero! Emilio Salgari! I read them all while I was in Italy.”
“Did you by any chance read them in Italian?”
Emily considered this. “Maybe.”
Emma laughed. “Well, you were lucky you weren’t here. The kids decided to have a dance, and someone spiked the punch. I told Charles, but he was all, ‘it will be an important lesson for them.’ I think he forgot who was going to have to clean up after the first boy started puking.”
“I’m assuming not you.”
“Are you joking? I saw it coming a mile away and carefully disappeared ten minutes prior.”
Emily laughed and yawned again. “Well, you should be here next time. Didi makes a good Empress, but I’ve no doubt you could teach her a thing or two.”
“Mmm, next time,” Emma said softly. And Emily could almost feel her fingers curling in her hair and her soft breath on the back of her neck. Next time was only a whisper away.
Author: Alsike
Rating: PG
Pairing: Emma Frost/Emily Prentiss, Deirdre Frost-Prentiss
Fandom: X-Men, Criminal Minds
Apologies: Halloween fic is important! And look, I have made my deadline! It's rather thrown together, not really a story, but whatevs, it's done.
If you really don't want to be spoiled for some later developments in Fake Empire, don't read it, but really, not major plot points involved.
Emily had discovered a whole new exciting list of skills that she wasn’t any good at since the four-year-old dimension hopper arrived on her doorstep. Most recently, sewing had been added.
Deirdre had learned about Halloween at school, and it had been the most thrilling idea she had ever encountered. And she wanted to go as an Empress.
Jubilee had abandoned her, because her university club was running a haunted house, and they were working their asses off to get it finished.
And as always Deirdre had a very particular idea of what the costume should look like, and none of the commercially available options were satisfactory. So she drew it and proceeded to describe it to Emily in detail. Emily managed to find an old bedspread of suitable quality, and approached the construction with determination and a large roll of duct tape.
Deirdre was not pleased by the duct tape, so Emily found an old travel sewing kit and did her best, but after several bleeding fingers and feral growls of frustration, the robe was shapeless and rather lopsided.
This isn’t going to do. Didi’s expression said.
Well, this is as good as it’s going to get. Emily glared.
Didi narrowed her eyes. If you don’t fix it, I’m going to cry.
Emily called JJ.
“You!”
Emily froze. “Um.”
“Do you have any idea what that demon spawn of yours has done now?”
“Um, no?”
“Do you know what she has convinced Henry to be for Halloween?”
“No?”
“A slave, Emily! She wants him to go as her slave! And I thought he wanted to be a ghoul or something, because he kept on going on about chains, but now he is prancing around in his underpants with a ball and chain around his ankle, pretending to be a slave, and I know I have lived in Virginia for almost ten years, but I am still a Yankee, and I am so not okay with this!”
“Um… are you any good at sewing?”
There was a long frozen moment. Then JJ growled into the phone, “I am not talking to you anymore, call Garcia.” And she hung up.
Emily called Garcia.
Garcia was over in minutes, her sewing kit in tow, and with only the barest of instructions from Deirdre (and not a single reprimand), managed to turn Emily’s mess into something actually resembling Empress robes (if the particular style they involved had ever been seen before on this earth, which they hadn’t, but at least they looked like something that could be interpreted as Empress robes, if worn with the right bearing and style.)
Garcia shook her head in horror when she found out that Emily wasn’t planning on dressing up, and shanghaied her over to her apartment where she found a pirate hat and a cutlass that would fit the bill. Didi picked out the red sash and eyepatch. Emily stood in front of the mirror and wondered if she had grown up in the states, whether this would be any less embarrassing.
Morgan hosted pumpkin carving in his apartment. He even convinced Hotch to bring Jack, although at almost twelve, he felt far too old to be hanging out with children. But he liked Morgan.
JJ was ignoring Emily, but when Emily ducked off into another room to avoid being splattered with pumpkin innards, she spotted JJ dropping into service, wielding the knife to cut out Deirdre’s design. Emily shook her head. Why did she always get so worked up about Henry being subservient to Didi when it was obviously learned behavior?
There were only a few close calls involving small children and knives, and in the end Morgan was the one who ended up with a bleeding finger, but he smiled and waved as they all left.
Didi frowned as she stood, half toppling backwards with the weight of the pumpkin. “We don’t have a step.”
Emily blinked, totally bewildered as she was unlocking the door to the apartment. It took her a good minute to figure what the problem was.
“Oh, maybe we can put it in the window.”
Didi considered this and nodded her approval.
Deirdre slept like a baby. Emily was sick all night from mixing red wine and candy corn.
JJ brought Henry over that afternoon and they went to visit Jubilee’s haunted house. Emily stayed outside, because she knew better. Deirdre and Henry enjoyed themselves immensely, managing to pull the cloak off of an axe murderer and throw candy at a ghoul until he ran away. JJ staggered out a few minutes later, utterly horrified. Emily gave her a look.
“You have no idea how much worse those things are after you’ve seen the things we’ve seen.”
“And this is why I stayed outside.”
JJ’s neighborhood was a madhouse of small children as dusk started to fall. Will was standing on the porch passing out candy to the groups of tiny tots being carried around by indulgent mums. Didi and Henry changed quickly but noisily in their costumes, acquired pillowcases, and begged to begin.
JJ came out of the house wearing a pair of pink rabbit ears and a Mia Hamm soccer uniform, and Emily’s hand shot to her mouth.
“Don’t you dare laugh! If you laugh I will talk in pirate speak to you all night!”
One of her neighbors wore a mask and popped out of the doorway, making Didi and Henry yelp.
“Finally,” Emily hissed under her breath, and JJ gave her a wry look, her ears bobbing as she turned.
“You’re hopeless, you know,” she said. “She just walks all over you.”
Emily did not comment on the carefully tattered slave costume that was at least a bit warmer than Henry’s first plan of just his underpants. But JJ had apparently decided to speak to her again.
There were floods of kids in the neighborhood, devils and witches and … turtles, and Harry Potters, but Emily thought the people would probably recall the exchange that went:
“And what are you, little girl?”
“I’m an Empress, and this is my slave!”
“Hi,” Henry would add shyly. JJ would elbow him. “Trick or treat,” he would murmur, his head down. Deirdre would stick out her bucket, which after a few houses she would empty into the pillowcase that Emily had slung over her shoulder. She carried Henry’s too. Didi said it looked like booty, but it mainly meant she could stay four or five feet away from the action.
After an hour and a half, Emily felt like her elbow was going to fall off. JJ gently herded them in the direction of home, and the last stop was at her house, where Will happily dropped candy into their bags.
Then came the sorting, where Henry and Didi poured out their loot on the living room carpet and separated it into types, then began the arduous process of trading. JJ played the arbiter, not wanting Didi to cheat Henry dreadfully, but also knowing that she would probably have to dole it out carefully (just like her mother had, sometimes she hated herself for becoming her mother) so that Henry wouldn’t eat it all at once and then be unhappy that it was gone.
Emily took over on the porch for a while, while Will chased the older kids throwing rotten eggs with a broomstick.
“Are you Jack Sparrow?” a small child of indeterminate gender inquired.
“Um, I was thinking more Yolanda Roccanera.”
The child frowned. “Who’s that?”
“The daughter of the Black Corsair?”
“I don’t remember her from the movie.”
Emily shook her head, gave the kid some candy and kicked it off the porch.
It was late, and even with all the sugar (which JJ had strictly limited to two pieces), Didi fell asleep in the car on the way back. Emily carried her up the stairs and put her to bed, wiping off her sticky hands and face.
Jubilee came in late, make up smeared over her cheeks, and exhausted. She collapsed on her bed, barely managing to kick off her shoes. Emily brought her a washcloth so she wouldn’t get greasepaint on her sheets, and Jubilee gave her that hesitant look that Emily had learned to read as, “you’re not my mother, you will never be my mother, but I want this so badly, and hate myself for wanting it.”
Emily sat backwards on a chair and asked her how the haunted house had gone. Jubilee scrubbed her face and told her about how Jeremy, one of the Linguistics grad students, had been dressed up as a mummy and tripped over one of his own bandages and nearly fallen on a small child who wet his pants in terror.
And then Emily took the washcloth, and Jubilee looked up, too tired to shut out the need from her eyes. Emily smiled and rubbed off one last spot on her nose, and kissed her forehead almost automatically.
“Woo, Emma would kill me if she knew what you did!” Jubilee finally found words to tease as she was half out of the room, and Emily glanced back with a mock glare.
“Well, you’d better behave, or I’ll tell!” Jubilee ducked her eyes, smiling, and pulled the covers up over her. Emily turned out the light and shut the door with a soft click behind her.
She dropped the washcloth in the sink and leaned against it, wondering when her life had become something she couldn’t recognize, and why all these kids could break her heart.
“Have a good time?”
“Yeah,” Emily yawned. Talking to Emma always made her sleepy, and Didi had crawled in with her sometime tonight, a softly snoring hot water bottle curled up against her side. “But no one reads the Black Corsair anymore.”
There was a pause. “Reads what?”
“Il Corsaro Nero! Emilio Salgari! I read them all while I was in Italy.”
“Did you by any chance read them in Italian?”
Emily considered this. “Maybe.”
Emma laughed. “Well, you were lucky you weren’t here. The kids decided to have a dance, and someone spiked the punch. I told Charles, but he was all, ‘it will be an important lesson for them.’ I think he forgot who was going to have to clean up after the first boy started puking.”
“I’m assuming not you.”
“Are you joking? I saw it coming a mile away and carefully disappeared ten minutes prior.”
Emily laughed and yawned again. “Well, you should be here next time. Didi makes a good Empress, but I’ve no doubt you could teach her a thing or two.”
“Mmm, next time,” Emma said softly. And Emily could almost feel her fingers curling in her hair and her soft breath on the back of her neck. Next time was only a whisper away.