Recuperation
Taking stock today.
Stayed in my suite all Monday, licking my wounds (not literally, thanks to that nasty ointment Holland gave me) and trying to sleep. Stay hydrated, too. Too much energy absorbed - my whole body feels gouty, still, and my knee is pure agony.
And my head. God, my head. The mess in it. What did she do to me? What did she rearrange? What did she implant?
The hallway will be cleaned and repaired soon. My body will heal in a couple weeks. My mind . . .
Good question. But damned if I'm going to let Emma Frost find the answer to it.
1/24/2006
Logfile from Shaw.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hellfire Clubhouse - Shaw's Private Quarters
Black stamps a cold mold on this contained suite: bedroom and bathroom in close communion, with a door out to the office's antechamber. The king-sized bed crouches in wide, dark splendor; low nightstands, mounted by the curving chrome nodes of modern lamps, flank its head. Next to a deep armchair in the corner, an armoire stands opposite the bed with doors of scarlet scrollwork to match the carpet's tiny diamonds on lush sable. One wall lies under black-velvet drapes, deep against the others' pale-rose silk papering under the crown-molded white ceiling.
Through a walk-in closet's passage lies the bathroom, a folly of night from black-marble counters to matte floor and wall tiles. A shower stands separate from the great soaking tub; the vanity runs two sinks under the high mirror. Chrome accoutrements and fluffy red towels provide cool touches of bright and blood.
--
A night of apprehension, a morning of avoidance. Emma's been absent. But a phone call of concern (over the state of the wall, of course) has piqued her curiosity and edged it over the survival instinct warbling vaguely (Hah. As if.) propelling her back to the club and a survey of the damage, along with the whispers of concern and gossip whipping from Pawn's minds and lips.
She approaches the Black King's office door, face settled into determined planes, brow lifting at the challenge from a loyal little Black pawn standing guard at the mouth to his master's lair. << Oh, please. Open it, >> she orders, taking an incautious hold of his mind and bending it to the task of opening it for her.
With a glazed blink, young, short, tough James Amatenzo (the worthy Jacko to friends and rich-girl fiancee) mutely obeys and even holds open the office door for the White Queen until she's inside. And inside? Lights are all off, and curtains are all closed. The scents of rooms boxed in on themselves ride the air, along with psychic currents: low-throbbing pain, sharper outrage and fear, thick and furry despair like old mink rubbed across the tongue. The locus of this output is in the bedroom, past a half-open door.
Emma drops her face, focusing her eyes on the opened door. The weight of the room presses in, suffocating, a crypt to pride and dignity and self-reliance. She waves a hand, dismissing Jacko the Valiant, and proceeds at a slow, wary rate toward the King's Inner Chambers, Esther approaching Assuerus's throne, unbidden. "Sebastian?" she murmurs, reaching a hand out to the doorjamb and sliding along the door to peer into the maelstrom.
A muffled cry curdles the daytime dimness, and the ball of Shaw huddled under the covers jerks towards opening. He does get his head up, and his upper body on an elbow's prop, and he pants for breath, wild-eyed until he focuses on her. Despair crashes harder at the sight of his Esther; his mood's throne tipples, if not topples. "Go away," he says in a wretched voice and closes his eyes. Behind them, fragments of nightmare start to fade into the ambience.
Emma flinches, leaning on the knob while the emotions crash over and past her, the hand on the doorframe curling around it, nails digging into the wood. "Sebastian," she tries again, straightening and moving further into the room, along the wall, free of the doorway. The bleeding pulp of his mental scape halts her instinctive wash of soothing projections, watering them down to clumsy, feather-light tides. She edges along the wall, both hands pressing against it behind her--solid, real. "What's the matter? What happened?" she whispers, her voice blending into the darkness.
"Get /out/," Shaw insists on a groan as he buries back into the bed's deep swaddling. His emotions dive with him, muting the output to intermittent, unpredictable spits and pops, accompanied by half-shaped (and not at all shielded, not even attempted!) thoughts. << Emmaout Jeanout Jeanloose looselooseshe'slooseJean'sloose hurt hurthurthurt hurt >>
An aborted step forward, way from the wall, toward him. She catches herself, buffeted by conflicts of memory and instinct and calculation, and stills in place, watching his dimly formed back. "Are you injured?" she asks quietly, moving again in a slow, wide arc.
His shoulder breaches the surface of the covers like a dolphin's sleek, firm, shining-wet back, and Shaw hunches it and wracks a laugh into a pillow. << Hurt so hurt, >> his mind laments (crackling indignation, impotent confusion). << The bitch beat me up good, Emma, you happy now? Humbled broken poor little Sebastian broken broken broken-- >>
<< No, >> she answers, trusting the dark of the room to hide the cold, satisfied smile that flickers to life, smoothed away as she curves toward the foot of his bed. << You're not broken, darling. Fractured, maybe, but I doubt anyone's ability to break you. >> An arrow of light falls across her, glimmering for an instant as she passes through it. << My strong, perfect King, >> she purrs soothingly. "Have you been tended to?"
Shaw sighs and lifts his face from the pillow, half-turning it her way for a profile's weary -- and bruised -- revelation. Lashes flutter against his cheek while he tries to put his mind in order. He mostly succeeds, so he can sigh again, roll onto his elbow again, and face her fully. His other hand pulls back tangled hair, and he /is/ bruised: blotches of fading color around eyes and mouth, a startling splotch on the white of one eye, and thin lines on neck and shoulders. He attempts a smile, which stretches the lacerations scoring his cheeks. "I have," he tells her. "And I've been trying to get my beauty sleep, but obviously, that hasn't happened. Sorry."
Emma blinks at the revealed damage, secretly, and oh so grudgingly, impressed. "Jean did this?" she asks, nodding at his face and moving from foot to side of the bed and sitting gingerly on its edges, now within reach and so monitoring his thoughts, his emotions for intent. "What happened?"
The lashes fall to sullen butterfly flaps once more. "Why not," Shaw invites instead, with a lash of malicious hurt (from him, at him, for him, a pitiless emotional flail on his open wounds), "just bounce into my mind and get the answer yourself? It was good enough for my erstwhile Queen; surely it's good enough for my extant one." << Bitches, >> snarls a last remnant of nightmare before it's gone and he's fully awake.
"You broke me of that habit long ago," Emma replies, flippant and ignoring the mental outwash. "But if you don't wish to tell me, I can pick it up in distorted pieces from your pawns instead. I can just sit here instead, with you, if you'd rather."
Shaw flinches at the offer, mind and body. "No. No. I'll tell you. And then you'll go away? Leave me alone for a while?" He sinks back against the pillows, and his eyes, still half-shielded, glitter with reflected wet light. "I need rest. And solitude. Please."
Emma moves her hand to his leg, brushing tentatively against it through layers of sheets and blankets. "If that's what you want," she agrees, almost tenderly.
Eyes close. Tears still leak out. << Dammit, >> his surface thoughts mutter, then whisk away into speech's cognitive buzz. "I was out of the clubhouse," Shaw begins, his voice a flat report to match his mood (though slight tremors shake the leg under her hand). "One of my pawns called to say that Jean was in some kind of trouble, according to Jason Wyngarde, who'd experienced a violent telepathic burst. I came home. I . . . found her."
The corner of her mouth twitches at Jason's name, and the pressure of her touch increases, soothed into a pattern of short strokes. "Did this pawn, did /Jason/ have any idea what precipitated the outburst?"
"No. He didn't know. He couldn't say where in the house she was." Slowly Shaw brings his hands up to run up his face and into his hair, where his scraped fingers stay in a tentative cradle of his skull. His voice, behind the barrier of raised, bent arms, drops; but feathers of memory brush bright, vital edges around his next words. "She was in her room. I knocked. She used her powers to open the door. She was -- she was /floating/, Emma, and her whole room was packing itself without her even watching it. Eyes closed, arms folded, just hovering above the floor, and everything whirling around her in perfect harmony . . ."
Emma bites her tongue on an acerbic comment on the likelihood of glittery, colorful "magic" swirls ala Disney floating around the scene. She's instead quiet, waiting for him to continue, her hand lengthening the strokes of her petting along his leg.
Shaw relaxes somewhat under it; his conscious attention is on his recap, anyway, with only dim animal appreciation glowing for the touch. "She thought it was me," he goes on. Despair trembles in mood and voice again. "That /I/ had betrayed her. Planned something, whatever had been done to her, with you and Wyngarde. I hadn't!" He lets his hands and arms drop free beside his reclining torso, and he looks bleakly at her. "But I would have. I could have. We all know that."
Emma scoots farther up the bed, picking up one of his hands and sliding under it, cradling it in her lap. "But you didn't. Of course you didn't. /You/ know the rules of the Circle," she murmurs, lightly tracing a long scratch from the back of his hand to forearm. "You're not an Xavierite. You'd not betray your partner." Her voice seems to fall free of the skeleton of words, reaching to wrap instead around his mood, his mind, bouying both on comfort's gentle currents.
Dully Shaw looks down his arm at her hand to his, lying loose and large and empty in her lap. More lacerations mark palm and thumb and fingers. He closes his eyes and turns his head away from the sight and from her. "No, I didn't," he agrees in hardly a whisper. "I wouldn't. But she . . . God. I never should have made her Black Queen. It worked, things worked, but the price -- oh, God, Emma. The price." His mood resists comfort, turns in on itself, insists on self-flagellation -- bloody shuddering under his words' blows. "I made a mistake. I'm sorry. I won't do it again. Count on /that/."
"Shh," Emma shushes, underlying his mood, fighting against its tide. "Is she gone then? Is she to just be let go?"
Shaw pulls his hand back to himself, folds his arms over his sheet-swathed stomach. He glances back at her, then away again, towards the shadowed pass-through to closet and bathroom. "If you would like to stop a woman who can fling me around like a rag doll without breaking a sweat -- you saw the hole in the wall out in the hallway, right? -- well, please, feel free, my dear." Bitterness snaps mental teeth at her, but he's otherwise gentled. Muffled. The enforced calm drags at his voice, pulling out native, long-ago rolling, drawling, piqued accent of western Pennsylvania's hills. "I know when I'm beat, and if you're smart, you do, too. She wants outta the club, she's out. /And/ outta the Circle. No more Worthington, no more Grey. Just us, huh?"
Emma watches his hand slide from her lap, and replaces his with her own. "For now. For now... She'll expect it now. But not always. No, she cannot always be prepared. She wants out," she murmurs lowly, almost to herself, then turns her head to watch his face. "We are enough," calmly stated.
Silence then. Then Shaw stirs, grasps more of his usual self, and tells her, "I've passed instructions to the pawns, yours and mine, about handling her if she comes back. They'll treat her as they've been told to treat Magneto if /he/ shows up: courteously, with respect, but as a walking weapon of mass destruction." He blinks her way. "Can you think of anything else? /Will/ she come back? She said something about wanting to talk with the White Bishop. Something -- I don't remember."
Emma stiffens, her jaw setting and nostrils pinching. "I'll see that he is kept out of her way, since she seems to have taken a special interest in him. As for the rest? I don't know. I don't know how deep this recently-developed instability runs. I find it difficult to believe that Jean Grey could hur--" She stops and her gaze flickers before a wryly apologetic smile creeps onto her lips. "Well, I did find it hard to believe."
Shaw's mouth forms a slight but genuine smile. "Me, too. It takes a lot to get me to actually bruise, but -- well, there we are." He hugs his folded arms tighter over his midriff and tips bruised shoulders in a shrug. "She did worse things in my mind, anyway," he says levelly (mostly) and clinically (almost). "I don't know what exactly, but nightmares, this shakiness that I'm sure is annoying you as much as it's delighting you, memories dug up from where they should've been buried--" He shakes his head and then studies her with heavy-lidded defiance. "I did teach you not to go rooting around in my mind. I hope you remember those lessons until I get sorted out again."
"I could put them back for you, if you like. When you feel better," Emma says, drawing her knee up and rocking onto it, leaning forward onto fists curled on either side of his chest, three pointed support for her as she moves close to brush her lips lightly against his then murmur against his cheek, "I've learned all the lessons you taught me."
Shaw . . . shudders, but gently -- gently! -- he takes hold of her shoulders and pushes her (gently!) away from him. "I will take it under advisement." Stiffly. Underlying ache/pain/fear/torment. "Thank you, for that and for the reassurance about my lessons." And a flash of cynical awareness: oh, all of them, is it? (Sadism, cruelty, manipulation--) A sneer tries for his expression, fails, and he just rolls over onto his side, putting the long line of his back, the bruised skin and the heavy muscles, between them. "If there's nothing else . . . ?"
Emma's outflung leg catches her, balancing her against the push and leaving her the dignity of settling back on her heel instead of falling off the bed. Her shielding flashes at the contact of that awareness, and a satisfied, smug smile answers as she rearranges her seat, moving to his side, back against headboard, knees tucked up, a hand dropping to his shoulder in companionable confidence. "No, darling. Nothing else. Get some more sleep," she purrs, all evidence pointing to an intention to stay right where she was while he did so.
"You are not," Shaw growls past the arms folded around his head on the pillows, "watching fucking over me while I fucking sleep, Emma Frost. You aren't my mother." Bone-deep, mind-deep pain that shakes him again, but he fights back with a foot's indignant kick her way. "Get out. I'm serious."
"Ow! Dammit, Sebastian!" Emma grouses back, rubbing at the contact site, but not moving elsehow. "I wasn't fucking /trying/ to be. I /thought/ I'd give your pawns some other excuse for your indisposition."
Shaw informs her, "I have the flu." A baleful eye rolls black (and bruise-spotted white) over his shoulder at her. "Do I look like I'm in the mood? For anything?"
"Do you think /I/ am?" she shoots back, eyeing him for a long moment before swinging her legs over the side of the bed and pushing to her feet. "But fine. We'll go with your story. I'll send in a bowl of bloody chicken soup," she snarks, padding to and around the end of the bed, and ambling toward the door.
"Emma -- wait."
She does, halting halfway to the door and half-turning back, expression cool and expectant.
"I'm sorry." Shaw rubs his forearm across his eyes, then peers at her with an expression grooved with broken capillaries and emotional exhaustion. "I'm hurt. All over. I /wish/ I knew what she did in my mi--shit." He curls around himself now. Sounds tired, too. "Thank you for coming to see me. I appreciate it. I'll remember it. But I /would/ like to be alone, please. I can't face -- not yet."
Emma's stance softens somewhat, matching her voice which carries through the gray light to him, laced with gentle teasing. "Of course, darling. I'm yours to command." She starts forward again, light from the doorway glinting off the smoothed blonde ponytail.
A peep of eye watches her go. He doesn't try to hold her this time, but his mood remains quieter behind her. No more of the nightmarish agony, and nearly a tranquility that promises better sleep. Alone again in his suite, Sebastian Shaw pulls pillows and covers around him into a tight, warm nest and with desperate determination closes out the world.
[Log ends.]
Stayed in my suite all Monday, licking my wounds (not literally, thanks to that nasty ointment Holland gave me) and trying to sleep. Stay hydrated, too. Too much energy absorbed - my whole body feels gouty, still, and my knee is pure agony.
And my head. God, my head. The mess in it. What did she do to me? What did she rearrange? What did she implant?
The hallway will be cleaned and repaired soon. My body will heal in a couple weeks. My mind . . .
Good question. But damned if I'm going to let Emma Frost find the answer to it.
1/24/2006
Logfile from Shaw.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hellfire Clubhouse - Shaw's Private Quarters
Black stamps a cold mold on this contained suite: bedroom and bathroom in close communion, with a door out to the office's antechamber. The king-sized bed crouches in wide, dark splendor; low nightstands, mounted by the curving chrome nodes of modern lamps, flank its head. Next to a deep armchair in the corner, an armoire stands opposite the bed with doors of scarlet scrollwork to match the carpet's tiny diamonds on lush sable. One wall lies under black-velvet drapes, deep against the others' pale-rose silk papering under the crown-molded white ceiling.
Through a walk-in closet's passage lies the bathroom, a folly of night from black-marble counters to matte floor and wall tiles. A shower stands separate from the great soaking tub; the vanity runs two sinks under the high mirror. Chrome accoutrements and fluffy red towels provide cool touches of bright and blood.
--
A night of apprehension, a morning of avoidance. Emma's been absent. But a phone call of concern (over the state of the wall, of course) has piqued her curiosity and edged it over the survival instinct warbling vaguely (Hah. As if.) propelling her back to the club and a survey of the damage, along with the whispers of concern and gossip whipping from Pawn's minds and lips.
She approaches the Black King's office door, face settled into determined planes, brow lifting at the challenge from a loyal little Black pawn standing guard at the mouth to his master's lair. << Oh, please. Open it, >> she orders, taking an incautious hold of his mind and bending it to the task of opening it for her.
With a glazed blink, young, short, tough James Amatenzo (the worthy Jacko to friends and rich-girl fiancee) mutely obeys and even holds open the office door for the White Queen until she's inside. And inside? Lights are all off, and curtains are all closed. The scents of rooms boxed in on themselves ride the air, along with psychic currents: low-throbbing pain, sharper outrage and fear, thick and furry despair like old mink rubbed across the tongue. The locus of this output is in the bedroom, past a half-open door.
Emma drops her face, focusing her eyes on the opened door. The weight of the room presses in, suffocating, a crypt to pride and dignity and self-reliance. She waves a hand, dismissing Jacko the Valiant, and proceeds at a slow, wary rate toward the King's Inner Chambers, Esther approaching Assuerus's throne, unbidden. "Sebastian?" she murmurs, reaching a hand out to the doorjamb and sliding along the door to peer into the maelstrom.
A muffled cry curdles the daytime dimness, and the ball of Shaw huddled under the covers jerks towards opening. He does get his head up, and his upper body on an elbow's prop, and he pants for breath, wild-eyed until he focuses on her. Despair crashes harder at the sight of his Esther; his mood's throne tipples, if not topples. "Go away," he says in a wretched voice and closes his eyes. Behind them, fragments of nightmare start to fade into the ambience.
Emma flinches, leaning on the knob while the emotions crash over and past her, the hand on the doorframe curling around it, nails digging into the wood. "Sebastian," she tries again, straightening and moving further into the room, along the wall, free of the doorway. The bleeding pulp of his mental scape halts her instinctive wash of soothing projections, watering them down to clumsy, feather-light tides. She edges along the wall, both hands pressing against it behind her--solid, real. "What's the matter? What happened?" she whispers, her voice blending into the darkness.
"Get /out/," Shaw insists on a groan as he buries back into the bed's deep swaddling. His emotions dive with him, muting the output to intermittent, unpredictable spits and pops, accompanied by half-shaped (and not at all shielded, not even attempted!) thoughts. << Emmaout Jeanout Jeanloose looselooseshe'slooseJean'sloose hurt hurthurthurt hurt >>
An aborted step forward, way from the wall, toward him. She catches herself, buffeted by conflicts of memory and instinct and calculation, and stills in place, watching his dimly formed back. "Are you injured?" she asks quietly, moving again in a slow, wide arc.
His shoulder breaches the surface of the covers like a dolphin's sleek, firm, shining-wet back, and Shaw hunches it and wracks a laugh into a pillow. << Hurt so hurt, >> his mind laments (crackling indignation, impotent confusion). << The bitch beat me up good, Emma, you happy now? Humbled broken poor little Sebastian broken broken broken-- >>
<< No, >> she answers, trusting the dark of the room to hide the cold, satisfied smile that flickers to life, smoothed away as she curves toward the foot of his bed. << You're not broken, darling. Fractured, maybe, but I doubt anyone's ability to break you. >> An arrow of light falls across her, glimmering for an instant as she passes through it. << My strong, perfect King, >> she purrs soothingly. "Have you been tended to?"
Shaw sighs and lifts his face from the pillow, half-turning it her way for a profile's weary -- and bruised -- revelation. Lashes flutter against his cheek while he tries to put his mind in order. He mostly succeeds, so he can sigh again, roll onto his elbow again, and face her fully. His other hand pulls back tangled hair, and he /is/ bruised: blotches of fading color around eyes and mouth, a startling splotch on the white of one eye, and thin lines on neck and shoulders. He attempts a smile, which stretches the lacerations scoring his cheeks. "I have," he tells her. "And I've been trying to get my beauty sleep, but obviously, that hasn't happened. Sorry."
Emma blinks at the revealed damage, secretly, and oh so grudgingly, impressed. "Jean did this?" she asks, nodding at his face and moving from foot to side of the bed and sitting gingerly on its edges, now within reach and so monitoring his thoughts, his emotions for intent. "What happened?"
The lashes fall to sullen butterfly flaps once more. "Why not," Shaw invites instead, with a lash of malicious hurt (from him, at him, for him, a pitiless emotional flail on his open wounds), "just bounce into my mind and get the answer yourself? It was good enough for my erstwhile Queen; surely it's good enough for my extant one." << Bitches, >> snarls a last remnant of nightmare before it's gone and he's fully awake.
"You broke me of that habit long ago," Emma replies, flippant and ignoring the mental outwash. "But if you don't wish to tell me, I can pick it up in distorted pieces from your pawns instead. I can just sit here instead, with you, if you'd rather."
Shaw flinches at the offer, mind and body. "No. No. I'll tell you. And then you'll go away? Leave me alone for a while?" He sinks back against the pillows, and his eyes, still half-shielded, glitter with reflected wet light. "I need rest. And solitude. Please."
Emma moves her hand to his leg, brushing tentatively against it through layers of sheets and blankets. "If that's what you want," she agrees, almost tenderly.
Eyes close. Tears still leak out. << Dammit, >> his surface thoughts mutter, then whisk away into speech's cognitive buzz. "I was out of the clubhouse," Shaw begins, his voice a flat report to match his mood (though slight tremors shake the leg under her hand). "One of my pawns called to say that Jean was in some kind of trouble, according to Jason Wyngarde, who'd experienced a violent telepathic burst. I came home. I . . . found her."
The corner of her mouth twitches at Jason's name, and the pressure of her touch increases, soothed into a pattern of short strokes. "Did this pawn, did /Jason/ have any idea what precipitated the outburst?"
"No. He didn't know. He couldn't say where in the house she was." Slowly Shaw brings his hands up to run up his face and into his hair, where his scraped fingers stay in a tentative cradle of his skull. His voice, behind the barrier of raised, bent arms, drops; but feathers of memory brush bright, vital edges around his next words. "She was in her room. I knocked. She used her powers to open the door. She was -- she was /floating/, Emma, and her whole room was packing itself without her even watching it. Eyes closed, arms folded, just hovering above the floor, and everything whirling around her in perfect harmony . . ."
Emma bites her tongue on an acerbic comment on the likelihood of glittery, colorful "magic" swirls ala Disney floating around the scene. She's instead quiet, waiting for him to continue, her hand lengthening the strokes of her petting along his leg.
Shaw relaxes somewhat under it; his conscious attention is on his recap, anyway, with only dim animal appreciation glowing for the touch. "She thought it was me," he goes on. Despair trembles in mood and voice again. "That /I/ had betrayed her. Planned something, whatever had been done to her, with you and Wyngarde. I hadn't!" He lets his hands and arms drop free beside his reclining torso, and he looks bleakly at her. "But I would have. I could have. We all know that."
Emma scoots farther up the bed, picking up one of his hands and sliding under it, cradling it in her lap. "But you didn't. Of course you didn't. /You/ know the rules of the Circle," she murmurs, lightly tracing a long scratch from the back of his hand to forearm. "You're not an Xavierite. You'd not betray your partner." Her voice seems to fall free of the skeleton of words, reaching to wrap instead around his mood, his mind, bouying both on comfort's gentle currents.
Dully Shaw looks down his arm at her hand to his, lying loose and large and empty in her lap. More lacerations mark palm and thumb and fingers. He closes his eyes and turns his head away from the sight and from her. "No, I didn't," he agrees in hardly a whisper. "I wouldn't. But she . . . God. I never should have made her Black Queen. It worked, things worked, but the price -- oh, God, Emma. The price." His mood resists comfort, turns in on itself, insists on self-flagellation -- bloody shuddering under his words' blows. "I made a mistake. I'm sorry. I won't do it again. Count on /that/."
"Shh," Emma shushes, underlying his mood, fighting against its tide. "Is she gone then? Is she to just be let go?"
Shaw pulls his hand back to himself, folds his arms over his sheet-swathed stomach. He glances back at her, then away again, towards the shadowed pass-through to closet and bathroom. "If you would like to stop a woman who can fling me around like a rag doll without breaking a sweat -- you saw the hole in the wall out in the hallway, right? -- well, please, feel free, my dear." Bitterness snaps mental teeth at her, but he's otherwise gentled. Muffled. The enforced calm drags at his voice, pulling out native, long-ago rolling, drawling, piqued accent of western Pennsylvania's hills. "I know when I'm beat, and if you're smart, you do, too. She wants outta the club, she's out. /And/ outta the Circle. No more Worthington, no more Grey. Just us, huh?"
Emma watches his hand slide from her lap, and replaces his with her own. "For now. For now... She'll expect it now. But not always. No, she cannot always be prepared. She wants out," she murmurs lowly, almost to herself, then turns her head to watch his face. "We are enough," calmly stated.
Silence then. Then Shaw stirs, grasps more of his usual self, and tells her, "I've passed instructions to the pawns, yours and mine, about handling her if she comes back. They'll treat her as they've been told to treat Magneto if /he/ shows up: courteously, with respect, but as a walking weapon of mass destruction." He blinks her way. "Can you think of anything else? /Will/ she come back? She said something about wanting to talk with the White Bishop. Something -- I don't remember."
Emma stiffens, her jaw setting and nostrils pinching. "I'll see that he is kept out of her way, since she seems to have taken a special interest in him. As for the rest? I don't know. I don't know how deep this recently-developed instability runs. I find it difficult to believe that Jean Grey could hur--" She stops and her gaze flickers before a wryly apologetic smile creeps onto her lips. "Well, I did find it hard to believe."
Shaw's mouth forms a slight but genuine smile. "Me, too. It takes a lot to get me to actually bruise, but -- well, there we are." He hugs his folded arms tighter over his midriff and tips bruised shoulders in a shrug. "She did worse things in my mind, anyway," he says levelly (mostly) and clinically (almost). "I don't know what exactly, but nightmares, this shakiness that I'm sure is annoying you as much as it's delighting you, memories dug up from where they should've been buried--" He shakes his head and then studies her with heavy-lidded defiance. "I did teach you not to go rooting around in my mind. I hope you remember those lessons until I get sorted out again."
"I could put them back for you, if you like. When you feel better," Emma says, drawing her knee up and rocking onto it, leaning forward onto fists curled on either side of his chest, three pointed support for her as she moves close to brush her lips lightly against his then murmur against his cheek, "I've learned all the lessons you taught me."
Shaw . . . shudders, but gently -- gently! -- he takes hold of her shoulders and pushes her (gently!) away from him. "I will take it under advisement." Stiffly. Underlying ache/pain/fear/torment. "Thank you, for that and for the reassurance about my lessons." And a flash of cynical awareness: oh, all of them, is it? (Sadism, cruelty, manipulation--) A sneer tries for his expression, fails, and he just rolls over onto his side, putting the long line of his back, the bruised skin and the heavy muscles, between them. "If there's nothing else . . . ?"
Emma's outflung leg catches her, balancing her against the push and leaving her the dignity of settling back on her heel instead of falling off the bed. Her shielding flashes at the contact of that awareness, and a satisfied, smug smile answers as she rearranges her seat, moving to his side, back against headboard, knees tucked up, a hand dropping to his shoulder in companionable confidence. "No, darling. Nothing else. Get some more sleep," she purrs, all evidence pointing to an intention to stay right where she was while he did so.
"You are not," Shaw growls past the arms folded around his head on the pillows, "watching fucking over me while I fucking sleep, Emma Frost. You aren't my mother." Bone-deep, mind-deep pain that shakes him again, but he fights back with a foot's indignant kick her way. "Get out. I'm serious."
"Ow! Dammit, Sebastian!" Emma grouses back, rubbing at the contact site, but not moving elsehow. "I wasn't fucking /trying/ to be. I /thought/ I'd give your pawns some other excuse for your indisposition."
Shaw informs her, "I have the flu." A baleful eye rolls black (and bruise-spotted white) over his shoulder at her. "Do I look like I'm in the mood? For anything?"
"Do you think /I/ am?" she shoots back, eyeing him for a long moment before swinging her legs over the side of the bed and pushing to her feet. "But fine. We'll go with your story. I'll send in a bowl of bloody chicken soup," she snarks, padding to and around the end of the bed, and ambling toward the door.
"Emma -- wait."
She does, halting halfway to the door and half-turning back, expression cool and expectant.
"I'm sorry." Shaw rubs his forearm across his eyes, then peers at her with an expression grooved with broken capillaries and emotional exhaustion. "I'm hurt. All over. I /wish/ I knew what she did in my mi--shit." He curls around himself now. Sounds tired, too. "Thank you for coming to see me. I appreciate it. I'll remember it. But I /would/ like to be alone, please. I can't face -- not yet."
Emma's stance softens somewhat, matching her voice which carries through the gray light to him, laced with gentle teasing. "Of course, darling. I'm yours to command." She starts forward again, light from the doorway glinting off the smoothed blonde ponytail.
A peep of eye watches her go. He doesn't try to hold her this time, but his mood remains quieter behind her. No more of the nightmarish agony, and nearly a tranquility that promises better sleep. Alone again in his suite, Sebastian Shaw pulls pillows and covers around him into a tight, warm nest and with desperate determination closes out the world.
[Log ends.]