[Private]
I really, really want to go home.
The work of the White Queen is never done. It continues in her absence, with her proxy. Everything takes on the illusion of importance when couched in the language of business administration; Ororo puzzles through memoranda at a plodding rate, the fair brow knit and leaned forward into the brace of splayed fingers. When the buzz from security interrupts the baffling onslaught of typed words glaring at her from the computer screen, it comes almost as a relief.
At least, until she hears what they have to say.
Emma Frost looks completely, utterly, and in all ways blank. Then, with a calmness that screams false, she closes out of each window individually on her computer, rises to her feet, and smooths her hands over the neat crispness of blue-accented white that is today's Paris-approved busines suit. The nylons have disappeared. So have the shoes. But the rest remains in place. She does not instruct the lackeys not to admit him, because that would be pointless. He is Magneto. He goes where he wants. But she does stand and wait, hipshot with false ease as she leans against the desk, and in her head dearly desires to scream at the body's owner.
Past security with paired fingers tipped to the silver of his temple, Erik sweeps into the clubhouse with all the confidence of a man who feels he has very little to fear from those housed within its walls. The black of his overcoat swings lazily in his wake - his leisurely pace not enough to stir the red silken lining within into a more dramatic presence, even when he approaches a familiar set of stairs, and starts up them. His right hand goes somewhat grudgingly to the banister before he's all the way up.
And onward. Familiar carpet and familiar doors, the curl of darker grey at the back of his neck bristling against the high flip of his collar when he narrows his eyes aside after any potential interruption, and then reaches for the door.
The pawns, instructed to steer clear and not do anything stupid, obey their instructions.
The door opens.
The occupant, forewarned of his approach both by security and by telepathy, holds it open and stares up at him. Her lips curl in a smile drawn with cool hostility, her gaze likewise cool -- hiding, imperfectly, a hint of fascination as she regards him through a different set of eyes than the ones she is usually wearing. "So kind of you to drop by," she says, her voice deceptively light. It is not a simper. Despite her best efforts, Storm cannot simper. "Won't you come in?"
The door opens, and Erik stands with his hand slightly lifted in the space of the area that was only seconds ago occupied by a door knob. It falls back to his side after further pause, blue eyes cast with typical suspicion over the white queen (her chest is particularly suspicious, tonight) and in he steps, with a half nod of greeting.
As he crosses the threshhold, Ororo draws the door shut behind him and stays there for just a half-second too long, trying to reinforce the shielding that Xavier taught her despte all the prudence and logic that suggests she should do the opposite. She crosses the room toward more comfortable seating, although there is a Cyclopsean straightness to her spine rather than the sinuous grace more often adopted by the practiced temptress. "Can I get you anything?" she asks, pleasantly. "Scotch?" Spurred onward by an overactive sense of the ridiculous, she offers, "Crab puffs?"
Erik's mind is in careful order anyway - very little visible above the surface, though that placid mantle ripples with rumbles of deeper thought beneath it, as things usually are. He paces well on into the office, proud and upright (though overall, rather confidently relaxed) as the tips of his fingers trace idly over the length of Emma Frost's aluminum desk. "No."
"Then since you are clearly not here to partake of Hellfire's splendid hospitality," Emma's voice says smoothly, as its present user slides down into a seated position at the edge of her own couch some distance away, "I suppose I must ask what it is you want." Ororo crosses her legs towards him, serene in the spread of her arms -- one at the armrest, the other over the couch's back.
"Sebastian Shaw seems to have taken an interest in Christopher Rossi," Magneto informs rather blandly, the weight of his glare settled on the desk at his side until he's prowled past it, and it resettles itself upon what outwardly appears to be a blank span of wall, and inwardly is, in fact, a computer.
The woman pauses where she sits. Ororo is an imperfect actress. Reactions chase each other over her face; most of them are hued in shades of ire. "Has he." There is nothing interrogative in the words: two syllables, flat and expressionless. The weather remains peaceful, a cooling summer night. This is somehow insult added to injury. She gets better hold of herself and cants her head as she looks across at him. A slender brow arches. "Christopher Rossi seems to be a man of singular interest."
For only the second time since his arrival, Erik half-turns enough to look back at her, one brow already lifted as he tugs his left hand away from the aforementioned wall and pushes it down into its respective overcoat pocket. "What? ...Surely you're not still sleeping with him." His brows fall, skeptical, and his shoulders square back to Emma, though they maintain just enough of a slope to suggest a general sort of brood to the familiar eye. Her last observation is ignored.
Ororo forgets herself long enough to sit up straight and spit, "/Still/?" and then hastily tries to figure out how to cover. The pause takes her rather longer than she is actually comfortable with. "--No," she says. "But I am sure /that/ hardly matters to Sebastian."
That particular reaction not anticipated, Erik's brows startle up at it, only to resettle at a discomfiting tilt when no explanation is provided. "There really are few other activities I can imagine that would require that he have an erection, and your clothing scattered about his living room. /Still/." A gruff snort proceeds a step taken in her direction, and then another, slow and deliberate. "There must be something."
"Didn't you hear I do bachelor parties now?" Ororo asks nastily. She gets up off the couch to fold her arms over her chest, posture tight with ill-suppressed ire.
"Is that what they're calling it these days? Young people," Erik delivers with excessively good-natured tolerance of her sarcasm, though the steeled set of his jaw clearly indicates irritation gathering in the face of her attitude. Cold eyes follow her up off the couch, and then narrow as his direct approach shifts over into the beginnings of a loose circle.
"I have no idea what Sebastian would want with Chris Rossi," Ororo tells him tightly, with a jerk of her head to toss long blonde hair back from her face. "I don't know what /you/ want with Chris Rossi. For that matter I really have no idea what /I/ want with Chris Rossi. Whatever comment you are about to make about his erection notwithstanding."
"Perhaps he wishes to inquire after the particular methods Christopher is using to consummate your affections." Another short scan passed from toes to torso, Erik snorts again as he draws to a slow halt just out of arm's reach, brows lifted and hands still resting firmly in his pockets. "Then again, I suppose there are few men in this city that you wouldn't be willing to bounce upon at the slightest provocation."
Ororo's lip curls, disgust more than disdain. She turns her head away and glares darkly at an indiscriminate point somewhere on the far wall. "Is there something you actually want from me or are you just here to throw insults at me and watch me cower before your might?"
"I'm sorry, my dear," Erik apologizes all too earnestly, brows knit with cynical emphasis over narrowed eyes until he turns slowly away to pace back for the desk. "Perhaps if you put a measure of concentrated effort into being less of a recreant harlot, I might find something more personally rewarding to do with my time."
The White Queen stands there for a moment, canting her head to stare after him. Her first response dies on her tongue and she hunts scatteredly for a replacement. Even the enemies act wrong when you are Emma Frost. "So I shall reform myself? Model myself on your standards, bind myself to arbitrary sexual mores, and abandon the best weapons a woman ever bought and paid for?" She snorts, though it sounds a little forced and false in her ears, and says, "Please."
"Hrrmph," is Erik's somewhat less than elegant reply, gruffed aside into his collar when he deigns not to turn fully back to face her, and studies the contour of one screen rising up out of her desk instead. "I trust you have been maintaining your half of our arrangement."
Ororo hesitates only a moment before answering him, wishing for her own body and her own problems and her own damn lightning bolts. She says, "How could I do otherwise?"
"I don't know. I suppose you could see something shiny or colorful and forget that we came to an agreement at all. You could go lusting after someone who wishes me dead." Left hand extracted from its pocket, Erik brushes it over the top edge of the monitor nearest him, stark glare watching with distracted fascination as the screen shudders and contorts before it goes black. His eyes focus sharply back upon Emma. "Shall I go on?"
"No." Ororo looks back at him, the face she wears mostly blank. What's there to be read is unutterably weary. Her stolen arms tighten in their flimsy barricade over her stolen chest.
The glacial ice of Erik's eyes is intense, set deep in shadow that is more indicative of his own weariness where his posture and expression would like to admit. Written into his gaze is distrust, among other things. Still. "When I return, I will expect a full report upon your progress. Our progress."
"Then you shall have it," Ororo says, fighting back against a mad urge to ask after a more specific date due or the possibility of extra credit. She lifts her chin, her mouth crimping into a slight grimace.
Those cold eyes scan a moment longer, and Erik, apparently satisfied, turns for the door. "Contact me if there are any problems."
"Of course." Ororo lets her hands drop from the cross of her arms to rest at her hips, relief in the shift of posture as well as in the puff of breath past her lips. She slides a few paces back, bare heels scraping over the white carpet as she makes sure to be out of his way, and watches him go.
One last glance casts down after bare feet, and Erik opens the door ahead of him with a gesture. Seconds later, he is gone.'
When the door has closed upon Erik's departure, Ororo sinks down into the lush upholstery of the couch, buries her face in her hands, and groans. "Hell."
The work of the White Queen is never done. It continues in her absence, with her proxy. Everything takes on the illusion of importance when couched in the language of business administration; Ororo puzzles through memoranda at a plodding rate, the fair brow knit and leaned forward into the brace of splayed fingers. When the buzz from security interrupts the baffling onslaught of typed words glaring at her from the computer screen, it comes almost as a relief.
At least, until she hears what they have to say.
Emma Frost looks completely, utterly, and in all ways blank. Then, with a calmness that screams false, she closes out of each window individually on her computer, rises to her feet, and smooths her hands over the neat crispness of blue-accented white that is today's Paris-approved busines suit. The nylons have disappeared. So have the shoes. But the rest remains in place. She does not instruct the lackeys not to admit him, because that would be pointless. He is Magneto. He goes where he wants. But she does stand and wait, hipshot with false ease as she leans against the desk, and in her head dearly desires to scream at the body's owner.
Past security with paired fingers tipped to the silver of his temple, Erik sweeps into the clubhouse with all the confidence of a man who feels he has very little to fear from those housed within its walls. The black of his overcoat swings lazily in his wake - his leisurely pace not enough to stir the red silken lining within into a more dramatic presence, even when he approaches a familiar set of stairs, and starts up them. His right hand goes somewhat grudgingly to the banister before he's all the way up.
And onward. Familiar carpet and familiar doors, the curl of darker grey at the back of his neck bristling against the high flip of his collar when he narrows his eyes aside after any potential interruption, and then reaches for the door.
The pawns, instructed to steer clear and not do anything stupid, obey their instructions.
The door opens.
The occupant, forewarned of his approach both by security and by telepathy, holds it open and stares up at him. Her lips curl in a smile drawn with cool hostility, her gaze likewise cool -- hiding, imperfectly, a hint of fascination as she regards him through a different set of eyes than the ones she is usually wearing. "So kind of you to drop by," she says, her voice deceptively light. It is not a simper. Despite her best efforts, Storm cannot simper. "Won't you come in?"
The door opens, and Erik stands with his hand slightly lifted in the space of the area that was only seconds ago occupied by a door knob. It falls back to his side after further pause, blue eyes cast with typical suspicion over the white queen (her chest is particularly suspicious, tonight) and in he steps, with a half nod of greeting.
As he crosses the threshhold, Ororo draws the door shut behind him and stays there for just a half-second too long, trying to reinforce the shielding that Xavier taught her despte all the prudence and logic that suggests she should do the opposite. She crosses the room toward more comfortable seating, although there is a Cyclopsean straightness to her spine rather than the sinuous grace more often adopted by the practiced temptress. "Can I get you anything?" she asks, pleasantly. "Scotch?" Spurred onward by an overactive sense of the ridiculous, she offers, "Crab puffs?"
Erik's mind is in careful order anyway - very little visible above the surface, though that placid mantle ripples with rumbles of deeper thought beneath it, as things usually are. He paces well on into the office, proud and upright (though overall, rather confidently relaxed) as the tips of his fingers trace idly over the length of Emma Frost's aluminum desk. "No."
"Then since you are clearly not here to partake of Hellfire's splendid hospitality," Emma's voice says smoothly, as its present user slides down into a seated position at the edge of her own couch some distance away, "I suppose I must ask what it is you want." Ororo crosses her legs towards him, serene in the spread of her arms -- one at the armrest, the other over the couch's back.
"Sebastian Shaw seems to have taken an interest in Christopher Rossi," Magneto informs rather blandly, the weight of his glare settled on the desk at his side until he's prowled past it, and it resettles itself upon what outwardly appears to be a blank span of wall, and inwardly is, in fact, a computer.
The woman pauses where she sits. Ororo is an imperfect actress. Reactions chase each other over her face; most of them are hued in shades of ire. "Has he." There is nothing interrogative in the words: two syllables, flat and expressionless. The weather remains peaceful, a cooling summer night. This is somehow insult added to injury. She gets better hold of herself and cants her head as she looks across at him. A slender brow arches. "Christopher Rossi seems to be a man of singular interest."
For only the second time since his arrival, Erik half-turns enough to look back at her, one brow already lifted as he tugs his left hand away from the aforementioned wall and pushes it down into its respective overcoat pocket. "What? ...Surely you're not still sleeping with him." His brows fall, skeptical, and his shoulders square back to Emma, though they maintain just enough of a slope to suggest a general sort of brood to the familiar eye. Her last observation is ignored.
Ororo forgets herself long enough to sit up straight and spit, "/Still/?" and then hastily tries to figure out how to cover. The pause takes her rather longer than she is actually comfortable with. "--No," she says. "But I am sure /that/ hardly matters to Sebastian."
That particular reaction not anticipated, Erik's brows startle up at it, only to resettle at a discomfiting tilt when no explanation is provided. "There really are few other activities I can imagine that would require that he have an erection, and your clothing scattered about his living room. /Still/." A gruff snort proceeds a step taken in her direction, and then another, slow and deliberate. "There must be something."
"Didn't you hear I do bachelor parties now?" Ororo asks nastily. She gets up off the couch to fold her arms over her chest, posture tight with ill-suppressed ire.
"Is that what they're calling it these days? Young people," Erik delivers with excessively good-natured tolerance of her sarcasm, though the steeled set of his jaw clearly indicates irritation gathering in the face of her attitude. Cold eyes follow her up off the couch, and then narrow as his direct approach shifts over into the beginnings of a loose circle.
"I have no idea what Sebastian would want with Chris Rossi," Ororo tells him tightly, with a jerk of her head to toss long blonde hair back from her face. "I don't know what /you/ want with Chris Rossi. For that matter I really have no idea what /I/ want with Chris Rossi. Whatever comment you are about to make about his erection notwithstanding."
"Perhaps he wishes to inquire after the particular methods Christopher is using to consummate your affections." Another short scan passed from toes to torso, Erik snorts again as he draws to a slow halt just out of arm's reach, brows lifted and hands still resting firmly in his pockets. "Then again, I suppose there are few men in this city that you wouldn't be willing to bounce upon at the slightest provocation."
Ororo's lip curls, disgust more than disdain. She turns her head away and glares darkly at an indiscriminate point somewhere on the far wall. "Is there something you actually want from me or are you just here to throw insults at me and watch me cower before your might?"
"I'm sorry, my dear," Erik apologizes all too earnestly, brows knit with cynical emphasis over narrowed eyes until he turns slowly away to pace back for the desk. "Perhaps if you put a measure of concentrated effort into being less of a recreant harlot, I might find something more personally rewarding to do with my time."
The White Queen stands there for a moment, canting her head to stare after him. Her first response dies on her tongue and she hunts scatteredly for a replacement. Even the enemies act wrong when you are Emma Frost. "So I shall reform myself? Model myself on your standards, bind myself to arbitrary sexual mores, and abandon the best weapons a woman ever bought and paid for?" She snorts, though it sounds a little forced and false in her ears, and says, "Please."
"Hrrmph," is Erik's somewhat less than elegant reply, gruffed aside into his collar when he deigns not to turn fully back to face her, and studies the contour of one screen rising up out of her desk instead. "I trust you have been maintaining your half of our arrangement."
Ororo hesitates only a moment before answering him, wishing for her own body and her own problems and her own damn lightning bolts. She says, "How could I do otherwise?"
"I don't know. I suppose you could see something shiny or colorful and forget that we came to an agreement at all. You could go lusting after someone who wishes me dead." Left hand extracted from its pocket, Erik brushes it over the top edge of the monitor nearest him, stark glare watching with distracted fascination as the screen shudders and contorts before it goes black. His eyes focus sharply back upon Emma. "Shall I go on?"
"No." Ororo looks back at him, the face she wears mostly blank. What's there to be read is unutterably weary. Her stolen arms tighten in their flimsy barricade over her stolen chest.
The glacial ice of Erik's eyes is intense, set deep in shadow that is more indicative of his own weariness where his posture and expression would like to admit. Written into his gaze is distrust, among other things. Still. "When I return, I will expect a full report upon your progress. Our progress."
"Then you shall have it," Ororo says, fighting back against a mad urge to ask after a more specific date due or the possibility of extra credit. She lifts her chin, her mouth crimping into a slight grimace.
Those cold eyes scan a moment longer, and Erik, apparently satisfied, turns for the door. "Contact me if there are any problems."
"Of course." Ororo lets her hands drop from the cross of her arms to rest at her hips, relief in the shift of posture as well as in the puff of breath past her lips. She slides a few paces back, bare heels scraping over the white carpet as she makes sure to be out of his way, and watches him go.
One last glance casts down after bare feet, and Erik opens the door ahead of him with a gesture. Seconds later, he is gone.'
When the door has closed upon Erik's departure, Ororo sinks down into the lush upholstery of the couch, buries her face in her hands, and groans. "Hell."