Hellfire 3
Title: Hellfire (3/6?) (Sequel to Human)
Author: Alsike
Fandom: X-Men/Criminal Minds x-over
Pairing: Emma Frost/Emily Prentiss
Rating: R
AN/Disclaimer: Not my girls.
Apologies: Wangst.
Summary: Emma's an X-man now, but she wasn't always fighting for truth, justice, and peaceful-coexistence. Emily has had a taste of her past, but is she ready to meet the White Queen?
The girls’ night out began with Margaritas, continued with salty Mexican food washed down with sangria, and concluded with tequila shots and beer. So the conversation was very free and easy.
“Look,” said JJ, after downing her third shot. “I know Emma and I, sudden irrational hatred, possessiveness, I dunno, all that crap. But seriously, have you seen the mark she left on your neck? What happened to your super turtleneck cardigans when you need them? And those are teeth marks, honestly! I don’t even want to see your back. I saw your back last time, and it was like: Caged tiger!”
Garcia giggled and tugged Emily closer by the collar. “Yep, those are teeth marks. Grrr. So jealous.”
“I’m not jealous!” JJ emphasized unnecessarily. “But like, have you thought about infections and things? And her clothing doesn’t exactly suggest sexually unavailable.”
Emily sighed and rested her head on her arm. “I’m not stupid. This has come up.”
“You mean she’s cheated on you? Already?”
Garcia gasped and put her hand over her mouth.
“No! Yes… no. Sort of. I don’t fucking know. I don't even know if we have the sort of relationship where cheating actually counts.” Emily peeled the label from her bottle of fine cerveza. “Maybe we do. Maybe that’s all that counts. Sort of like, as long as we don’t have anyone else, we’re together, but once we do, once we don’t need whatever this is, it’ll go away, as if it had never happened.”
There was a small silence.
“That really blows,” said Garcia finally. “I need another beer.”
* * *
“I really don't understand why you keep saying I have lesbian tendencies!” exclaimed JJ, wobbling out towards the parking lot. “I am a tactile person. I touch my friends! It doesn’t mean anything! And seriously.” She pointed at Emily. “She assaulted me! Not like, assault, assault. But there was no ninety-ten, that was one hundred percent Emily!”
“Can we go back to pretending that never happened? I would have kissed anyone that night.”
“Aww, now I’m disappointed I didn’t stick around! Jayj, you get all the fun.”
JJ grumbled again.
“But you really shouldn’t deny it,” continued Garcia. “Your mom knows you have lesbian tendencies. You even felt me up once.”
“At a party,” JJ hissed. “When I was blindfolded!”
Garcia patted her shoulder. “It isn’t gay unless you push back.”
Emily frowned. “I think that only applies to men.”
* * *
That evening Emma’s phone rang with an unexpected number. She frowned as she picked it up. A watcher would have seen her pale slightly and stiffen at the voice on the other end.
“Hello, Sebastian. How lovely to hear from you,” she said, her voice flat and cool. “Yes, fortuitous indeed, our meeting.”
“My companion? Do you mean Emily?” He blathered on an she picked up an invitation with a crumpled corner and thought about Emily in a red dress. “No, of course she isn’t trained,” Emma snapped. “That wasn’t my intention with her.” She rolled her eyes. “The sex, Sebastian, it was for the sex.” He responded and she laughed.
“Darling, if you still think stuffing your dick full of kinetic energy improves your technique, you really learnt nothing at the Hellfire Club.” She chuckled, still pleased with her response as he formulated his next impertinent question.
“No, she’s a natural.” Emma smiled to herself, sitting and leaning back into her pillows as she reformulated their history. “I just ran into her, accidentally. I was bored and she was flirty so I let her pick me up, and god, Seb, you have no idea what she can do with her tongue.”
She paused and frowned at his words. Could he honestly believe she had run into Emily at the club? Hadn’t he been paying attention? But everyone knew that a leopard didn't change his spots and he wasn’t idealistic enough to blind himself like certain others who may or may not have allowed her on their team.
“What do you mean? I haven’t been visiting out of solidarity with you, darling. I’ve had to get it elsewhere. Emily was just blind luck.” Her eyes narrowed. “No, I have no claim on her. We have sex; we’re not life partners.”
“What do you think, Sebastian? She’s a human. Low shelf life. I’ve taken most of what I want. There were some things she had never tried before, but now, there’s not much…. “
“She’s still a lesbian, Seb; don’t be stupid. How exactly did you assume that fucking me would make her bisexual? Or are you asking from personal experience?” She laughed at his response.
“A party? Certainly, a good party? Because that last one was boring as shit…”
Emma breathed through her nose and slid her fingers over her nipple. “Is that so? Yes, I would have loved to bring her to that kind of party.”
“No… I’m not seeing her anymore, not for a while. It was an accidental encounter at the conference as well. She was never seeing me exclusively. We were just fucking.”
Emma paused, then growled. “He was trying to kill my students, Shaw. You know how I feel about that.
“No, I don’t think she was surprised. She grew up around politics, of course she knows all politicians are corrupt. I don’t think she gives a damn as long as they don’t kill and rape children. So if that’s one of your new themes, I doubt she'd be interested."
Emma forced a laugh. “For old times’ sake? Maybe if you wash your hair. Oh, please. Women are a challenge. Obviously you never managed to please one if you don't know that by now.”
“Yes, I’ll look forward to it. Thank you for thinking of me, Sebastian.”
Emma ended the call, and sat, motionless, until the moon set.
* * *
“Jayj?” Emily said, leaning over her knees in the back of the taxi that had just let Garcia out. The driver was very pleased since he got to go into the high fare district of central DC and out to the suburbs, all on one trip. “What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
Emily looked uncomfortable and childlike and very very drunk. JJ was reminded of the last time she had been alone with a drunk Emily and very carefully kept her hands to herself. “Don’t kiss me.”
Emily scowled at her. “I was going to ask if it was different, having someone at home.”
JJ stared at her, really glad she was not sober, because the horrible twist in her stomach was bad enough as it was. She looked tense and unhappy, with an expression suspicious that she had managed to reveal one of her deeply shielded vulnerabilities. “Um, I don’t know.”
“Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. Tell me what it’s really like.”
“Really like?” JJ leaned back in her seat and stared up at the ceiling of the cab. “Tonight it’s going to suck. There’s always someone there to be pissed at you if you come home plastered and smelling like booze.”
Emily chuckled a bit.
JJ relaxed into her topic. “And after work it really sucks, because you don’t get to go home and just collapse. You have to still be on, and sometimes he’s just so perky and I just want to tell him to fuck off back to Louisiana.”
Then she frowned. “But if he’s not there, then I worry about where he is. And sometimes… sometimes it works. If work has been awful and I just need something to put it out of my mind, and he’s there, and he’s made dinner, and he’s happy to see me, and there’s nothing else in the world that I need.”
Emily closed her eyes. “I was afraid you’d say something like that.”
* * *
Emily stared at her phone, unable to dial, unable to put it away. It was late, nearly four, and she was still muddy-headed from the alcohol, and slightly nauseated. She felt like an addict. She shouldn’t call. She shouldn’t need it so much. She shouldn’t feel so afraid of the one person she felt safe with.
And it wasn’t as if it was Emma who scared her. It was the darkness around her, the people who had looked at her with ugly things in their eyes and their minds. And it was her strength and her pride and her anger and how they didn’t seem irrational, not for someone like her, not for someone with so much inside.
Emily had lived in enough war zones, had walked through ghettoes, had counseled the abused and wounded and afraid often enough to know that people changed in certain ways based on the world they grew up in. It was basic profiling. She could see it in herself, in her colleagues, in her neighbors and the people she passed on the street.
There was a way of walking, a carriage, a response to unexpected stimuli that read to her as bright as a neon sign. Emily knew trauma, she knew people who had suffered immense, incomprehensible losses by the gratuitous violence of an unkind universe, and Emma should have been one of them. A teacher, caught up in a genocidal catastrophe, should be broken, should be unable to comprehend the loss. She would seem hunted, startled by a sharp echo, and stunned to immobility by the sight of children playing.
But from the moment the woman of diamond had turned to flesh, Emily had read a different signpost on the shattered shards of her soul. Emma wasn’t broken by tragedy, just gutted, hollowed out, and never, ever surprised.
Emily didn’t want to put words to the possibilities of what that meant.
But the part that was the most terrifying was how she felt that whatever world had made Emma into who she was, was not so far away, and perhaps she had stepped into it without even knowing of its existence.
And it wasn’t fair, because it sometimes it meant nothing. But the times it meant nothing were the moments Emma made her feel like she was all that mattered in the world, and that feeling was always a lie.
Her phone rang.
“You can’t call me anymore.”
“What?” Emily heard the plastic of the phone creak under her grip. She had considered giving this up, but it couldn’t be taken away from her.
“You can’t. Too many people know about this, about us, and if they know I’m still talking to you, that we’re still in contact, you are in danger. So I am ending this now, before they hurt you.”
The words were hard to comprehend, her head still twisting into odd balloon-animal shapes. But something deep inside matched what she had been feeling before. “So this is it?”
“Yeah,” Emma said, quietly, too quietly, but too resignedly to give any false hope. “It’s gone on for long enough.”
“It has.” Emily was quiet for a moment. “Thank you.”
It was entirely the wrong thing to say at that moment, but she couldn’t find any other words. And perhaps that was what she meant. Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for being someone I could talk to and feel comfortable with. And thank you for ending this before I was too invested to step back from the edge.
* * *
Part 4
Author: Alsike
Fandom: X-Men/Criminal Minds x-over
Pairing: Emma Frost/Emily Prentiss
Rating: R
AN/Disclaimer: Not my girls.
Apologies: Wangst.
Summary: Emma's an X-man now, but she wasn't always fighting for truth, justice, and peaceful-coexistence. Emily has had a taste of her past, but is she ready to meet the White Queen?
The girls’ night out began with Margaritas, continued with salty Mexican food washed down with sangria, and concluded with tequila shots and beer. So the conversation was very free and easy.
“Look,” said JJ, after downing her third shot. “I know Emma and I, sudden irrational hatred, possessiveness, I dunno, all that crap. But seriously, have you seen the mark she left on your neck? What happened to your super turtleneck cardigans when you need them? And those are teeth marks, honestly! I don’t even want to see your back. I saw your back last time, and it was like: Caged tiger!”
Garcia giggled and tugged Emily closer by the collar. “Yep, those are teeth marks. Grrr. So jealous.”
“I’m not jealous!” JJ emphasized unnecessarily. “But like, have you thought about infections and things? And her clothing doesn’t exactly suggest sexually unavailable.”
Emily sighed and rested her head on her arm. “I’m not stupid. This has come up.”
“You mean she’s cheated on you? Already?”
Garcia gasped and put her hand over her mouth.
“No! Yes… no. Sort of. I don’t fucking know. I don't even know if we have the sort of relationship where cheating actually counts.” Emily peeled the label from her bottle of fine cerveza. “Maybe we do. Maybe that’s all that counts. Sort of like, as long as we don’t have anyone else, we’re together, but once we do, once we don’t need whatever this is, it’ll go away, as if it had never happened.”
There was a small silence.
“That really blows,” said Garcia finally. “I need another beer.”
* * *
“I really don't understand why you keep saying I have lesbian tendencies!” exclaimed JJ, wobbling out towards the parking lot. “I am a tactile person. I touch my friends! It doesn’t mean anything! And seriously.” She pointed at Emily. “She assaulted me! Not like, assault, assault. But there was no ninety-ten, that was one hundred percent Emily!”
“Can we go back to pretending that never happened? I would have kissed anyone that night.”
“Aww, now I’m disappointed I didn’t stick around! Jayj, you get all the fun.”
JJ grumbled again.
“But you really shouldn’t deny it,” continued Garcia. “Your mom knows you have lesbian tendencies. You even felt me up once.”
“At a party,” JJ hissed. “When I was blindfolded!”
Garcia patted her shoulder. “It isn’t gay unless you push back.”
Emily frowned. “I think that only applies to men.”
* * *
That evening Emma’s phone rang with an unexpected number. She frowned as she picked it up. A watcher would have seen her pale slightly and stiffen at the voice on the other end.
“Hello, Sebastian. How lovely to hear from you,” she said, her voice flat and cool. “Yes, fortuitous indeed, our meeting.”
“My companion? Do you mean Emily?” He blathered on an she picked up an invitation with a crumpled corner and thought about Emily in a red dress. “No, of course she isn’t trained,” Emma snapped. “That wasn’t my intention with her.” She rolled her eyes. “The sex, Sebastian, it was for the sex.” He responded and she laughed.
“Darling, if you still think stuffing your dick full of kinetic energy improves your technique, you really learnt nothing at the Hellfire Club.” She chuckled, still pleased with her response as he formulated his next impertinent question.
“No, she’s a natural.” Emma smiled to herself, sitting and leaning back into her pillows as she reformulated their history. “I just ran into her, accidentally. I was bored and she was flirty so I let her pick me up, and god, Seb, you have no idea what she can do with her tongue.”
She paused and frowned at his words. Could he honestly believe she had run into Emily at the club? Hadn’t he been paying attention? But everyone knew that a leopard didn't change his spots and he wasn’t idealistic enough to blind himself like certain others who may or may not have allowed her on their team.
“What do you mean? I haven’t been visiting out of solidarity with you, darling. I’ve had to get it elsewhere. Emily was just blind luck.” Her eyes narrowed. “No, I have no claim on her. We have sex; we’re not life partners.”
“What do you think, Sebastian? She’s a human. Low shelf life. I’ve taken most of what I want. There were some things she had never tried before, but now, there’s not much…. “
“She’s still a lesbian, Seb; don’t be stupid. How exactly did you assume that fucking me would make her bisexual? Or are you asking from personal experience?” She laughed at his response.
“A party? Certainly, a good party? Because that last one was boring as shit…”
Emma breathed through her nose and slid her fingers over her nipple. “Is that so? Yes, I would have loved to bring her to that kind of party.”
“No… I’m not seeing her anymore, not for a while. It was an accidental encounter at the conference as well. She was never seeing me exclusively. We were just fucking.”
Emma paused, then growled. “He was trying to kill my students, Shaw. You know how I feel about that.
“No, I don’t think she was surprised. She grew up around politics, of course she knows all politicians are corrupt. I don’t think she gives a damn as long as they don’t kill and rape children. So if that’s one of your new themes, I doubt she'd be interested."
Emma forced a laugh. “For old times’ sake? Maybe if you wash your hair. Oh, please. Women are a challenge. Obviously you never managed to please one if you don't know that by now.”
“Yes, I’ll look forward to it. Thank you for thinking of me, Sebastian.”
Emma ended the call, and sat, motionless, until the moon set.
* * *
“Jayj?” Emily said, leaning over her knees in the back of the taxi that had just let Garcia out. The driver was very pleased since he got to go into the high fare district of central DC and out to the suburbs, all on one trip. “What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
Emily looked uncomfortable and childlike and very very drunk. JJ was reminded of the last time she had been alone with a drunk Emily and very carefully kept her hands to herself. “Don’t kiss me.”
Emily scowled at her. “I was going to ask if it was different, having someone at home.”
JJ stared at her, really glad she was not sober, because the horrible twist in her stomach was bad enough as it was. She looked tense and unhappy, with an expression suspicious that she had managed to reveal one of her deeply shielded vulnerabilities. “Um, I don’t know.”
“Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. Tell me what it’s really like.”
“Really like?” JJ leaned back in her seat and stared up at the ceiling of the cab. “Tonight it’s going to suck. There’s always someone there to be pissed at you if you come home plastered and smelling like booze.”
Emily chuckled a bit.
JJ relaxed into her topic. “And after work it really sucks, because you don’t get to go home and just collapse. You have to still be on, and sometimes he’s just so perky and I just want to tell him to fuck off back to Louisiana.”
Then she frowned. “But if he’s not there, then I worry about where he is. And sometimes… sometimes it works. If work has been awful and I just need something to put it out of my mind, and he’s there, and he’s made dinner, and he’s happy to see me, and there’s nothing else in the world that I need.”
Emily closed her eyes. “I was afraid you’d say something like that.”
* * *
Emily stared at her phone, unable to dial, unable to put it away. It was late, nearly four, and she was still muddy-headed from the alcohol, and slightly nauseated. She felt like an addict. She shouldn’t call. She shouldn’t need it so much. She shouldn’t feel so afraid of the one person she felt safe with.
And it wasn’t as if it was Emma who scared her. It was the darkness around her, the people who had looked at her with ugly things in their eyes and their minds. And it was her strength and her pride and her anger and how they didn’t seem irrational, not for someone like her, not for someone with so much inside.
Emily had lived in enough war zones, had walked through ghettoes, had counseled the abused and wounded and afraid often enough to know that people changed in certain ways based on the world they grew up in. It was basic profiling. She could see it in herself, in her colleagues, in her neighbors and the people she passed on the street.
There was a way of walking, a carriage, a response to unexpected stimuli that read to her as bright as a neon sign. Emily knew trauma, she knew people who had suffered immense, incomprehensible losses by the gratuitous violence of an unkind universe, and Emma should have been one of them. A teacher, caught up in a genocidal catastrophe, should be broken, should be unable to comprehend the loss. She would seem hunted, startled by a sharp echo, and stunned to immobility by the sight of children playing.
But from the moment the woman of diamond had turned to flesh, Emily had read a different signpost on the shattered shards of her soul. Emma wasn’t broken by tragedy, just gutted, hollowed out, and never, ever surprised.
Emily didn’t want to put words to the possibilities of what that meant.
But the part that was the most terrifying was how she felt that whatever world had made Emma into who she was, was not so far away, and perhaps she had stepped into it without even knowing of its existence.
And it wasn’t fair, because it sometimes it meant nothing. But the times it meant nothing were the moments Emma made her feel like she was all that mattered in the world, and that feeling was always a lie.
Her phone rang.
“You can’t call me anymore.”
“What?” Emily heard the plastic of the phone creak under her grip. She had considered giving this up, but it couldn’t be taken away from her.
“You can’t. Too many people know about this, about us, and if they know I’m still talking to you, that we’re still in contact, you are in danger. So I am ending this now, before they hurt you.”
The words were hard to comprehend, her head still twisting into odd balloon-animal shapes. But something deep inside matched what she had been feeling before. “So this is it?”
“Yeah,” Emma said, quietly, too quietly, but too resignedly to give any false hope. “It’s gone on for long enough.”
“It has.” Emily was quiet for a moment. “Thank you.”
It was entirely the wrong thing to say at that moment, but she couldn’t find any other words. And perhaps that was what she meant. Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for being someone I could talk to and feel comfortable with. And thank you for ending this before I was too invested to step back from the edge.
* * *
Part 4