Hellfire 6
Title: Hellfire (6/8?) (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: More wangst. But the plot will convene next chapter, and I will stop psychoanalyzing my characters.
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?
“Emily, what’s this?”
Ororo had gone into the kitchen for a refill of the Kunun. She picked up a card from the pile of mail on the table. “It’s from the Hellfire Club.”
“Really?” Emily came in and took it from her. The paper was soft and it was addressed by hand. The ink had the scratchy surface texture that suggested a fountain pen.
“Why are you getting mail from the Hellfire Club? Emma didn’t…” Ororo looked stern and angry. She seemed taller and Emily was reminded of her friend’s career.
“No. I was just… doing some research, and I got on their mailing list somehow.”
Ororo pursed her lips. “You do not just ‘get on the Hellfire Club’s mailing list.’ I do not believe they even have a mailing list.”
“Did you know they have a website?”
Ororo closed her eyes. “It has been a long time since I have associated with them. But they are dangerous, Emily.”
Emily found a butter knife and slit open the envelope. She took out the card, also handwritten, but in gold ink. “It looks like they’re having a party.”
“Emily. Promise me you won’t go.”
Emily laughed. “I wasn’t planning on it. This whole thing is absurd.” She gave Ororo a sly grin. “Did you know my mother had a seat? I am apparently a scion.”
Ororo covered her face. “This isn’t a laughing matter. Your girlfriend may have converted to the bright side, but she has plenty of old associates who are still agents of chaos.” In her tone it was clear that she would trust Emma’s conversion as far as she could throw it (which, as it was intangible, was not very far at all).
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Emily said, more stiffly than she had intended. She read the card again. The party was on Friday, in DC, which was unnerving.
“Right now, that is less than important.” Ororo clasped her shoulder and Emily looked up, startled. She rarely initiated physical contact. The grip prickled like static electricity. “You need to understand what you’re getting into.”
Emily jerked out of her grip. “I do understand. I’m not an idiot. Emma told me about them before. Either way, this has nothing to do with her or with you. This is my job. I was looking into a file. There might be a serial killer associated with the group.”
Ororo shook her head, suspicious and disapproving. “There isn’t just one. I used to be the White King, I know.”
Emily gave her an odd look. “White… King?”
Ororo gave her another narrow-eyed look that was clearly the ‘I maintain my disapproval of your romantic alliances,’ look. “Some people don’t share well.”
* * *
Emma woke up sweating from a dream that was half fantasy, half nightmare. Fur at her neck, Emily pressed to her hip and nuzzling against her. She knew it was Emily, but she couldn’t see her. She could feel the blindfold, feel the leather straps of the harness digging into her. It should hurt, but it was the cool metal of the inhibitor collar that made her shudder. She was trapped in her own mind, truly blinded, truly trapped.
Emily was kissing her, a little lazily, but blatantly and forcefully, not letting her kiss back, taking what she wanted from her mouth. Then there were other fingers and other hands touching her, some laughter, and her stomach tightened. She knew the laugh, the one that was almost a growl, her fingers clenched together, unable to find something to hold onto. She felt younger; skinnier and angrier, and it was Lourdes kissing her now, not Emily.
And she knew what happened next. She remembered how it felt, how it made her feel fifteen again: weak and powerless; and dirty. She remembered not being able to get up the next day, too sore to move, and knowing that she had been an idiot to believe that there was any power in submission, any power in anything but control.
She heard Sebastian whispering in her ear, and she saw herself, smiling and drinking, and tracing lines over the human furniture, so happy because it wasn’t her this time. She had done it, she had taken it, and there was something beautiful about the fear and shame in the minds of these others. Maybe there was something beautiful in it when it had been her. It made children grow up.
Emma has always known that if you tell yourself a lie often enough, you can make yourself believe it, but it doesn’t make it true. And she can see the lie, see the greed in everyone’s minds, see her own self-hatred turn into selfishness, and the way she could read someone’s mind and still see them as nothing more than a tool, than a weapon to be honed and balanced.
She remembered the girl, her trust, her slack mouth and wide eyes, and how she had so desperately wanted to please her. Why did they trust her? Why did anyone trust her when it was so obvious that she could not bring herself to care for anyone else, not unless she needed them. But what was the difference between needing a weapon and needing…
And it was always going to be Emily, her trust and her pain and the way she deserved something that wasn’t selfish, someone who wouldn’t just break her heart by forgetting that it mattered. And why couldn’t she just hate her? Burn her, shoot her, kill her any way she wanted to, but don’t forgive her.
She had felt trust turn to shock, horror and betrayal before. She had deserved it, and she was watching herself press Emily up against the door, choking her, screaming at her to hate her, to hurt her, to do anything, just not forgive her, never forgive her for this.
She was awake, and she felt the clammy sheets twisted between her fingers, the fear and sickness snarled in her chest. She scrabbled for her phone and pressed the number in before she could think. It rang twice before it was picked up, and Emma curled up helplessly in her disheveled blankets.
“Emma?”
She said nothing, even held her breath. There was a long silence on the other end of the line and then a sigh.
“This was your choice,” came the quiet whisper. “I don’t… I don’t need you waking me up like this. I’m not going to martyr myself for you. I did everything I could to help you when I knew you needed it, but I’m tired. If this is all there is… this is shit, Emma! This is-“
Emma’s thumb hit firmly down on End Call.
Five hundred miles away Emily heard the dial tone and threw her phone at the wall.
“This is shit.”
* * *
Emily yawned all the way through the briefing, and covered her eyes from the painful light as they put together the profile. When it was over she evaded Hotch’s disapproval, and found her way into Garcia’s office.
“Are you all right, honey?” Garcia gestured at her monitors. “Seems like you weren’t that into it today.”
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep. A friend came by and we stayed up late. Then I got a phone call when I had just dropped off, which made me too angry to go back to sleep. I watched infomercials for three hours, and then had a nightmare about my mom attacking me with a blender.”
Garcia blinked. “That sounds… Freudian?”
Emily laughed. “Maybe. But I’ve never seen my mother in the same room as a blender, and I doubt I ever…” She trailed off and looked stricken. She swallowed hard. “I won’t.”
Penelope knew better than to press. “Was there a reason you came in here?”
“Yeah,” relieved for the out, Emily rummaged through her papers. “I got this invitation,” she pulled out the letter from the Hellfire Club, “do you think you can find out who sent it?”
Garcia frowned, and examined the card. She glanced over at Emily suspiciously, and suddenly Emily noticed the screens flickering, images moving so quickly over them that they couldn’t register to her eyes.
“Sebastian Shaw.”
Emily blinked. She remembered a frustrated, self-absorbed angry man. She remembered being asked if she were interested in her rights.
“You do know that the house where it’s being held used to be a bordello, right?”
“A bordello? When?”
“Until 1898.”
Emily couldn’t help letting the laugh bubble up from behind her hand.
“It hasn’t changed ownership since it was built.”
“Are you trying to imply something?”
“This group has a connection to a lot of shady businesses. You aren’t planning on going, are you?”
“There’s no reason for me to go.”
“Do you think Emma’s going to be there?” Garcia looked curious but hesitant. “Do you think she dumped you because she was going to get involved with them again and didn’t want you to get caught in the crossfire?”
Emily stiffened. She hated being protected. Everyone thought she needed looking after, that she couldn’t handle things. She could handle so much more than they thought, and the things that were actually too hard to handle were shoved towards her like they were cake.
“Why would that make a difference?” she forced out. “I don’t want to see her again. I don’t need to deal with that shit.”
Garcia’s eyes widened. “Did something happen?”
“She called.” Emily sighed. “She called and didn’t speak, and then hung up on me while I was yelling at her.”
“Ooookay?”
“It just pissed me off. I don’t need her to fuck me around anymore. She was…” Emily pressed her hand to her forehead and sank into an extra chair. She looked at Garcia who was making her pathetic sympathetic expression. “Do you ever regret things… with your parents, I mean, do you regret things you said to them or hid from them, mistakes you never got the chance to fix?”
The sudden offensive was a bit of a shock, but Penelope only flinched for a moment. “Of course. And every day there’s something new I wish I could have told them, shared with them.”
Emily looked at the wall, but wasn’t seeing it. “I think…. I think I was a terrible daughter. I used my father’s death as an excuse to abandon my mother. And it wasn’t as if she were there for me, but I couldn’t respect that she felt like I did, because she had left him. I had been loyal. And I assumed everything she did was an attempt to control me. Even when she told me that she wanted me to respect myself enough to find someone I wouldn’t be ashamed of introducing her to. I thought that meant she wanted me to see people that she approved of. So I did the opposite. I actively sought out women who were too vulgar or too wild, people she would hate. Not that I ever let her encounter one if I could help it.”
She hung her head, and Garcia sat stiffly, trying to focus on her pain, rather than wonder if she had stopped looking to accomplish something because she didn’t have anyone to tell about it.
“I miss her. It feels so stupid because I had such a long time where I wouldn’t talk to her, would do everything I could to stay away, and now I just wish I hadn’t been an idiot, and I still had a chance to make up for my bratty attitude and try to relate to her as an adult.”
“I don’t think she saw you as not an adult.”
Emily smiled weakly. “Still, it would have been nice to let her know that I understood her when she said that I should respect myself enough to find someone I could introduce her to. She wasn’t accusing me of anything. She actually meant what she said.”
Garcia cocked her head and looked at her curiously. “You would have introduced Emma to her?”
“I didn’t…” Emily laughed aloud and flushed embarrassedly. “I didn’t mean that, really. Emma… She reminds me of my mother. The hanging up on me when I start to swear is not a new thing. She orders me around, makes me go to terrible parties.”
“And gives you lots of hot sex?”
“It’s not that Freudian.” Emily shook her head. “My mother would have either loved her or hated her, but she wouldn’t have disapproved of her.”
She had known it for a long time, but at the funeral it had really come through to her. Emma wouldn’t let her sulk in the corner. She wouldn’t let her think she was more out of place than everyone else. She had teased her and pushed her, and with the hollow absence of her mother so visible, Emily had needed something to fill it.
It would be nice if that were all, if she could recover from two losses with a single bout of grief, but it didn’t work like that, not after months of lazy conversations, after desperate confessions, and fear, and absurd, nonsensical need.
But if this was about protecting her, goddamn the bitch.
* * *
Part 7
Author: Alsike
Fandom: X-Men/Criminal Minds x-over
Pairing: Emma Frost/Emily Prentiss
Rating: R
AN/Disclaimer: Not my girls.
Apologies: More wangst. But the plot will convene next chapter, and I will stop psychoanalyzing my characters.
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?
“Emily, what’s this?”
Ororo had gone into the kitchen for a refill of the Kunun. She picked up a card from the pile of mail on the table. “It’s from the Hellfire Club.”
“Really?” Emily came in and took it from her. The paper was soft and it was addressed by hand. The ink had the scratchy surface texture that suggested a fountain pen.
“Why are you getting mail from the Hellfire Club? Emma didn’t…” Ororo looked stern and angry. She seemed taller and Emily was reminded of her friend’s career.
“No. I was just… doing some research, and I got on their mailing list somehow.”
Ororo pursed her lips. “You do not just ‘get on the Hellfire Club’s mailing list.’ I do not believe they even have a mailing list.”
“Did you know they have a website?”
Ororo closed her eyes. “It has been a long time since I have associated with them. But they are dangerous, Emily.”
Emily found a butter knife and slit open the envelope. She took out the card, also handwritten, but in gold ink. “It looks like they’re having a party.”
“Emily. Promise me you won’t go.”
Emily laughed. “I wasn’t planning on it. This whole thing is absurd.” She gave Ororo a sly grin. “Did you know my mother had a seat? I am apparently a scion.”
Ororo covered her face. “This isn’t a laughing matter. Your girlfriend may have converted to the bright side, but she has plenty of old associates who are still agents of chaos.” In her tone it was clear that she would trust Emma’s conversion as far as she could throw it (which, as it was intangible, was not very far at all).
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Emily said, more stiffly than she had intended. She read the card again. The party was on Friday, in DC, which was unnerving.
“Right now, that is less than important.” Ororo clasped her shoulder and Emily looked up, startled. She rarely initiated physical contact. The grip prickled like static electricity. “You need to understand what you’re getting into.”
Emily jerked out of her grip. “I do understand. I’m not an idiot. Emma told me about them before. Either way, this has nothing to do with her or with you. This is my job. I was looking into a file. There might be a serial killer associated with the group.”
Ororo shook her head, suspicious and disapproving. “There isn’t just one. I used to be the White King, I know.”
Emily gave her an odd look. “White… King?”
Ororo gave her another narrow-eyed look that was clearly the ‘I maintain my disapproval of your romantic alliances,’ look. “Some people don’t share well.”
* * *
Emma woke up sweating from a dream that was half fantasy, half nightmare. Fur at her neck, Emily pressed to her hip and nuzzling against her. She knew it was Emily, but she couldn’t see her. She could feel the blindfold, feel the leather straps of the harness digging into her. It should hurt, but it was the cool metal of the inhibitor collar that made her shudder. She was trapped in her own mind, truly blinded, truly trapped.
Emily was kissing her, a little lazily, but blatantly and forcefully, not letting her kiss back, taking what she wanted from her mouth. Then there were other fingers and other hands touching her, some laughter, and her stomach tightened. She knew the laugh, the one that was almost a growl, her fingers clenched together, unable to find something to hold onto. She felt younger; skinnier and angrier, and it was Lourdes kissing her now, not Emily.
And she knew what happened next. She remembered how it felt, how it made her feel fifteen again: weak and powerless; and dirty. She remembered not being able to get up the next day, too sore to move, and knowing that she had been an idiot to believe that there was any power in submission, any power in anything but control.
She heard Sebastian whispering in her ear, and she saw herself, smiling and drinking, and tracing lines over the human furniture, so happy because it wasn’t her this time. She had done it, she had taken it, and there was something beautiful about the fear and shame in the minds of these others. Maybe there was something beautiful in it when it had been her. It made children grow up.
Emma has always known that if you tell yourself a lie often enough, you can make yourself believe it, but it doesn’t make it true. And she can see the lie, see the greed in everyone’s minds, see her own self-hatred turn into selfishness, and the way she could read someone’s mind and still see them as nothing more than a tool, than a weapon to be honed and balanced.
She remembered the girl, her trust, her slack mouth and wide eyes, and how she had so desperately wanted to please her. Why did they trust her? Why did anyone trust her when it was so obvious that she could not bring herself to care for anyone else, not unless she needed them. But what was the difference between needing a weapon and needing…
And it was always going to be Emily, her trust and her pain and the way she deserved something that wasn’t selfish, someone who wouldn’t just break her heart by forgetting that it mattered. And why couldn’t she just hate her? Burn her, shoot her, kill her any way she wanted to, but don’t forgive her.
She had felt trust turn to shock, horror and betrayal before. She had deserved it, and she was watching herself press Emily up against the door, choking her, screaming at her to hate her, to hurt her, to do anything, just not forgive her, never forgive her for this.
She was awake, and she felt the clammy sheets twisted between her fingers, the fear and sickness snarled in her chest. She scrabbled for her phone and pressed the number in before she could think. It rang twice before it was picked up, and Emma curled up helplessly in her disheveled blankets.
“Emma?”
She said nothing, even held her breath. There was a long silence on the other end of the line and then a sigh.
“This was your choice,” came the quiet whisper. “I don’t… I don’t need you waking me up like this. I’m not going to martyr myself for you. I did everything I could to help you when I knew you needed it, but I’m tired. If this is all there is… this is shit, Emma! This is-“
Emma’s thumb hit firmly down on End Call.
Five hundred miles away Emily heard the dial tone and threw her phone at the wall.
“This is shit.”
* * *
Emily yawned all the way through the briefing, and covered her eyes from the painful light as they put together the profile. When it was over she evaded Hotch’s disapproval, and found her way into Garcia’s office.
“Are you all right, honey?” Garcia gestured at her monitors. “Seems like you weren’t that into it today.”
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep. A friend came by and we stayed up late. Then I got a phone call when I had just dropped off, which made me too angry to go back to sleep. I watched infomercials for three hours, and then had a nightmare about my mom attacking me with a blender.”
Garcia blinked. “That sounds… Freudian?”
Emily laughed. “Maybe. But I’ve never seen my mother in the same room as a blender, and I doubt I ever…” She trailed off and looked stricken. She swallowed hard. “I won’t.”
Penelope knew better than to press. “Was there a reason you came in here?”
“Yeah,” relieved for the out, Emily rummaged through her papers. “I got this invitation,” she pulled out the letter from the Hellfire Club, “do you think you can find out who sent it?”
Garcia frowned, and examined the card. She glanced over at Emily suspiciously, and suddenly Emily noticed the screens flickering, images moving so quickly over them that they couldn’t register to her eyes.
“Sebastian Shaw.”
Emily blinked. She remembered a frustrated, self-absorbed angry man. She remembered being asked if she were interested in her rights.
“You do know that the house where it’s being held used to be a bordello, right?”
“A bordello? When?”
“Until 1898.”
Emily couldn’t help letting the laugh bubble up from behind her hand.
“It hasn’t changed ownership since it was built.”
“Are you trying to imply something?”
“This group has a connection to a lot of shady businesses. You aren’t planning on going, are you?”
“There’s no reason for me to go.”
“Do you think Emma’s going to be there?” Garcia looked curious but hesitant. “Do you think she dumped you because she was going to get involved with them again and didn’t want you to get caught in the crossfire?”
Emily stiffened. She hated being protected. Everyone thought she needed looking after, that she couldn’t handle things. She could handle so much more than they thought, and the things that were actually too hard to handle were shoved towards her like they were cake.
“Why would that make a difference?” she forced out. “I don’t want to see her again. I don’t need to deal with that shit.”
Garcia’s eyes widened. “Did something happen?”
“She called.” Emily sighed. “She called and didn’t speak, and then hung up on me while I was yelling at her.”
“Ooookay?”
“It just pissed me off. I don’t need her to fuck me around anymore. She was…” Emily pressed her hand to her forehead and sank into an extra chair. She looked at Garcia who was making her pathetic sympathetic expression. “Do you ever regret things… with your parents, I mean, do you regret things you said to them or hid from them, mistakes you never got the chance to fix?”
The sudden offensive was a bit of a shock, but Penelope only flinched for a moment. “Of course. And every day there’s something new I wish I could have told them, shared with them.”
Emily looked at the wall, but wasn’t seeing it. “I think…. I think I was a terrible daughter. I used my father’s death as an excuse to abandon my mother. And it wasn’t as if she were there for me, but I couldn’t respect that she felt like I did, because she had left him. I had been loyal. And I assumed everything she did was an attempt to control me. Even when she told me that she wanted me to respect myself enough to find someone I wouldn’t be ashamed of introducing her to. I thought that meant she wanted me to see people that she approved of. So I did the opposite. I actively sought out women who were too vulgar or too wild, people she would hate. Not that I ever let her encounter one if I could help it.”
She hung her head, and Garcia sat stiffly, trying to focus on her pain, rather than wonder if she had stopped looking to accomplish something because she didn’t have anyone to tell about it.
“I miss her. It feels so stupid because I had such a long time where I wouldn’t talk to her, would do everything I could to stay away, and now I just wish I hadn’t been an idiot, and I still had a chance to make up for my bratty attitude and try to relate to her as an adult.”
“I don’t think she saw you as not an adult.”
Emily smiled weakly. “Still, it would have been nice to let her know that I understood her when she said that I should respect myself enough to find someone I could introduce her to. She wasn’t accusing me of anything. She actually meant what she said.”
Garcia cocked her head and looked at her curiously. “You would have introduced Emma to her?”
“I didn’t…” Emily laughed aloud and flushed embarrassedly. “I didn’t mean that, really. Emma… She reminds me of my mother. The hanging up on me when I start to swear is not a new thing. She orders me around, makes me go to terrible parties.”
“And gives you lots of hot sex?”
“It’s not that Freudian.” Emily shook her head. “My mother would have either loved her or hated her, but she wouldn’t have disapproved of her.”
She had known it for a long time, but at the funeral it had really come through to her. Emma wouldn’t let her sulk in the corner. She wouldn’t let her think she was more out of place than everyone else. She had teased her and pushed her, and with the hollow absence of her mother so visible, Emily had needed something to fill it.
It would be nice if that were all, if she could recover from two losses with a single bout of grief, but it didn’t work like that, not after months of lazy conversations, after desperate confessions, and fear, and absurd, nonsensical need.
But if this was about protecting her, goddamn the bitch.
* * *
Part 7