Emma is surprised the first time she asks in passing, how many men Scott has killed, and he replies immediately, unflinchingly, "I don't know."
She watches his solemn, stoic face with its chiseled and stony features for clues, remorse? Regret? Remembrance?
He is not bothered one bit.
She digs around his mind. The answer in there is just the same as his simple verbal statement.
He doesn't know.
He might not even care enough to know.
This changes the way she sees him, and she purses her lips at him as he goes back to the crossword puzzle he was idly filling out with his morning cereal.
The mutant leader of the free world, a man who could destroy more than the eye could see in a blink, scratched in some letters on the newspaper, such a trivial quiz, for a man who acted so ordinary at that moment.
She's heard worse answers before, from other men but coming from him, she's shocked. She's alarmed, and slightly intrigued.
She had not meant to be so interested and invested, but she found this seemingly predictable man to be more and more mysterious than she thought.
That was partially why she kept coming back, deeper and deeper each time.
It's not that Emma's particularly surprised that he has killed before, or even that he's vague about it. Of course, he has to have killed, he has seen lots of violence and battle.
The seemingly stable man elaborated when she did not respond. "There were so many accidents and fights, I couldn't possibly know who or how many people I might have hit along the way, especially with the ruckus."
Emma knows, just from reading his mind and knowing his past, that he had fought against evil and crime or whatever the X-Men had done back in his teen hey-days, without a single body count. Come his college years though, and he felt the guilty and anguished pangs of seeing teammates die as well as killing others himself.
He kept a count then, and vowed to do what he could to protect others, and never take a life.
It isn't until a lot of messed up things happen like possessions and resurrections, and Scott is now older and more jaded and has been in many parallel universes and dimensions, and has stopped keeping count of who, what or how many he kills in his path.
It would be impossible to count.
The old Scott would have been racked with grief and felt himself a monster in some angst-riddled reaction.
Emma's not sure if he accepted that role as the mythological one-eyed beast a long time ago, or if he simply didn't even think about that anymore.
Standing behind him as he sits at the table, she puts a fond hand at the nape of his neck, stroking his rich brown hair. He nods appreciatively, giving her an easy grin.
This is her Scott, for the time being.
Over the course of the day, Emma's thoughts are rather morbid.
She thinks about death, as a blanket of blackness, emptiness, that offers nothing. No pain, no sorrow, no joy, and no nothing. Her own mother must have sought that sort of state from the prescription drugs she kept well-stocked in her bathroom cabinet, to which Emma's brother had gotten into at an early age, rummaging through Hazel's goods.
Emma has killed probably more than Scott has, and she would have been proud of it at one point in her career, but now she is less hazy and evil, she is somewhat more sober and she is somewhat less evil. She blames Scott for taking her evil and addictions.
Her evil was her blanket, it was what made Emma who she is, it took away the lacking life she had up until she renounced her family and her goodness and joined Hellfire and became an evil seductress who was never out of money, jewels, lingerie, bondage weapons, and drugs.
She knows how Scott feels about her bondage days, and appreciates him for it, even though she chides him for being prudish.
They both know he's not that prudish at all.
Emma has known men like Sebastian Shaw, whose brute strength and passive aggressive temper ended the lives of many men and women alike, indifferently, and with a bloody passion.
These people had made murder a social sport for her. She was cruel, and she knew it.
She has known powerful and morally bankrupt murderers who were her comrades. That doesn't faze her.
What does faze her is that Scott has come so far to be able to sit over cereal and talk about his personal death toll so casually. His thoughts don't dwell a second.
This man, so young for his stature, had faced so much in the span he had been alive, and now he was not affected by the tiniest bit, and nearly nothing fazed him, because he was that broad and jaded in perspective. He was a living demi-god, what the ancient Greeks would have called mutants before they knew better.
She wonders if maybe her cruelty had pushed him too far, had infected him as well. He had been so good, so good that he had been the only one to see through her spiteful demeanor when she first arrived. So good that he had trusted her when she seduced him.
The scale of his conscience was still the biggest she had known. But why then, was she now slightly afraid of him?
She eyed him carefully, for the first time warily, as if expecting Mystique or the like to replace him.
Had she changed him in ways opposite from how he changed her for the better?
There had been times during her days of villainy when they had faced off against each other, and either could have killed the other on numerous occasions easily. She wonders what her life would have been like had she killed him then and never seduced him. She shivers to think about it.
She was bad back then. Very bad, and she tried to kill him and all the X-Men or harm them some way as if it were a hobby.
But it was all for business or power or something sinister, which made it all the more evil.
But after Genosha, as soon as she promised to have turned over a new leaf, when all the other X-men were obviously and rightfully distrusting, he had welcomed her in that oblivious and friendly way he had.
He blamed it on the aftermath of his Apocalypse possession and its dark thoughts, but she knew it was out of his goodness, and charisma that naturally drew her.
She had without a doubt in her mind, that Scott would never even want to harm her, and it was a given he could never kill her, even if she was a flaming Phoenix entity.
She was his new weak spot. But as she gazed at the back of his unsuspecting head that morning, she had shivered, thinking of his strong and precise hands around her neck, crushing her.
Something in her thoughts shifted, she couldn't be so sure...
He had none of that masochist streak and violence Shaw had, he did not show his power off to the world like Tony Stark, he did not treat others as inferiors like Namor.
He was the most different man she had met. Had she met him earlier in life, then maybe there would have been a chance for true redemption for her, maybe she would not have become as terrible and cruel, maybe she would have been more like the girl she had been growing up, the sort of girl who asked for men like him, heroes. He was the epitome of power, a force of nature, but with that ruby mask on, bridling and containing his power, and a goofy grin, he was a gentle and kind man who still saw himself as Slim, the nerd with the eye problem.
That night as she lays in his arms, tangled in the twisted sheets, collapsed against his chest as he securely embraces her, she feels the safest and yet the most afraid for her life that she has ever felt in all her experience as her.
She wonders if this is what love is supposed to feel like, and if it is. She's terrified of it, terrified of him. She has never been this terrified in her life.