Title: From the Ashes
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Nuttin's mine. Emma Frost, the Hellions, and Generation X all belong to Marvel. No copyright infringement intended. Don't sue, please.
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Emma Grace Frost was not a woman to be trifled with.
She stood impatiently in her bedroom, pacing back and forth with a mug of steaming coffee in her hand. Occasionally she would walk to the window, look down on her students and always half-expecting them to be gone, shake her head and chastise herself for doing so, then repeat the cycle all over again.
Being a telepath of formidable talent, however, she found it ironic, even to the point of being somewhat amused, that her emotions were not going to stop until they succeeded in pulling her down into the depths of her self-pity.
She turned from the window again, made a note not to keep checking on them like she was a doting nanny, and looked around her room. Perfect white walls, white curtains, white bedspread, white carpet... It irritated her. She had always had a fondness for the color white, for the purity and simpleness it represented, two things her past had taught her she could never truly be.
She choked down the urge to turn and look out the window again.
Emma took a sip from the coffee in her hands, draining the mug dry and still clutching onto it, thinking that if she did she could hold onto the comfort it brought her when nothing else could. Part of her subconsciously wondered if that was why she still had a shoebox tucked away in the top shelf of her closet, holding some treasured possessions of her lost Hellions.
After their deaths, while still grieving and in a mind-numbing state of disarray, she had been clearing out their belongings and sending them home to family members when it occurred to her that no matter how hard she tried, she would never truly forget them. So she had taken one thing from each of their rooms - a small trinket here, a small collection of baseball cards there - and stashed them away in a box, placed them in her closet, and vowed never to touch them again. That would be her ending to the story, a final way to put her emotional tumult to an end.
It hadn't worked.
Emma looked over her shoulder, saw the new students outside playing basketball as they had been doing for the past twenty minutes.
She sighed quietly, looking down into her empty mug. When had life gotten so complicated? Strangely, she thought, she had not been thinking that when her life had been nothing more than moving from one private Hell into another. She had been far too concerned with her own gain to worry about the greater scheme of things.
Then she had founded the Hellions, believing her life to be getting itself back on course. Granted, they were not the most talented of mutants, or the brightest, or prettiest, but they were her students, and she only regretted that she had never told them in words how very much she cared for them. She was fairly certain, though, that if such a thing as an afterlife did exist, they saw her weep for them every night for a year straight after their deaths.
And now she found herself with a completely new team of new, trusting students. A chance to start over. To redeem herself. To show how very perfect she was.
Emma cringed, clutching the mug a bit tighter. Her concept of herself as being the embodiment of perfection had given birth to an arrogant streak in her, one that had been promptly crushed after it had caused her to be lapse with her Hellions. They had died fighting for her. For what she and they believed in. They had trusted her to guide them, protect them, take them home at the end of the battle and lecture them about what they did wrong, compliment them on what they did right.
But perfect Emma Frost had never had the opportunity to do so.
Perfect white coffee mug.
In a sudden blaze of intense fury, she hurled the cup across the room, watching the porcelain connect with the wall and shatter into large chunks on the floor. Tears welled in her eyes, and she angrily brushed them away, denying herself the right to cry. She wouldn't. Not for the Hellions, not for this new team, no one. Her crying days were over. She couldn't cry when she had a team to watch over, to protect, to guide.
She turned back to the window, watched the young mutant known as Everett make a slam dunk with the basketball. She smiled; this time around, things would be different. She would learn from her mistakes, pull a new team from her past troubles and turn them into confident, strong individuals.
Emma Frost closed the curtains to the window and set about picking up the broken pieces of ceramic on the ground.