With a single mother and a weak sister, Emma Frost did her best to help anyway she could in her family and around town by cheering them up with anything. A joke, a smile, a snowball fight for the kids, she would do anything. Being "the town clown" as it was put, wasn't always the best for her though, like her sister, Emma had weakness, but she didn't show it, she toughed it out for herself and to hold up the roof over her family's head.
One winter, when the spring crept upon the leaves with dew and sunlight, Emma's younger sister fell ill, the doctor told them to say their last good byes to her on a Saturday evening, but Emma asked the doctor anyways, through shaking lips. "How long does she have to live?" Emma partly didn't want to hear the answer, but the doctor changed her dark thoughts back to light. "If only we had some of those herbs, you know, the ones in the bottom of the lake, we could help bring down her fever," the doctor sighed solemnly, "Without them she has no hope of recovery, but going for them is plain suicide." The doctor put a comforting hand on Emma's trembling shoulder, but in her deep brown eyes, there sparked no despair, only hope.
"Emma, stop!" her mother cried, tears streaking her tired and aged face as she reached out, trying to stop her reckless daughter from leaving her childless. The doctor froze, but soon ran to his pupil for assistance. "WHAT," the doctor's student exclaimed after he'd heard the news, shock and anger written over his features as he bounded off for the woods after Emma, shouting her name though it fell on deaf ears. Shock that such a care-free girl would go off to death definitely awaiting her, and anger that she would act so bashfully as to throw away her own future.
Emma searched for the herb by brushing away snow from the ice, until she saw it, down beneath the crystal clear ice swaying gently in the slow current of the freezing water. The doctor's student finally found Emma, in the middle of the lake, he sighed relief that the ice had not begun to break.
But just as he thought this, a crackling sound erupted from the spot Emma sat on of the ice, and he looked up with eyes wider than hers. In an instant, as though she hadn't been there at all, Emma disappeared under the icy waters with several pieces of ice.
Though the tiny fragments of jagged ice in the water cut into her arms and now bloodshot eyes as she swam for what felt like an eternity, Emma willed herself forward. The herb that would heal her sister, the herb simply had to heal her sister for her family not to fall apart completely was only a couple inches from her finger tips when the frozen world around her began melting into darkness. Flashes of black smothered Emma's sight, and her dark brown hair flowing loosely around her was snapped back along with her head as a sudden surge of current threw Emma hard against a spike of ice. A snap was heard by Emma's numb ears, and another color mixed with the darkest of blacks: Red.
The doctor's pupil starred horrified, no, past the highest level of disgust and shock as the water revealed by the hole made from Emma's body became tinted with red, and he ran back to the town, shouting of the news. Eventually, when he finally arrived at Emma's home, where her sister had made a quick, soon to be miraculous recovery from her sickness, he said in a strained and hoarse voice from the shouting, "Emma…is dead." Emma's mother crumbled on to the floor and Emma's little sister wailed louder than the doctor's pupil did coming into town. Mumbling through sobs something along the lines of, "Emma…you liar, Emma… you promised that when I got better…that we would go ice skating on that lake…you swore."
But in the night, when the full moon hung high in the center of the sky, a spell was cast, and Emma's bones were repaired, her fragile body made strong…at the cost of her past memories, all she knew, was that her name was Emma Frost, spirit of winter, and Guardian of that which we all desire, pure and innocent happiness. And that was all she knew, from then, until this day and forever from there.
Her family lived on, but died with a piece of them missing, a piece Emma Frost didn't even remember being a part of. Gift or curse, or the better question for the matter of eternity, life of joy for all forever, or one death of a girl most don't even bother to believe in.