EMMATRATION TO EXPIATION
By Quillon42
SOMETIME IN 1991 IN THE LITERAL UNDEGROUND OF NEW YORK CITY
Fetid odors assaulted Emma's delicate nostrils as her alluring yet artificial form fell abruptly into the dark, dank, and foreboding sewer. She swore soundly as she struggled in vain to maintain the cleanness of her cape, corset, and all her other immaculate ivory effects.
At first the winsome yet woe-inspiring woman could not see, before her face, even one of the gloves she wore—an article ordinarily as deceptively and pure as her soul was the contrary. Then shocked on eerie white glows here and there, barely illuminating the place.
"Who's there?!" cried the quease-inducing human queef known around this time as the White Queen. "Who's…who dares to drag me down into this...shit-saturated hollow?!"
Then the gravelly grind of a haggard coot's throat, and Emma abruptly ceased her mewling.
"The shines and sparks all around you…that's the doing of Electric Eve," said a cold, cruel voice from somewhere seemingly close by. "She's been around for only so long, and the girl's still getting used to her newfound abilities.
"You, on the other hand…you've been pretty seasoned in your…talents…your ability and penchant for…manipulation of minds, and otherwise."
Emma spun around and around shakily, all in a vain effort to try and find the source of the voice. All around her, small lightnings kept creeping about, allowing her to see only the outlines of the subterranean chamber surrounding, but nothing in the immediate foreground.
"When my people find me…!"
Then her voice was cut short by the whishing forth of…something sudden that she could not see.
"But they're not…going to.
"Because you're…already…in our…"
[WHISSSSSKKKKK]
"…HANDS."
The Queen's feet parted from the foot-deep sewer-watered floor as the voice, belonging to a miserable, monstrous, maroon-mantled Morlock known only as Masque held the woman well off the ground and only by her cold, cream countenance with his grimy, gnarled paws.
"You have mostly skated through your life, Emma Frost," the maggoty Morlock went on, as the lady between his grubby mitts began to change, facially and physically in general, "skated in relation to the exponentially greater loads of suffering and strife that your fellow mutants have endured.
"Now the time is come for you to receive the reckoning due you for all of your misdeeds. This evening, you will either emerge from these grounds a new woman entirely…or you will not emerge from them at all."
The horrific transmogrification of Frost was nearly complete. The way Emma's face and body felt, to her, was something unspeakable, it flitted through her mind as Masque threw her roughly to the watery floor once more.
But it also felt very familiar, long since departed from her.
"The transformation, tonight…will require your abdication, Your Majesty," added the menacing misshapen man before Emma. "You will have to debase yourself, to become more like the mutants amongst you."
He turned to leave at last. "When it comes to comeuppance, Lady Frost, to paraphrase what said around here so many years back, when your Hellfire Haunt was at the height of its reign…as was uttered by an annoyingly-overexposed, adamantium-laced bastard, when he too fell into these very sewers…
"Now it is, most definitively…your turn."
Then exited the putrefaction of a person who had changed the White Queen into what she was now. With his departure, the electric effects all around the chamber intensified, such that Frost could make out a bit more of her surroundings.
Against one of the walls, she could see now, was the figure…of some sort of humanoid, suspended off the floor as she was seconds ago, but…hanging, as if by hooks. Emma stepped closer to it, the little lightnings all around brightening especially near there, as if the woman's captors wanted her to go and make out the image in full.
It was only when Miss Frost came within a couple feet of the body that she realized who or what it was.
Secured to the wall by iron hoops, through which his arms ran, was a man made entirely of what appeared to be mirrors. Emma could tell he was still alive, as she could detect faint breathing…but he was out cold. She placed her fingers to her temples, in an attempt to connect with the other…
"I'm afraid you're not going to get any reception down here, in order to do that…
"…darling."
Frost looked all around for Masque once more, as his voice reverberated in her ears just now. It was as if his presence were hovering over the entire Morlock grid, and she were just a mouse in a maze (in addition to the rat she always was otherwise).
The lightnings around Emma intensified even more, some of them sparking at her feet (which she noticed were no longer in her patented pearl-hued boots) to the point that she jumped back a bit. She looked up once more at the man, who unbeknownst to her was the Marauder Prism, in a rare moment he the one actually terrorized and victimized by his usual targets in the Morlocks (although here they were much more merciful, in keeping him alive…barely).
When she did, a step back or two, Emma beheld in the Marauder's glass chest cavity the horror that Masque had made her. She covered her face instinctively, as if it could make it all go away…but then seconds later she undid her forearms from her features, and it was all still there.
In an unthinkable maneuver, Masque with his black magic mutant hands had made Emma Frost revert, facially and bodily…
…to the skinny brunette teen that she was in her secondary school years.
But with acne that she never had before.
And an A-sized chest. (even Teen Emma was at least a "B" student, in more ways than one, around the time things bloomed for her in terms of powers and, erm…other aspects).
Oh, and no curves otherwise.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!"
A itch of a snicker from the shadows.
"What are you going on about, dear?" continued the taunting voice. "You're undergoing a penetration…an Emmatration, as it were—down to what you really are, at your core: you're a BABE once more, I tell you, a B.A.B.E.:
"Boring-Ass Brunette Emma!"
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" screamed Frost as she ran trembling fingers through her hair. "You can't do this! Change me back this instant!"
But there was no more response from the voice at the moment.
Only the shrillest of sounds as what seemed distantly like violins were scratching a solar-system-subjugating melody that made Emma's gray matter wish to migrate from her mindspace. The violins shrieked their music harshly as they chased a couple of awful lines, repeated again and again:
"BABE-Y, BABE-Y, BABE-Y, OHHHHH, [Violins: SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRIEK]
"BABE-Y, BABE-Y, BABE-Y, OHHHHHHHHHH! [Violins: SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRIEK]
"BABE-Y, BABE-Y, BABE-Y OHHHHH, [Violins: SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRIEK, SHRIEK]
"I THOUGHT YOU'D ALWAYS KEEP YOUR MIND!"
The sickeningly-sobbing string instruments, of which Emma had not heard anything so horrible since the bleeding, wailing violins of the graduation song "Through the Years"—or perhaps from the most memorable scene from a certain, Psychotic film featuring another blonde iconically penetrated through—were enough to make her wish to telepathically shut down her own brain. She pressed her hands as hard as she could to her now-fawn locks and yelled once more as loud as she could.
"AAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!"
By the time her last scream died out, the miserable music was gone. Emma looked back at her own, retrogressed image in Prism's chest for comfort as the voice of Masque cleared its throat.
"So I take it you're not a fan of my vocal talents?
"In case you were wondering, that was a song which my fellow Morlock Piper picked up from the future—his secondary mutation being an ability to perceive pop songs from decades to come—and goodness, from what he's telling me, the future of chart hits is pretty effing bleak.
"But I'll tell you what…I can play favorites, too. And this one will be just up your backalley…"
A rush of air whooshed up the rear passage of Emma Frost and the lady turned around abruptly.
"Wish I could have done that before you changed her, Masquey," mused a voice from below.
"Take it easy, Blowhard…" said Masque in reply to another of his brethren.
"Yeah, you can call me that, with emphasis on the second syllable for right now. God, to be able to whistle up the White Queen's…"
"I don't have to stand for this!" yelped the vanilla victim, almost uncontrollably at the sensation of the intrusion which was basically an aerial version of the anal alimentary procedure that sounded similar to her own name and which others mockingly called her as a child. "WHEN I GET OUT OF HERE, I'LL SEND ALL MY STUDENTS DOWN TO ERADICATE…"
"Now, Emma."
She then stopped as the dewomanized girl, reduced to waifishness off of which a sullied private school uniform hung loosely, whirled around to face the most arch, awful voice she'd ever exposed ears to, at least in her youth.
"That is now way for a proper, young, female Frost to comport herself."
When she turned, standing before her, impossibly, was none other than that pecker of a patriarch, that fucker of a father, the ever-wicked Winston Frost. He was bedecked as always in one of his tidy three-pieces, as if looking to do business in these underground boonies somehow.
"But, Daddy…" she said, in protest and against so many parts of her mutant mind which cried out against this compulsory playacting—but she could not help herself, here in this hell just for her—"but Daddy, look at me!"
"Mmyes," Winston commented, as he strode slowly, pacing pompously around his middle-interval, mostly-ignored daughter, "you have really fallen out of Nature's favor now, haven't you? And I thought that you would at some point blossom into something much more…"
A pause punctuated by the longest, most supercilious of sighs.
"Buuuuut, as it appears…your image is now bound to tarnish ours."
Emma's now-intensely-less-imposing form cowered in the presence of her papa.
He flicked a shoulder of the now-frail girl as he took another pass around her. "Your…figure…is going to cost me some of my own figures.
"I'm not quite sure how, but I just know that this…creature you've become is going to cost me profits, girl. I mean, first nothing but Bs on your gradesheets at Snow Valley, and now this."
Emma hurried after Daddy as he continued on, the latter starting to retreat through the far end of the chamber. "I thought that disowning you would be a drastic recourse at first, but now it's looking pret-ty ap-peal-ling…"
"NO! Daddy, I can change! Really!"
Winston stopped and turned on a pinched penny, cast his steely blue gaze directly into his daughter's. "Emma, my dear," he began, extending a hand in front of him just for the sake of musing…
…which Little Miss Frost mistook to be a hand offered in consolation…
…resulting in Winston's curling the limb back in a threatened strike. "You're already past your critical period. With emphasis on the period. You're not going to grow anymore from here.
"You're stuck with that body. And that face. And I must say, my precious little lady…
"It's just another dose of disappointment from you.
"But that's okay…"
"No…DADDY!" Emma almost screamed, as Winston started beyond the border of the chamber.
"Don't GO!"
"…I've established an immunity to your disease of disappointment over the years," finished Father Frost, as he started to discorporate into the blackness of an adjacent tunnel opening. "It doesn't bother me anymore, because it's all I, or any of us in our clan, have grown to expect from you."
"DADDY!"
[SHFTASSSHHH]
The sparking lightnings almost flooded Emma in the face as she leapt back, the image of Winston weakening more and more beyond the dancing, deadly illuminations.
Amidst all the frightening flashes, which would leave sinister streaking impressions in the mind for hours to come, the sequestered Queen could swear she heard some of the faintest yet prettiest tones emanating from the accosting brightness as well.
[DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK, DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK, DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK, DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK, DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK, DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK, DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK, DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK, DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK, DAN-KA-DAN-KA-DANK…]
It seemed as if the music was coming from some sort of xylophonic synthesizer. It came off a bit elementary to Emma, even though she had not talent whatsoever in this realm…but nevertheless the sounds were mellow and soothing, and Emma felt that she could even close her eyes as the notes continued to count off across her ears.
You have no heart, but the Queen will be overthrown…
And you're not sleeping now, the dark is too hard to beat…
And you're not snatching now, the spite you need to escape it…
The lyrics were sung as if by a siren, the melody alluring even to someone like Emma, though the words kind of threw her off.
And then…
[SHFTASSSHHH]
"AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!"
"I SHOW THE LIGHTS THAT SHOCK YOU, SAP YOU, OHHHHH, AND THEY'LL SHINE WHEN YOU'RE ALOOOOONE…"
The electrifying impact of the lightnings that finally penetrated Frost had done their own devastating damage…
…but it was the tonal terror of the voice that now invaded her that inflicted the most injury.
As the woman struggled to hold herself up, in the dark onrushing water, from the surrounding mouth of Masque once more: "Sorry, Emms…it might have been nice to hear Piper playing and Beautiful Dreamer taking the first few lines of that tune…but I just had to cover the chorus.
"For the record, that one was 'Lights' by Ellie Goulding…which is to be released, actually again and again and again in the future…first on an album by the same name, Lights, in early 2010…to be followed up by a deluxe edition, Bright Lights, in late 2010…to be followed up by another followup, Pretty Bright Lights, in 2015…to be succeeded by Very Pretty Bright Lights in 2016…and then at last to be topped by Really Very Pretty Bright Lights in 2017. And, can you believe it!...all the poor gits and blokes will go and buy every single edition.
"Don't worry, though…I'll get to those producers, when the time comes. They're probably the only people who could begin to be anywhere as crooked as you. Although I do have someone who might be in the same zip code of corruption…"
The quashed Queen was fully at her feet now, the lightnings dimming slightly once again. She felt for her face to find if there were any lasting effects from the shocks…
…and one shock a bit more pleasant was that not only did she sense no scarring…the acne seemed to be gone from her countenance as well. Her fingers ran only across smooth flesh…
"Well, well, well…if it isn't little Miss Emma FALSE."
…and then this very brief reverie of relief was snuffed by the seemingly impossible appearance of another Frost, as Emm turned once more to see her snide older sibling alighting on the scene.
"Adrienne…" she started.
The other was bedecked in the closest crop top and the tightest cream trousers, with a scarflet of maize matching that which hardly covered her tanned torso. Adrienne's eyes appeared even icier blue, her hair more blindingly blonde that that of the Machine's much more frontlined Frost.
The older sister approached the younger, the latter still less sensuous than she once was in fabric and in figure. "Looks as if you've been taken down a peg or two, in terms of your…top-heaviness…" When Adrienne reached for Emma's chest to accompany her caustic clauses, Em blocked it instinctively with a backhand.
"Don't you lay a single one of your dykey digits on me, sister," the once-Queen's younger self spat. But before Emma could say or do anything more, Adrienne somewhat…spirited around her sister's rear, and sprightly slapped the woman on her now-deflated derriere.
As she was doing so: "And your behind is no longer looking to burgeon…ohh…"
And Adrienne's acerbic address all of a sudden was cut short as through the mind of even an apparition of the lady ran the future of her younger sibling. The older Frost girl had the power of psychometry, in which she could sense by touch the past of an object, as well as its possible future.
She kept her hand this one of Emma's former principal assets as her eyes closed snugly, the affected other sister unable to turn around.
"I can see…so much failure in your future…
"You're really going to let those kids at the Academy down, Emma," she went on. "You come off as such an intimidating image, at first…but those kids will all see through you in time. Whether it's the Hellions, or…what will come to be known as Generation X…you could go through an entire alphabet of teams, and you'll continue to fail to fool anyone."
Adrienne's hands then moved around to the front of Emma's uniform-covered stomach, with Emma herself still unable to stop it. "I know this skinniness!" she said, the words parting from the lips at her younger sister's right ear. "I know…you never had anything going on naturally…" the hands rising slowly, "up…"
"You will unHAND me!" shouted Emma, her left elbow coming up and striking her accoster in the side of the head, causing the other to tumble down a second. Emma then turned sharply to strike out with a boot, but Adrienne caught it, pushing it back into her sister and sending her down.
"You think my…manipulations…are bad now, Emma False," said Adrienne as she reached her feet once more, "What I'll do to your students, in the years to come…when you come begging to me for help…begging…for me to bail you out…with money and power from a father who always preferred me over you…"
"I've never looked to you for anything, and I never will," said the other, crossing her arms over her chest (which she had to admit was much easier now than it had been in the past several years). This thought still in the back of her mind: "And yes, I used some of my…earnings, to obtain…augmentations…but you're just as fake.
"What with your own eyes and hair…really green and brown, respectively. At least my irises are genuine…while you can't look anyone in the eye, Adrienne, without the other person viewing you through a literal lens or two of falsity!
"If I…ever come, to any point at which I require assistance," said Emma, approaching vindictively the vision of her sister, who was now a bit more hobbled from her younger sib's momentum, "I'll get it from someone who gives a shit about me in return…someone worth my time and whatever little love and care I have left to give.
And then, up in her older sister's face, "And as for you, you can shove, the fuck…
…"OFF!"
With this Emma pushed Adrienne as hard as she could, pressing with cold palms against the enormous yet ersatz paired occupants in her sister's crop top so that the other Frost fell hard once more against the sewer floor.
But this time, Father Frost's fiduciary favorite failed to rise again, as her form instead receded into the ground, an arm reaching out for her sister to grasp and save.
The thought of retrieve and rescue crossed the younger Frost's mind for a second…and were she as young and naïve within as she appeared now to be without, she might have screamed her sister's name with more pathos than any Italian Stallion could ever invoke the same appellation. (Lord knew Emma was right now as spent as said Stallion would be at the end of any of his films).
Emma chose instead to let Adrienne go, and resolved to stay away from her acidic sibling into the future as well. Whatever school she ran in the future, if she ran it into the ground financially, then so be it. The beleaguered recently-erstwhile Queen would sooner follow her former students to the place where some of them likely occupied now, a place embodied by the first syllable of the team she once ran.
Speaking of Hell, in any case, a few minutes gone again and another "musical" number from the Stygian depths assaulted Miss Frost's ears, just as she found that a certain, upper-torsoed area of her delicate form was upgrading once more, from double-As steadily to a pair of her favorite letter, E…
[DUN-SA, WHOOO! DUN-SA, WHOOO! DUN-SA, WHOOO! DUN-SA, WHOOO!]
It sounded like something that was composed on a kindergartner's plastic piano. Or something sounding from one of those damn video games her students would waste their lives on in their spare time at the Academy. Frost figured her former student Beef could bang out something more inspired.
[DUN-SA, WHOOO! DUN-SA, WHOOO! DUN-SA, WHOOO! DUN-SA, DUMMA DUMMA DUMMA DUMMA…]
"The fuck is this…Playstation 1…beat-'em-up background music?!" she cried in exasperation as she looked all around.
"Ahh, my dear…this is what passes for the most successful offerings of music from the far future," replied the vicious voice of Masque once more. "Its title is fitting for the blurring of lines your linen figure is treading now, between lewd, livid, and lost…
"If you must know the origins of the song that will become your dirge in these dank depths…The guy from Growing Pains…unfortunately, in time he mated.
"And even more unfortunately…this is what came of it all."
"But I thought…" she said, a second after slamming the heels of her hands against her ears, "I thought he went all evangelical and stuff…"
"No, not Kirk Camer…look, it's not fucking important which one it was, okay?!
"All that matters is that you drown in its prurient perversion…drown face down in your sorrow, facing down and falling, capsizing out of compunction regarding the one of your kin who was kicked to the curb, and abandoned…
"Even by you…"
And then the voice dissolved once more as one more ghostly gibbet of Frost's fractured family forced his way into the fore…or at least, at first, his inflection, woozy and wavering.
"Em…
"Em…
"…
"…
"…Em…"
Anyone inducted into the Mansion of all Mutantdom was very familiar with that monogram midway through the alphabet. Whether it was Marvel Girl or Mirage or Magik or Magma or Magneto or just…friggin' "M" (as in, yes, Monet St. Croix, whom Miss Frost would come to know all too well from her charge of children to come in the near future), there was always someone a person would meet, whose name and/or codename commenced with that magnificent mother of the thirteenth letter, someone who may or may not have been someone very integral or special.
Well, the most integral "M" for Emma was that of the first self-conceived-saintly syllable of her own first name.
The first half of her of own…Christian name.
"Em…" the voice continued, as the young man's frail features flooded into the young woman's field of vision.
"Oh, no…" the once-White One whispered to herself as she witnessed the willowing-in of the countenance of her only brother.
Christian Frost.
"Em…" the vision said, his body enveloped in a snug straitjacket, a pain-wrack expression etched on his face. "Why…
"Why did you leave me?"
Emma's eyelids squeezed as shut as they possibly could—but she still felt him there, living, breathing against her crème cheeks.
Technically speaking, it was Christian who departed from the Frosty front before she did…but it was seconds before her own exit, after he was whisked away by whitecoats, the shock of her father's betrayal a cue for her own exodus from the ease of her upbringing.
[DUN-SA, WHOOO! DUN-SA, WHOOO! DUN-SA, WHOOO! DUN-SA, DUMMA DUMMA DUMMA DUMMA…]
All throughout this, that abominable anthem kept on playing. There was still a field in the front of Frost's brain, despite this immediate emotional encounter with her brother, that was being turned on by the tepid tune still sounding. There was just something about a song that was lazily slapped together in under an hour and which was basiaclly the semblance, quality, and artistic weight of thirty-two-bit themes of Sony's mid-nineties console debut.
(As such, Guys, if you ever want to get your lady "in the mood" in this culturally cornucopic year of 2013, all you have to do is stay in, send your younger brother to his room, lock him in there, and tell him he can't come out until he's played three hours of either Gekido or Fighting Force at maximum volume. By the next morning you and your girl will each be having septuplets with all the fornication you've foisted upon one another.)
Fighting the guilt within her that made her want to face her brother, Miss Frost started swaying to the terrible Thicke hit, her voluptuous hips torqueing, her once-again shapely ass rocking, she getting into the music to such an extent, in fact, that she didn't even notice the white sleeves that were coming over her shoulders—enveloping over her upper torso and holding her cozily close in a snug, tight embrace.
"Em…
"Em…talk to me…"
"… … …Christian," she said, suddenly settled once more, by the voice of the latest visitor and his hovering hug—the one, and the only family member that she ever began to care about.
Her entire mind ignoring the music at last, Emma allowed herself to sink into the straitjacket that was enveloping her entirely.
The lady's brother, once upon a time: a strong, sturdy boy buoying her with beauty and confidence at a time in her life when she had neither, he being there for her when her father flung her self-esteem so far away from her, Chris hoisting her up once more when no one else did or could, the young man working cosmetic magicks to make her more than presentable at a secondary school soiree, a spectacle of stateliness, of pure loveliness which the young woman never really recaptured on her own, not apart from the night of that dance, not ever.
Fate should have been kind enough to allow Emma's older brother to live up to his literal Christian name and rescue his little sister before she fell into the veritable perdition of virtual prostitution which we all know damn well that Emma descended into in time.
But there was a different brand of temptation that had claimed young Master Frost first, and while for a good amount of time no one ever asked him—and he in turn never told—the secret was… outed before long.
And of course, the news never sat well with Old Man Winston, who had a reputation to uphold as the second wealthiest man in Massachusetts, as well as the first bastardliest. Christian's father ignored the noose that knotted its impression into the young man's neck upon the latter's literal attempt at ending it all, and the crotchety codger strangled the life out of his child his own damn self, all by sending Chris to a place that did not deal so much with those far from sobriety, as Emma had hoped, but rather with those irretrievably remote from sanity.
Not a clinic, but a clink, the sheltered, snobbery-shut-in girl had discovered, she shedding the remaining slender shreds of her tender teenage years as she watched the orderlies usher her brother away. And that was the last that anyone, friend or Frost, had ever seen of Christian.
Including Emma herself, and at this instant of realization, while the straitjacket closed around her, she felt shame, moreso than that feeling in a tiny, tantalizing, tucked-away part in her mind when she stone-skipped her soul amidst the insidious surface of Hellfire per se, moreso than what she felt there when she first chose the corset and the cape, moreso than what she felt there when she first referred to herself as Queen.
All those years flaunting flesh amidst the scantest of fabrics, all of it literal white lies. The pleasurable pallor of the innocence-losing, boobs-oozing bodice. The vanilla of the very-high-topped, creamy-thigh-topped boots. The isabelline allure of the attention-herding, bare-belly-girding bikini panties. The whiteness of the whole of Emma's Queenly accoutrements always belying the baseness within the woman.
"CHRISTIAN!" she screamed desperately as the brunt of what she now wore bore down.
"… …Christian…" she hardly managed, as she felt the fabric suffocating her slender frame.
She had only seconds to get out anything more before the threads would teem down on her, expel the very existence from the woman.
"I'm…
"I'm sorry…
"I'm so sorry that I never…came for you…"
The beleaguered regent was drowning in synthetic whiteness, the straitjacket pounding its purity into her, smothering her with a sibling's insane sense…
…and she embracing it back, she holding it hard and fast to her from within, Emma allowing that tiny, tucked-away part to trounce the tawdryness, to beat back the bawdiness that pulverized her personhood into perdition all these years.
[DUN-SA, WHOOO!]
[Dun-sa, Whooo.]
[dun-sa, whooo…]
And as the lady ceased her cries against the dear straits, as she went from struggle to snuggle within them, the douchily-trite Thickeian theme tore away at long last from the terrible chamber. At this point Emma could even feel the air itself feeling a hair less heavy.
And Christian Frost finally released his embrace from Emma, he hunching down before her humbled frame to speak.
"Em…I've had…such a life in solitary…away from anything…anyone.
"I solicit you…
"Visit me…
"Please…"
A deluge of dead-sincere tears streamed from her eyes.
"Yes…yes, yes Christian. I will come for you. I swear."
And the faintest of smiles traced across the noose-track-throated young man as his image began to rise slowly, then dissipate into the stony sewer ceiling.
"NOOOOOOOOOO!" ("NOOOOOOOOOO!")
A similar scream issued at the same time Emma's did. At first she was certain someone—one of those damn Morlocks, to be sure—was mocking her. Another one of these gutter snipes playing tricks on her again.
"YOU CAN'T BREAK ME!" she yelled out into the underground void. "YOU CAN'T TAKE ANYTHING AWAY FROM ME…ESPECIALLY NOW THAT I'VE FOUND AGAIN WHAT I'VE LOVED MOST! YOU BRING ALL THE HORRORS YOU HAVE HOARDED DOWN HERE, BRING IT ALL UPON ME!
"I DESERVE IT! BRING IT ALL!...I'LL TAKE IT ALL…"
Completely depleted, Emma collapsed, falling just short of fainting.
She lay there, for several moments, heaving, panting, palpitating.
And silence finished her deposing, became Queen and reigned for a good run of minutes.
Then a light—a real one, one with warmth, a light that was good and not a Goulding-synthed simulacrum—a brilliant light brightened the entire area, bringing the lady back and healing her.
Emma found that she could regain her feet once more as she watched another woman, as beautifully and bountifully blonde as herself, strode steadily into the chamber. She was tall, and strong, with eyes as evocatively azure as her own.
"You're free now," the woman started, as she cast her hands around the place, spreading her light all around, the cries of chagrined denizens tolling all around.
"Wh…who?..."
"Emma…I'm Emma," she said, almost palindromically. "My real, full name—by which I am not referred to, down here—is Emma La Porte."
She walked to the edge of the pseudo-room, looked into the darkness with a bit of grave satisfaction at the justice she knew was being done here at the moment. "Down here, I am known as Penitence.
"You were, for the last few hours, and up till right now, a prisoner of some older, bitterer, wayward Morlocks under the manipulation of the monster known as Masque. This was, of course, until my own resistance routed him."
Frost could register only a face full of failing to understand at all of this.
"Of all the mutants topside whom Masque despised most, you were amongst them," La Porte continued, looking directly at Frost now. "He detested that a number of those gifted with particular talents…were so gifted aesthetically as well.
"He hated women especially, ones who emitted only energy signatures and showed nothing on the surface of any kind of…mutation.
"Storm. Polaris. Marvel Girl, or Jean, or I give the hell up with whatever name she has now. You'd need a daily newsletter with her, to keep up with her codename/identity changes.
"Anyway," the lady went on, "I know of some of the names from the people supporting me, who go topside on occasion. I stay down here, and I help who I can, with what the Lord has given me, then and more recently. You see, I was once somewhat like the way you've been, as you've been for a long time…I was flighty. Floozy. Had my way with men, in a most profligate profession.
"Then I met a young man, with whom I tried to transact…Rusty Collins, his name was…and I got burned. In so many ways."
The other Emma blinked, and of a sudden the fairness of her face fell, revealing wrinkles, blisters, and horrible weals. A part of Miss Frost wished to retch from this…but she fought it, kept it down.
"Rus and some of his friends led me down here, to Masque so that my incinerated face and body could be full restored…and it was, for a moment. Then I witnessed the ugliness that was Masque, as he tried to snuff the spirit out of the boy, who burned and then tried to balm me with Masque's healing…and I realized that I wanted no part of it.
"I demanded that Masque change me back, back to the charred, scarred way that I was. I found faith and service to the Lord anyway, through my burning, and it changed me so much within that I cared not for how I appeared without.
"In the end I rebuked Masque, and took residence here with many of the Morlocks, giving them guidance and something that lies literally at the center of your identity. Something that, respectfully, you lost of late…but gained back this evening.
"It was…Grace."
Then in another instant, La Porte spun around slowly, her face becoming beauteous once again.
"And God, He…decided, in His own good graces, that I should be blessed again…and so I found in time that I too had mutations within me…"
As Emma Frost continued to listen with undivided attention, Emma La Porte came upon her suddenly, waved hands before her. And for the third time in her life, she became brunette again. She looked at her hands, then back to the other Emma, unfazed.
Then La Porte laid hands on the other's shoulders, and Frost bleached back into blonde. Again, no reaction from the woman who was now quit of being Queen.
La Porte then breathed into Frost's face…
…and for the first time, in this reality anyway, the latter's form crystallized…and Frost froze.
"I'm sharing my blessing with you now…from one expiated Emma to another. You now can change, from your original thin brunette self…to an actually natural, bonny blonde…to this precious diamond form I diffuse within you now…each with a beauty of its own. As I can go from one form to another as I please, from pulchritudinous on the surface, if I must deal with those above, to my own comfy cozy odious other look…so too do I imbue you with the same ability. In addition to your telepathic talents, you now can shift between these three forms, as it suits you. And each is as real as the next…there is no need to pretend anymore."
"Why?..." was all Emma Frost could utter in return, though she was gathering more and more strength each minute.
"Because I can look within you and see that, despite the fact that you endured an ordeal which might embitter and enrage most…the encounters you underwent, especially the final one with your brother…it activated, again, that Grace within you, which I can sense, I can tell you will carry with you beyond this chamber, and beyond this evening."
And after Emma Frost embraced Emma La Porte, gratefully and wholeheartedly, the former found her way back to the surface, an honestly changed woman. Through the blessings of without as given by that new, inspiring magnaminous Morlock leader—and through the Grace she found within, as inspired too by the love given to her by Christian, the one family link who ever truly loved her—Emma turned over a new leaf, a veritable entire effing tree in fact. Almost a consummate Pollyanna now, she began to insist that everyone call her Emma Grace, or "EG" if they wanted—an apropos title, suggesting the abbreviation, perfect to capture the inspiring example that she wished to become, in imitation of the other Emma.
And her first significant act, she determined, was to harrow that Christ of a Frost from the hell of the awful asylum that held him. And she would succeed, her succor bringing her brother back from the brink and into the land of the living-to live specifically with her, and be nursed fully back to health with her own unique yet benign form of mental help. The two would be close once again, and this time living under a roof that was not hostile for once.
And Emma beyond this would go on to become an excellent, elegant schoolmistress—one who actually went around as more brunette than blonde or diamond in the times to come, given again the twin inspirations of Christian and La Porte from the present. She was a woman now, still strikingly beautiful on the outside, but most importantly now with a soul to match, one set out not to defile or to deflower, but to develop and deliver those lives she touched. And Frost's school would always hold fast, such that hers would rival Xavier's own, and her path would never cross with that of any surly Summers or aggrandized Greys.
And it was in this way that Emma Frost went from an empress of vice to an exemplar of virtue.
AFTERWORD
I've been bashing Emma Frost in a few stories now; I wanted to challenge myself and actually take on a story that would redeem her (as is consistent with some of my other stories, which redeem or rehabilitate certain characters or relationships between characters). If you read the limited Emma Frost series, from about a decade ago I believe, it's pretty good—better than I thought it would be, actually—and you can see there how terrible almost all her family was…except for her brother Christian. And it's tragic, really, that that one, pure relationship had flown from her so soon, and arguably contributed to her own corruption. I tried in this story to fix that terrible thing, and bring not only Christian, but also Emma back from the brink in fact, through this story.
Emma La Porte is an actual character also; you can see her in X-Factor Volume 1, Issues 1 and 16 (in the former, she is burned by Rusty Collins; in the latter, there is the whole Masque episode in the sewers with her). So here in the Machine's mutant playground we have two blonde Emmas, each who is flawed, with La Porte on the outside but with a beautiful soul on the inside, and vice versa for Frost (with emphasis on the "vice"). Emma La Porte is never made a mutant in the mainstream continuity, though—and in fact, after those two X-Factor issues I mentioned above, she is never seen again in the stories, at least to my knowledge.
I just thought it would be an interesting encounter between the two, and as Mary Sue as I've once again made a woman who has fallen from grace (with Emma's middle name only being ironic in the mainstream continuity, honestly), I just wanted to portray Miss Frost in a more positive way, which for the most part did not objectify her too much (although I know and readily admit she was objectified a little here…not to rationalize but I'm sure it's what a few people were expecting here upon clicking on an Emma Frost story).