Author: Katya Starling
Fandoms: X-Men/Golden Girls
Characters/Pairing: Sean/Emma, Sal/Sophia
Rating: PG/K+
Challenge:
1_million_words: April Challenge: How I Met...: Emma Frost + Sophia Petrillo: Scream, Make-Up Sex, Driving, Game Night, Seek, Wrong, Flinch, Snow, Fall, No Shame (Shameless)Warnings: Cannon Character Deaths, Slight AU
Word Count: 1,248
Date Written: 5 May 2019 (Thanks to
flipflop_diva for the extension. I would've had it done, but it was almost impossible to do it justice on a bloody cell phone!)Summary:
Disclaimer: All characters within belong to their rightful owners, not the author, and are used without permission.
Emma felt like screaming as a small car cut her off, pulling sharply ahead of her into the parking spot where she had been about to pull her convertible. She would have had the top down and blasted the other driver for everything she was worth if it was not for the insufferable snow that was persisting in drifting down in the Weather Witch’s absence. As it was, she did not want to be out tonight, let alone driving herself, but she’d opted to escape the mansion, along with all the thoughts of Warren and Betsy’s make-up sex and the boys’ game night and shameless “entertainment”, and not wait for Bumpkin to return to her side. She never should have let him off tonight, she thought, but despite what others believed, she did not use her fellow mutants, any of them, as slaves.
She rolled down her window, her mouth open to scream at the other driver, but watched, with no slight amusement, as the other car tried to settle into the parking space. After damaging both the car ahead of and behind it, it finally stopped, and the driver got out. Emma’s ice blue eyes widened slightly at the sight of the crinkled, old woman
“WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?” the woman screeched, brandishing an umbrella at her. “I CAN SMACK YOU TOO!”
Emma stared for another moment. She could easily wipe whatever was left of the old bat’s memory or make her see her worst dreams come to reality. Yet there was something about the old lady, especially after everything Emma herself had been through in the last twenty four hours, that was bringing laughter bubbling up inside of the infamous “Frost Queen”.
Run along, you mortal fool, before I steal whatever it is you call a brain. She did burst out laughing at the look of complete shock that colored the woman’s lively, prune face.
“SAL! I TOLD YOU TO STOP PLAYING TRICKS ON ME!!” Sophia didn’t flinch as she bellowed and poked her umbrella at the dark, snowy sky.
Emma laughed so hard that tears sprung to her eyes. She watched, through her laughter, as the old woman beat a hasty retreat back into her car and pulled away. She didn’t even care when she slightly bumped her convertible, nor did she mind the snow that her spinning tires sloshed onto her windshield. Through it all, she was too busy laughing so hard that she shook and cried.
Finally she wiped her tears away and peered through her windshield just in time to see the owners of the other cars return. Their mouths flew open, their faces coloring. She wasn’t sure what moved her in that moment, but as she pulled away from the spot, she touched the humans’ minds and made them see their cars as being perfectly intact and normal. It was strange. She didn’t usually like, let alone help, humankind so easily, Emma thought, but there was something about that old prune . . . something that was still making her laugh.
She glanced into her own mirror and smoothed away the wrinkles she allowed no one else to see. She still had several decades before she reached that prune’s age, but she hoped when she did, she was still as feisty. Of course she would be, Emma thought, smiling, because no matter what the world did to her, no matter what others thought of her, regardless of any actions or thoughts she indulged in in which everyone else thought she was wrong, she would always have the spirit of a fighter.
It was how she’d survived this long, she reflected, and how she’d survive being at the mansion when no one wanted her there. She’d been afraid that leaving Scott would finally allow the others to kick her out, but no one had even tried. Perhaps she’d finally earned her place amongst them. Wryness twisted her blue lips at herself. Such was impossible, she knew. They would always view her as mean, wicked, cruel, and utterly wrong, but it didn’t matter what they thought. It never had, and it never would.
Regardless of rather or not she was at Xavier’s or somewhere else, she would always find a way to help the next generation of mutants. She was exactly as she had told Scott, and as he’d admitted to her that he knew her to be: she was a teacher. She was a crafter, a molder of minds that were more innocent than her own had ever been. Everyone had abandoned her when she’d been a child. They’d left her to her own devices not just to survive this cruel world but to survive what they had done to her, and she had.
She wondered again about the old woman and the stories the pruneface could tell. Something told her that she, like herself, was a fighter but in an altogether different manner. She had been hated too, but not because of her genes. She was Italian, Emma knew that from her voice, and had probably lived through the Great Depression and only she knew what all else. She had her stories to tell her own youngsters, just as Emma had stories to tell the next generation of mutants and the ones who would come behind them and the ones after that.
They had stories, because they had fighters. They had life still, because they were fighters. No one would ever take that from them. They would always fight to survive, always fight for what was theirs, and as they did so, they would gleam more and more stories to tell and share with those who were both willing to listen and unwilling. The next generations could learn so much from them.
As she drove away, Emma remembered a voice of which she was still dearly fond, trying to impart some sage advice to her. “Th’ seekin’ fer one thing will find another,” Sean had told her once when he’d been trying to comfort her when their children had been missing. They had found other lives to help, but she’d still been furious because it wasn’t their children. And now their children were either dead or wanted nothing to do with her.
Sean, like the other woman’s Sal, was dead. Emma blinked through a fresh bout of tears and looked again through her snowy windshield. This time, as the old woman’s gaze had before her, she turned her tear-filled eyes to the dark sky in search of something she could not see. She couldn’t see, but in that very moment, she could feel it. She could feel him. “I’ll never give up, Sean,” she whispered, wiping away tears which, like her wrinkles, she would never allow another soul to see. "I’ll never give up, Sean. I’ll always keep fighting. For the children. For you. For me,” she whispered, pulling to a stop and letting herself cry.
Maybe he was right after all, she reflected as she wept. Maybe tears could be therapeutic after all. Maybe they could be freeing. She only wished she could be free with him, but the time would come. The time would come, and he’d still not want her with him.
“Cazzo, but women are idiots!” a certain, unseen Italian muttered, punching a fist up at the sky.
“Ye’re tellin’ me nothin’ I din’t already knae, boyo.” The two parted ways, each going to their women and neither being seen, though felt, again that night.
The End