Literally Pirateninja (shadowcat) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2012-07-27 11:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, emma frost (white queen), kitty pryde (shadowcat) |
"It wouldn't have taken much, for me to end up like you. Just a tug in a different direction."
Who: Kitty and Emma
What: A very... odd... heart to heart.
When: Thursday
Where: Emma’s house
Status: Complete!
Rating: PG-13
Sometimes after a traumatic experience, people tended to reassess aspects of their lives - or multiple lives, as the case might be. Emma Frost was one such assessment for Kitty. Finding her hadn’t been hard. Ridiculously easy, in fact. She’d decided to just drop by to not give Emma any excuse to avoid meeting with her. The house was impressive. Even with her windfall from helping Domino she could never afford a place like that in a million years.
She wasn’t sure she’d want to.
Emma was having a hell of a time with the little fuzzy creatures that wouldn't stop multiplying. One or two had been easy enough to kill and sweep away but multitudes took a bit more drastic measures to ensure her home was no longer invaded. She'd already tried calling a number of exterminators, but they'd all been too busy and Emma couldn't even persuade them with her money; most had already had their services bought out through the next two weeks by people in her tax bracket. So Emma had more of less successfully taken things into her own hands.
She was walking from room to room with a broom in her gloved hands. She almost heard Kitty's car, but didn't take notice of it, too focused on ridding her house of pests.
Kitty knocked on the door. She could hear a ruckus inside and smirked as she imagined the woman running around trying to rid herself of pests. It was an amusing mental picture, particularly in 'diamond vision'.
She waited a polite amount of time before knocking a second time.
Emma almost let the door go unanswered. She knew it wasn't Scott, as she wasn't expecting him and Jean was probably working at this hour. It was only after the second, slightly more insistent knock that Emma removed her gloves, laid her broom aside and headed toward the door.
The look on her face wasn't especially inviting when she realize that it was Kitty. "Hello," she said in a rather lukewarm sort of way. Her body blocked the interior of the house from view and she leaned rather heavily on the door. As always she looked something like a movie star. "Can I help you?"
"Hi," Kitty replied, feeling the urge to take a step back and rub her arms due to the frigidity of the greeting. She resisted it, and instead shrugged a shoulder, "I wanted to talk. I promise I won't take up too much of your valuable time."
It was too easy to fall into a habit of mocking her. In a way it was a defensive mechanism to deal with Emma's general attitude and approach to life - and how much parts of Kitty despised it. And okay, despised her.
But the grown up thing to do was push that aside and at least....something.
Really, her plan hadn't gone much farther than 'show up at Emma's and talk to her'. She had thought to wing it from there.
Emma, for her part, wasn't feel especially cruel. Perhaps being bloodthirsty after the rodents had taken a bit of an edge off of her. She still wasn't welcoming. It just wasn't in her nature and Kitty wasn't really enough of a friend for her to allow her defenses down.
"What did you want to talk about?" Emma said, not budging.
Good question Kitty thought to herself. She stuffed her hands into her jean pockets, meeting Emma's eyes, "There's a lot of stuff I want to talk about, but it depends on how receptive you are, doesn't it?"
Emma crossed her arms over her chest. She would rather get down to the business of things than linger on uncomfortably. "So talk then, kitten."
"Out in the pacific," Kitty started. Or so she hoped some of those notes ended up at the bottom of the ocean, "We managed to dump a life raft. To throw them off. But we put notes in it. It's probably still out there. But there were things I wanted to say to you, and I guess I still do."
Emma only raised a brow in response. "Go on."
"You're not irredeemable," Kitty said, flatly. She skipped the part about bonding - she doubted that would ever happen.
"You're not entirely evil. I just hope you can accept that." Maybe coming from the woman who'd called her the definition of evil, it would mean something. Or maybe it wouldn't.
Emma stared at Kitty for a long moment, confusion flashing through her face and then passing quickly. She understood that Kitty meant well, but this did not make Emma any more compassionate than she normally would be. Emma was a hard woman who hadn't been allowed weakness growing up. As such, she didn't much like it in others.
"I don't think myself evil," she said plainly. There was something like curiosity in her eyes. "Is that all you wanted to say?"
"Look," Kitty said, exasperation showing on her face and in her voice. "We don't have to get along, but we don't have to hate each other, either. I don't really want to be enemies."
"We aren't," Emma said, the barest bit of clarity showing on her features. She hadn't understood how Kitty had seen the two of them in her mind's eye. Though Emma wasn't kind, she didn't think Kitty to be anything but a (sometimes annoying) stranger. Kitty seemed to take this incorrectly. "I don't hate you." She shrugged. "You do annoy me, though. And your sensitivity is strange to me."
Kitty bit back a comment about diamonds and ice being anything but sensitive, so of course it's strange, "It's hard to tell with you sometimes. Annoyance comes off as hostility."
She pulled her hands out of her pockets and waved one around, "My problem is I have a harder time separating the two worlds, than a lot of people."
And here it was. Emma got the distinct feeling that Kitty had come around to talk, not just about their relationship, but about things. She kept her face neutral. "No," Emma sighed. She could feel a headache coming. "I do believe that you're in the majority and I'm in the minority." As far as she could tell, people seemed utterly enamored of their dream-lives.
Enamored wouldn't be the word Kitty would use, "I think it depends on what you believe the majority position to be."
"Most seem to want to go right back to the way things were." Emma was thinking of Scott and how he wanted to help. And of Jean and how she unironically referred to hypothetical villains as "the bad guys".
"I'm on the fence," Kitty admitted. "There's that part of me that wants to help people. Do the right thing. That enjoys the adrenaline rush that comes with a tense fight or death-defying. Then there's the part of me that's reliving burnout, emotional wringers, death, anger issues and the whole nine yards. Do I want to go through that again? Do I want to put other people through that?"
There were dim recollections of some of the horrors the younger students went through.
"I don't know. Do you?"
"There's no black and white answer here," She responded. "Nothing is the same, not exactly. Even my powers take more effort a lot of the time."
"No, I suppose there aren't." Emma sighed. "Do you know why you're here, Kitty?"
"I don't really know." Kitty shifted uncomfortably on her feet, struggling to keep her face impassive. "Is there anyone you've dreamed about, that you haven't found here? I've got friends, a woman I love, but there are people missing that make the world feel kind of... empty."
Emma hesitated a moment, deciding to not be unnecessarily mean. "One or two. But there is no person that could go missing from my world that would make it empty." That was, perhaps, more than a bit of a lie, but Emma pulled it off well enough.
Well enough that Kitty didn't pick up on it. Not that she was looking for it. In that other world she would have. Not here, not right now after the week she'd just had. Rachel, Kurt, Brian, Meggan, Logan on and on.
"Too many for me."
There was the sound of a car coming up the drive.
She glanced in that direction, "I should go..."
"I am not kind," Emma didn't take her eyes off of Kitty, who she suddenly found strange and almost interesting. "And I do not suffer foolishness." She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "But I will give you just a bit of advice, in return for what you said earlier: every moment you pine after people who may or may not exist, you are wasting your time. If an old friend is meant to return to you he or she will. And if not, you should keep the memories and move on. It's pathetic to linger. What you long for in them, you should instead go find in yourself." A pause. "Perhaps then you won't go to relative stranger to find solace." There was no warmth in Emma's blue eyes, but there was truth there. She suspected that Kitty wouldn't take kindly to her blunt words, but it didn't matter. Maybe some of it would stick. "Live your life, Katherine. And pray that you won't have to be an X-Man again. Because this time around you have the potential to be normal and happy. All the adventure and the friendship couldn't bring us that over there."
Kitty folded her arms for a moment, digesting that.
"It wouldn't have taken much, for me to end up like you. Just a tug in a different direction."
Then she turned, and walked to her motorcycle.
"For the best, then," Emma said. She took a step back, her hand holding her door in place. "The world could hardly handle two of us."