DISCLAIMER: This story uses mutants. Mutants are Marvel's. They aren't mine. I stole them. This story is mine. Archive without permission and I will track you down and make sure that the song that gets stuck in your head starts with "I love you, you love me." as sung by the Spice Girls on the bad crack.
Please, please note that this isn't part of my timeline. This story was written for one main reason — because Falstaff said I couldn't do it (Note from Leary: never do that) and I knew that I bloody well could write a believable story of Paige killing Emma. (Note from Leary: And with enough angst thrown in to drown the Summers Clan to boot.) And the next story I'll send out will be over twenty pages long, just to prove you even more wrong, Staffie-Poo. :P
Warning: Somewhat graphic images. Implied homosexuality/bisexuality. (Note from Leary: Denise is trying to earn Laersyn's Pitchfork Of Evil®.)
Coup d'Etat
"You're young, beautiful, intelligent, and you know exactly what you want, and aren't afraid of ruffling a few feathers to get it. In truth? You remind me of myself, when I was younger."
"Is that her version of a compliment, or a warning?"
Emma and Paige - GenX #4 (Thanks Harliquin!)
Dear Diary:
I'm writing this here because I don't know what to do. The woman I love has gone too far. What do I do now?
This afternoon, she walked into our living room with a content smile on her face. Without even taking off her coat, dressed in her street clothes, she said the words I've always wanted her to say but I never wanted to hear. "I've done it."
My God—Paige is the White Queen. She took off the coat and there was the get-up…. the trollop, tart clothing that Emma used to wear. The so-called ceremonial outfit of the White Queen now adorned my gal.
Diary, it's been a long time since I wrote, hasn't it? Where have eight years gone? I flipped back a page and found part of a song I had started to write. That song had marked something so special—my recovery from losing my voice and the dreams I had had about singing. I had worked through everything—my attempts at suicide, my self-hatred, my hate at the world in general, and lastly, the depression that kept me down. I was writing again and the world looked so good. For a week or so it was.
Jubilee was killed while she and Paige were shopping at the mall. Paige fought the sentinels with her, and watched Jubilee get hit by the sentinel's newest weapon. The beam of light entered Jubilee and literally blew her to pieces. That is, Jubilee exploded from the inside out. And Paige, being so close to her, was drenched in her blood and innards.
That marked the beginning of the year from hell, which is the nice way of putting it. I know it was rough for me, but it was so much worse for Paige. When does a person get so broken, so often, that they can't put their life back together? It happened sometime that year. All I know is that she wasn't the same gal from one Christmas to the next.
First, it was Jubilee's death. The two may have squabbled, but they were best friends. Paige learned to hate the government for trying to destroy mutants. Then her mother had a series of strokes. Paige went home for a bit to help out. I think that time back home, among people who had nothing, taught her to hate poverty and lust after money. If it wasn't being back there, it was selling the farm to pay for the medical bills.
Paige's mother was a proud person, who wouldn't take all the money Xavier and Emma and Cable offered her. She saw the farm as a shackle around her remaining children's future, and her illness a chance to help them escape. She ended up selling the farm to Cable outright, accepting what she knew was a compassionate offer from a man whose pseudo-son was buried on it. They moved to Louisville.
A couple of years ago, I met a woman who had spent several years in Louisville. She remembered the good stuff about it, the big hoopla over the Churchill Down's, the history, the mall with putt-putt golf in it. And she remembered something that did not surprise me after what happened in Louisville. "When I was in second grade, my teacher handed out these flyers—just to the white students. It invited us to a special children's rally for this thing called the KKK. It sounded like so much fun, playing around, watching cartoons, singing songs. I took the flyer home, and my mother explained about hatred to me for the first time in my life. The next day, I handed the flyer back and told my teacher that I'd never do anything that made such a big deal out of something nobody could control."
I know that not everybody from Louisville is a bigot. But what really stuck out in my mind was the location of that school, downtown, near a meat processing factory. It sounded so much like where Paige's family settled. If the teacher felt comfortable doing that, it sure as hell explained why there were so many members of the FoH around.
I remember the last time I heard Paige cry, the day that Sam set down so gently on the Academy grounds. Tears were streaming down his face as he held her and whispered the sad news that their entire family had been butchered in their apartment. Paige broke down denying it. Sam had had the sad, painful task of identifying his family's bodies.
I don't know what X-Force did to the Friends of Humanity, but I do know it wasn't humane. The next time I saw Sam, it was at the internment. Six coffins stood between him and Paige that day. He was surrounded by his friends, depending on them to hold him up as the preacher said the last prayer. I'll never forget his farewell to his mother. Rahne gently scooped up the soil and pressed it into his open hand. He clenched it so tight that his knuckles were white. Then, leaning against Cable, he slowly turned his hand over and watched the dirt spill out. Of everybody there, only those two could identify with that kind of pain.
You noticed I said two, right? Paige was silent, shut off during the whole ceremony. She had no problem with helping bury her family. I kept repeating to myself, 'After the first death, there is no other,' but this wasn't right. I wasn't watching Paige, my Paige that day. Whoever this imposter was, she didn't have her heart.
I really and truly noticed the similarity between Emma and Paige that day. It was deeper than the builds or the hair color. It was their eyes-- the same numbness was there. And, thinking back, it was about that time Paige started wanting what Emma had—money, prestige, and especially power. I wish I had known where it would end.
I hoped, with time, the old Paige would return. I saw glimmers of her in little things, the way she'd push herself at school and in workouts. She became very dedicated to a strict diet-- no animal fats, nothing artificial, everything had to be fresh. She also started pushing herself at work at Frost Enterprises. I don't know if she thought she could make middle management in one summer or what, but she was so driven to learn everything she could about the business world, where fortunes were made or broken seemingly over night.
I convinced myself that this was just her way of trying to prevent what happened to her family from happening to her. It made sense in a muddled way—her family lost their money because her mother lost her health. Because her family lost their money, they moved to the city, away from a community that generally supported mutants. Because they moved, they died.
And the woman at the end of that summer seemed so much like Paige that I thought it was the old Paige returned. Sam knew better. The day he and Rahne were married, he pulled me aside and asked me to keep an eye on his sister. "She still could go either way," he warned me.
"Don't worry. I'll make sure she stays on the straight and narrow," I promised. I wish I had done better.
There is no one moment that screams, "I started loving her right here." Instead, I had a million little things that add up to the fact that I love her. Maybe I started to love her the minute I first saw her and every day just made that love grow. I've always wanted to protect her and keep her safe, even if I've failed more than I've succeeded.
There are times I look at Sam and then look at Paige, and wonder how different two people can turn out even after being raised by the same parents. From the few times a year I see him, I know he's happy and content with his job as an instructor at the Muir Island Academy. Then I look at Paige—she's never content with her life, always pressing on for the next big thing. Sam's found his life's meaning in his children— three with one more on the way—and his students. Paige had her ovaries removed a couple of years ago. I think Sam took what life had to offer him the first time; Paige is still holding out for what's behind door number three.
Back to that year. We became seniors that fall when Emma and Sean took in a new class of students. Tracy, Kris, Hope, Scott, Barney, and Mark were the freshmen. I miss them, I still feel responsible for their deaths. I know I couldn't have done any better, nobody could have.... No, we could have been trained better—or could we?
Doc Samson told me time and time again that Creed was simply smarter than our security system, that nobody else would have caught the blips on the screen any faster than I did. When it boiled down to losing my sanity or accepting that, I took what he offered. I can only hope it was true.
I don't know what motivated Creed to come after us. After months of therapy, I've become content that I can't remember finding Ev strung up by his lower intestines or Sean's face ripped off. But I did. Bloody hell, I love my faulty memory.
If only it had thought to tuck what happened to Artie and his cat, Muffin away where it buried the other memories, I'd sleep better at night.
...
Artie was—torn up---- many pieces---- Muffin was dangling
from Sabertooth's mouth. Paige was sprawled beside me, Creed had thrown her
aside.... She shifted to adamantium and attacked. He may have had the claws
but she had so much more and was out of her mind. Killing fever vs. a wild
rage… He didn't have a chance.
Skin found us standing in the biosphere. He cradled Leech like he would have a baby. Poor kid never had a chance. "The others?" I asked, afraid of the answer. Angelo and I had moved out to a private cottage a couple of weeks ago, one of the perks of being a legal adult. Our house was located near the freshman dorm.
"Freshmen all dead... They tried to take him on…" Angelo had seen so much living on the streets, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw. Years later, I met him again. All he would say about finding the condition of their bodies was, "It was like glimpsing hell."
Monet and Penny survived. Emma wasn't even on the school grounds, she was at an executive retreat at the time. The five of us decided to call in the X-Men and let them handle this. Emma broke down, retreated inside herself. Betsy and Paige pulled her out-- I don't know the details.
That was the start of the interdependent relationship between Paige and Emma. Emma needed Paige as proof that she wasn't a total failure. Paige needed Emma to get ahead, to leave behind all of the pain she felt. They needed each other to recover. I had picked up the pieces before and knew how to do it again. And this pain wasn't as deep for me as them. That's what I tell myself, at least. I never really wanted to question the relationship between the two.
That night marked the end of our formal training in our powers. I took advantage of the fact that I had a roof over my head, and started selling my music. Diary, would you believe that I've done country, Goth, R & B, and ballads? The styles are different but the emotions are the same. Selling myself as a mute was harder than anything I had done before, but I loved it. Angelo stayed at the school for a while but went to work for Emma doing something with computers. Monet and Penny disappeared off to somewhere—I never knew who they were, I never knew where they went.
How did I get involved with Paige? Remember the song I wrote, saying 'I love you but I can't have you'? Paige came to me one night, I'll never know why, and slipped into my bed.
She asked me to make love to her. I couldn't kiss her without blowing up a bloody dorm. Think I could make love with her? Think I'd ever take the risk of losing control and hurting her like that? Hell NO.
But she was there, wanting me. It was her idea to have me go into her mind and seduce her there. But me and Gayle had only done it a couple of times. There was only so much I could make her feel. Later, we tried using images from movies and romance novels, substituting our faces for theirs.
It was unfair to her, she said finally. She wanted to know what it was to have sex-- the sights, sounds, smells, and the feelings. I didn't want to lose her—I loved her. She knew that so, after thinking it over, she asked me to help her seduce a guy in one of her classes.. He was the kind of guy to make a man feel … less than adequate. Paige picked one hell of a guy to lose her physical virginity to. And I was there, not quite watching, and not quite participating. I don't think she knew how much it hurt me to do that.
Later, she took to becoming more like Emma. As much as it hurt, I always knew I was better off with her than without her, so I went along. Each time made me feel less like a man, and more like a ghost wearing the shell of a man's body. Around this time, my physical body actually started to atrophy. Finally, I shed it like a butterfly leaving its cocoon.
Paige stopped inviting me to come along with her, knowing how much it hurt me to watch. I knew she'd never be faithful to me but I stayed with her. Hope is a cruel thing at times. Because the Paige I knew when we started to go to school together was loyal.
I knew about them all-- she was honest. She'd give me the details when she came back. And every time, she promised that it wouldn't happen again. I can list the guys' names, but one hurts more than the others combined. She had slept with Angelo for a year and had had real feelings for him.
That kind of brings me back to today. A long time ago, Paige learned that she could morph herself into male bodies as well as female -- and she used that to her advantage every chance she got. That's what scared me the most, when Paige continued by saying, "Emma forgot to say her safe word."
My former headmistress was suffocated with a clear plastic bag. Somehow, I don't think she had a chance to beg for help. Even if she did, begging wasn't something that Emma would do.
Nothing would have stopped Paige from getting what she wanted and I realized this afternoon that no one else could stop her hurting others but I can't kill her. Wonder how I'm writing this? In that moment, I made a rash decision. I'm in her, controlling her. Maybe, between me and her brother, we can get her back—the naïve girl we knew she was when she was sixteen. Maybe not, but she'll never kill again.
I'll make sure of that. I do love her after all.
Jono