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There are nights, just like this, where she wakes in a cold sweat from a nightmare and the grief and anger – so, so much anger – Emma feels, threatens to consume her and swallow her whole. Where her heart is in a vice grip, that squeezes and squeezes until all the emotions she represses comes to the surface and she hates it. She hates that she was helpless to stop Scott’s undeserved death and she hates how she can’t stop the flood of emotions that are so raw she’s sure she would cry if she hadn’t left all her tears on Muir Island.
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Grief is always first. Grief so deep it seeps into her bones and she can’t move. It’s so heavy it feels like she’s stuck, stuck on that dreadful island with Scott’s dead body – ugly and scarred – in her hands with the echoes of his breathless last words ringing around in her head. We can’t end like this, Emma! He was right in a way though, it can’t, no, it shouldn’t have ended like that for him.
Everyone knows the life they live is dangerous with death always lurking around the corner but Scott deserved better, if anything, he deserved to go out on his terms instead of by the very disease he was trying to stop. So that’s what she did. She gave him a death she felt he deserved – Emma knows what’s going to happen even before Black Bolt shifts slightly, steps forward, opens his mouth and, SCOTT! – made him into an idea and did what they both wanted to do by saving mutantkind. Still, here she is, up at – Emma blinks, glances over at her clock beside the bed – 4:39 in the morning unable to sleep.
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Emma doesn’t like it but she does understand why she grieves so much for him despite Emma and Scott not being Emma and Scott for years now. Some think that she shouldn’t feel so much for him, if she even feels anything at all but, frankly, Emma Frost doesn’t give a fuck about what people think of her.
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Emma grieves the man who understood her like no one else, who saw past her practiced aloofness and bitchiness, saw and cared for her, not Emma Frost Former Ruthless White Queen of the Hellfire Club, Headmistress of the Xavier Institute but just Emma. Flaws, faults and all.
She grieves the man who was so entirely and completely dedicated to his cause and trying to be strong on behalf of everyone else that he constantly buckled under the weight of it all and gave and gave and gave up everything – his reputation, his friends, his family – to protect mutantkind, until the only thing he had left to give was his life.
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Anger is next. Not red, hot, blinding anger but the kind that’s cold, quiet and unexpected. The kind that settles just under her skin and won’t leave until she’s had her revenge like an itch she can’t scratch.
It’s anger at Black Bolt, Medusa, the Inhumans and even the X-Men who stood by for long pussyfooting around with ‘peace talks’ or whatever bullshit they came up with to help them sleep at night while the m-pox took so, so many lives.
Emma’s anger is at the injustice of it all. The fact that the Inhumans are praised as heroes while their genocidal mist is killing mutants all over the globe and the X-Men hope to solve the problem of the second mist cloud by holding hands with the Inhuman royalty and singing kumbaya round a campfire.
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At some point, Emma realises that stewing in her rage and sorrow is useless if she doesn’t do something about it. Wallowing in what-ifs and what-could-have-been does nothing to assuage the fact that there is a second cloud out there and she is one of the few mutants in the world who is willing to do what needs to be done to get rid of it.
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Blinding sunlight is beginning to peak through the curtains and Emma sighs in resignation. There’s no point in attempting to go back to sleep so Emma forces her emotions back down where they belong, gets up and does what needs to be done.