Chapter Text
Somehow, Emma Frost standing in his kitchen at six in the morning was not the weirdest thing to happen to Peter Parker on a random Wednesday.
Rather, it was that Emma Frost was crying in his kitchen at six in the morning on a random Wednesday.
He was dreaming. He was absolutely dreaming. He really prayed he wasn’t, because if Jean Grey found out he had been dreaming about Emma Frost, she probably would not stop at half of Manhattan. New York City was utterly, irrevocably fucked. The whole of the United States—nay, the world—would probably be brought to their knees. They had survived the Chitauri and Ultron and Thanos and Doctor Doom, but hell hath no fury like a Jean Grey scorned.
He hoped he was just delirious. He hoped he had a terrible, horrible, massive concussion. He had bumped into a lamppost yesterday while laughing at some video Jean had sent him. Surely that would cause some kind of damage. He really prayed it had.
Or maybe he was dead. That was the second-best option. Or maybe the first—he wasn’t so sure anymore. Jean Grey finding out he had hallucinated Emma Frost after a traumatic head injury was also not high on his list of conversations he wanted to have. He wasn’t too sure what people saw when they hallucinated. Shadowy figures were the common-sense answer. But at least they could be shadowy figures of people you loved. Maybe you could feel the embrace of family long gone. Or see the outline of a lover, a friend, while your brain knitted itself back together.
At least death would mean he would just be gone. No awkward explanations needed. He was probably in Hell, because Emma Frost was standing and crying in front of him. Maybe she had just gotten out of some kind of torture session with the Devil. Maybe she had been burning for her many crimes, was turning over a new leaf, and felt the desire to atone in her long, fiery eternity.
Yeah, that was probably it. They were both in Hell. It was cool that Hell was a real place, Peter thought. There were a lot of really weird places in this universe, he had come to understand. They hadn’t known Norse mythology was a thing until Thor came crashing down to Earth. Valhalla was real, apparently. A Christian Hell wasn’t so far-fetched. It probably was a well-established realm already. There were probably angel-themed and devil-themed superheroes out there that he hadn’t met yet. That was cool. Maybe he could meet them now.
He probably did deserve to be in Hell. He had let down a lot of people in his life. Although, if Peter were to be honest, being torture-mates with Emma Frost wasn’t particularly high on his list of wants. He probably would have picked someone else. Maybe he could ask a guard. Did they have guards in Hell? Maybe some demon jailers were roaming around. He would get on his knees and beg them to switch cellmates. He would rather be tortured alongside Thanos. At least he had some interesting moral and philosophical quandaries. Emma Frost was just Emma Frost. She wasn’t going to debate altruistic genocide with him while being prodded with hot pokers over a fire.
Hell was awfully cold, though. Time ran differently here—it had to. Peter had died in December, but surely they didn’t have winter, or celebrate Christmas in Hell. Maybe Hell had just frozen over. That was a pretty apt way to describe Emma Frost sobbing in his apartment, bare arms curled around herself, clutching one of his plush green cushions. That was a cushion that Jean had given him. He was dead already, but he was going to die again. Maybe Dante had been right. Maybe he was just on one of the outer layers. He would die again, and descend even deeper. He really hoped Emma Frost wouldn’t be following him.
“Frost?” A squeak came out of Peter. The apartment was still dark, but Manhattan was slowly stirring. The darkness of night had melted into a blush of indigo, and in the faint light cast by the window, he could indeed see the very real, pale visage of Emma Frost. Oh. Not a hallucination, then, probably. Peter was still hoping for Hell.
Peter knew what she looked like, even though they had never met. Which was weird, to be honest. He was at Xavier’s School a lot these days. To see Jean, obviously. (Not because he enjoyed hanging out with Scott, Warren, Kurt, and Bobby). Despite that, they had never crossed paths. The first time he had visited, Emma Frost had been out on a mission. The second time, she had also been out on a mission. The third time, she had been in her office, which, for some reason, was locked tightly shut for the entire duration of his three-day stay. Maybe she could photosynthesise. Maybe she could shift into a block of diamond and go into some kind of stasis. Maybe she could suck elemental carbon out of the air to become a bigger, meaner block of diamond. After the third time, Peter had stopped asking. Jean had looked oh so pleased every time, and she had looked so adorable, smiling up at him with soft, wide, innocent green eyes before kissing him and pushing him against any surface that he would stop wondering about the mystery of one of the mansion’s teachers.
Emma Frost liked to be at the front and centre of the X-Men. Bold, flashy, regal. She was beautiful, objectively. Peter wasn’t blind (although he currently wished he was). Long blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes, pale skin. She was now wearing her signature white fur coat, which wrapped around her long legs. A thin white choker encased her throat, decorated with a large, audacious ruby. He tried very hard not to look at her chest.
She wasn’t beautiful in the same way that other women were beautiful. It wasn’t like the shy attraction one felt when looking at their high school crush. It wasn’t the spark of lust one felt when looking at a swimwear model. It wasn’t the soft adoration one felt when looking at someone they loved. Jean Grey was beautiful in that way, all snark and fire, coated in softness and sunshine.
No, Emma Frost was beautiful in an untouchable way, like being gifted a bouquet of foxglove. Her stare made you feel like you had swallowed a mouthful of broken glass but were somehow enjoying the sensation of shards ripping open your throat.
The figure shifted. Yep, that was Emma Frost all right. Instead of her usual cutting smirk, tear tracks lined her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
“Peter?” she whispered. Broken.
He shuddered. This was strange. This was a real out-of-body experience. Maybe the hallucination theory had been struck off too quickly. He didn’t even think an Emma Frost burning in hell would sound like that. She probably would have manipulated the guards into freeing her, deposed Satan, and then started reigning over Hell.
He was awake now, more alert, even though he could definitely feel a splitting headache coming from being woken up early and dealing with whatever the fuck was going on in mutant land.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Emma Frost gave another almighty shudder, clutching the cushion tighter. Oh, for God’s sake. He would have to replace that cushion. He didn’t know where Jean had gotten it from. He needed to burn it, fast, before she could ask him why his cushions smelled like Emma Frost. Or maybe she would want it as a keepsake. Maybe she would encase it in glass and put it in the corner of her room at Xavier’s. Emma Frost’s tears, it would read. The bitch does have a heart, the subcaption would say.
“I’m not her,” she said, which somehow made even less sense than every other event that had transpired up to this point. Somehow, even though she was talking about herself in third person, Peter could feel the sting of venom in her voice. Maybe the X-Men were going through an identity crisis these days. Maybe self-hatred was a side effect of secondary mutations and fighting incredibly odd villains like the one that tried to populate the planet with clones of Jean Grey. Well, that part wasn’t so bad, Peter thought. The whole let’s merge Jean and Scott’s DNA to make super-babies was far more objectionable. Jean had found that really funny, and she would remind him all the time. Peter hadn’t found it funny at all. He had woken up in a cold sweat thinking about babies with laser eyes that could move objects with their mind more times than he would like to admit. At least Peter’s rogues’ gallery was fairly normal. These days, it was mostly bank robbers, sometimes with stolen alien tech, the odd animal-themed villain, and still the same annoying latex-clad cat burglar he could never seem to catch. At least she was only (mostly) stealing from the rich.
Emma Frost staggered forward. Peter staggered back. A flash of something across her face—was that hurt? He didn’t know Emma Frost could feel hurt.
“I don’t know what that means,” he warned, crouching slightly. “How did you find where I live?”
He didn’t ask how she got in. Fucking telepaths always found a way. The fact that she was crying in his kitchen was actually an upgrade to taunting him and reading his deepest, darkest shame.
She blinked up at him softly. There was something so wrong about that expression on the usually regal face of Emma Frost. That was an expression Jean reserved for him, usually when they were alone, or when he said something sweet in public. It was usually followed by a kiss, Jean melting against him like putty, sighing in that contented manner that made his heart flip.
Yeah, Jean was so going to kill him for making that connection. He was going straight from the first circle of Hell to the ninth. Maybe he would be the first one to establish a tenth.
“I’m not Emma Frost,” the figure that looked and dressed like Emma Frost said. “It’s me, Jean.”
Peter blinked. That was going to cause issues, if she was telling the truth. His impending headache was coming faster. It was even more impending than before, and it was already pretty impending when he first woke up to Emma fucking Frost in his apartment.
“You possessed Emma Frost?”
Peter didn’t know whether to be outraged, terrified, or impressed. He didn’t know you could possess Emma Frost. You couldn’t burn fire or electrocute lightning. The math wasn’t mathing, and the mutation sure as hell wasn’t mutation-ing.
Jean had been working on her consent issues with Charles. She had spent so long viewing people as collateral, as puppets to be used and discarded. It didn’t help that her power left no memories—it was invasive but not usually traumatic. Jean didn’t really find much of a problem using it. Peter understood, obviously. But it was still wrong. It was still a violation. She had agreed not to use it on regular civilians.
Anyways, he wasn’t going to think about the moral and ethical dilemmas of telepathic possession now. His headache didn’t need to get any worse.
The thing that may or may not be Emma Frost blinked. She giggled. Emma Frost fucking giggled like a schoolgirl.
“No, you idiot,” the woman said, scrubbing at her eyes. “I’m really Jean. I’m just trapped in her body.”