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FEEDBACK/ARCHIVE: Feedback is welcome, as long as it's polite (translation: no FLAMES) to [email protected] Archiving is cool if you'd kindly do me the courtesy of asking first. Those of you who have perpetual carte blanche to archive me know who you are.

WARNING: There's consensual male-female sex here. They wanted to, and who am I to stop them? Oh, and this is proof I should not let people in #fictalk encourage me when I've had too much sugar and too little sleep. I can be a truly twisted critter when I set my mind to it.

Milan.

The world was coming to an end.

"Oh," she moaned, and buried her head under the pillow, blocking out the damnable lances of sunlight peeping through the window. She sighed, and turned over, only to have a warm, muscular arm curl around her in its sleeve of black paisley silk.

~Who in the hell...?~ she thought, fuzzily. But that was too much effort at the moment. Her head was throbbing. Her mouth was full of rusted steel wool. Her eyelids felt as though someone had rubber-cemented them shut while she slept.

~Oh, my girl, you haven't been hung over this badly since your days trolling for sugar daddies in New York,~ she thought. Then, giving in to her condition, she snuggled up against the man beside her and let sleep drag her back down into unconsciousness. As she shifted, her left hand brushed across the pillow -- the brilliant gold of a wedding ring glinting in the sunlight.

On some level, although she slept, her body recovering from too much expensive indulgence, her subconscious mind was not content to be lazy. Restless, it called memory into dream, giving her an entirely-too-vivid show of things she would truly prefer forgotten.

She had come home from her trip to visi Manuel in Spain (where she went every year on the anniversary of the Hellions' deaths), and found that history, cruelly, had repeated itself.

Emplate lay in the middle of the front foyer, fat and bloated as any cartoon rat after eating an entire cheese wheel. Beside him was the corpse of his flunky, DOA -- who was, well -- DOA. Apparently he had made one sarcastic remark too many.

But the worst thing of all had been that Generation X were dead. Emplate had eaten them all, leaving nothing but a pile of dessicated corpses, even his sister Monet.

Emma had fought off the waves of grief, guilt and revulsion long enough to reach out with her power and pay Emplate back for what he had done. She had taken the glowing light of his mind in her telepathic grasp, and then shredded it into so much psionic confetti, leaving Marius St. Croix a drooling heap on the floor.

Her chauffeurs were dead as well. Leech and Artie. No one survived, although she had not found all the bodies. She had had the presence of mind to call the X-Men to let *them* handle this. Her perfect, icy facade had held steady through all that. Even a week later at the mass funeral for Jubilee, Everett, Angelo, Monet, and Paige, she had remained stonefaced.

The alcohol had helped to dull the pain.

She had gotten on the first plane out of Westchester the first chance she'd gotten, and flown to Milan. There she had booked the most expensive suite and proceeded to sit at the bar and work on obliviating herself. In Milan, no one knew Emma Frost, so there was no one to be horrified that she was turning into a common drunk.

By the time the Hand found her, she was so far gone that her telepathy was dulled, and she did not recognize their intent to 'recruit' her to their ranks, resorting to the same techno-arcanic mix that had transfigured Psylocke into the deadly ninja who no longer looked British.

Fortunately for her, though, the handsome Brosnan-esque man in the tuxedo had recognized the Hand for what they were, even though they were trying to look as normal as everyone else. "Miss, I really think you ought to take better care of your pets. They do get so bitchy when you neglect them," he'd quipped, fighting them with a smile.

"Shaken, not stirred!" he'd shouted as his elbow smashed a ninja's nose into his brain. "Let's see how fast I can bat cleanup, dollface." He'd winked at her then, and leapt into the fray in earnest.

Emma had watched, blue eyes wide in amazement, as her chivalrous rescuer decimated the ranks of the Hand, all the while humming the theme from the old 'Get Smart' TV show. By the time he was done, she stood alone with her bottle of Chateau Margieaux '69, in a garden littered with messily dead ninjas.

Although she was inebriated in the extreme, Emma was, of course, still able to keep her sense of decorum about her. "I feel like a heroine in a Bond film," she'd said flirtatiously. A part of her attempted to protest that she wasn't customarily this flighty; another part firmly told it to keep its opinion to itself since this was the first selfish thing Emma had permitted herself since the death of Sean and her students.

"Think nothing of it," he had told her, bending to kiss her hand. "I'm Guy. Guy Incognito."

The name alone should have tipped her off. But, well, she was really, really drunk. "Emma Frost."

Guy raised one dark brow and smiled. "Charmed, I'm sure," he trilled. "I should point out, though, that since we're in Milan, custom dictates that since I saved your life, I'm entitled to a reward. Especially since I really had other plans. Man, Al's going to have a fit I was so late. Not that she likes Escargot. But I do so love surprising her. She's like a mother to me, you know. But for this -- how could she fault me, right? How often does a man get a good workout and the gratitude of a beautiful woman? Spend the night with me - it'll be a kick."

"Of course. But we should get your tuxedo shirt in club soda before the bloodstains set," Emma said practically.

Whistling the James Bond theme, Guy offered Emma his arm. By the time they got to her room, however, he could barely stand. "Oh, damn," he mused thoughtfully. "Those shuriken *must* have been *poisoned.* This is going to put a damper on the night, dear."

Emma gasped. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

"No, no, afraid not," Guy said dramatically with a shake of his head. "You could make my last moments happy ones, though...Marry me. My little Al ... she'll need someone to look after her."

Hook. Line. Sinker. Emma burst immediately into tears. She'd failed twice. Third time *had* to be the charm. "All right," she told him, weeping. Her tears fell on his face in the moonlight. She missed the odd shimmer of his expression.

Finding an officiate at two in the morning was no easy task. But find one they did, and Emma became Emma Frost Incognito. They had returned to her hotel room and consummated the marriage -- first gently, tentatively, uneasily -- like porcupines. Then, with increasing understanding and relaxation, like otters...

...and finally, with wild, swinging-from-the chandolier-abandon, like crazed champanzees on LSD.

The lucid dream, recapping the past few hours of her life ended, and Emma sat up, wincing. She was about to swear under her breath when she realized Guy still lay beside her. Fearful of finding him dead by her side, victim of the Hand's poison, she touched his face and found it warm...

...and rather unevenly bumpy.

"Guy?" she asked, narrowing her eyes.

"Whaddaya know? I'm not dead! It's a damn miracle, I tell ya!" Guy said energetically, wakening the moment Emma had touched him.

"But the poison..." Emma gasped. "You were dying."

"Did I forget to mention my healing factor?" Guy tilted his head like a confused cocker spaniel. "I do that sometimes when I'm in pain." He rose from the bed and vanished into the bathroom. "I'm for a shower, my little wife. You're welcome to join me."

Emma was relieved to see her hero was alive and well; but she hadn't counted on waking up as anything but a widow. "Maybe we can get it annulled," she mused, glancing up at the ceiling with a frown. ~The hotel's going to want me to pay for that,~ she thought with a sigh, eyeing the expensive light fixture which now hung precariously by two thin wires.

Emma recalled with amusement her night of passion with her new husband. "All Jocks ever think about is sports," he'd whispered in her ear as she tied him to the bedposts, "All nerds ever think about is sex."

She appraised the rest of the room. Several other pieces of the furniture were broken. Her Guy, although unconventional and weird -- was *quite* talented. ~Perhaps worth keeping,~ she thought with a wry smile, touching a bitemark on one breast.

She reached for her purse to get her checkbook before she forgot in all the excitement. The marriage license fell out.

She read her name on it and chuckled. To her surprise, though, the other name on the certificate did not read Guy Incognito.

It read: Wade Wilson.

Emma's scream shattered the mirror on the dresser.

Another Portal - Back to the Void