X-Men: The Beginnings of Corruption

Jean watched Emma apply her make-up in the silver lacquer of the mirror. It wasn't clean and casual, like Jean did hers. Emma lingered on every brushstroke, every flavored dab, like an artist composing a masterpiece. And she never looked at Jean.

"I'm back," Jean said, emphasizing it, though the point had been made abundantly clear by the vast Phoenix Effect in the night sky, her destruction of the Prime Sentinel before it could kill Nightcrawler, her night on the town catching up with the rest of the original five like she'd been on a long trip overseas. Not dead from a thing that thought it was Magneto stopping her heart.

"I'm well aware," Emma said, her lips pursing together as she polished them with lipstick.

"You must've known I would be."

"Yes. I thought it'd be sooner rather than later. You've been dreadfully tardy, Jean dear. Really let the boys wallow in their tears this time."

"But I'm back. And you and Scott are still a—" Jean compressed her distaste into the set of her jaw. "Thing."

"Yes. We are, aren't we?" Emma blotted out the color of her face with blush. Making herself as white and indestructible as any glacier.

"Shall I be the bitch, Emma? Just this once?" Jean sat, TKing the chair underneath her even as she lowered herself. "He's not yours. He's mine. Everyone knows it. Especially him. What they don't know is you only wanted him because he was mine."

"This is you being a bitch?" Emma asked. "It's awfully hard to tell."

"He is going to leave you for me. Just like he left Madeline. And she was the mother of his child. You're just—what—a mid-life crisis with decent taste in clothes?"

"I must remember that one for the title of my autobiography," Emma mused. She fixed her breasts in the mirror. She wore a white blouse that turned her cleavage into art, with a red leather belt on white leather pants, all ending in white Ann Demeulemeester heels and a helping of jewelry as platinum as the polish on her nails.

"Give him to me. Spare yourself the embarrassment. Spare him the angst. We both know you're bored of him anyway. You were just holding on for this moment, for me coming back and asking you to do the right thing."

"You really do think you're some kind of goddess." Now Emma seemed to see Jean's reflection in the mirror. A drop of denim jeans and T-shirts in her lovingly furnished room. Blue-collar. Ruffled hair. "That the two of you have some epic love story because you went to prom together."

"I can prove it, if you want. But I don't think you'd like losing. You're not a prideful woman, Emma." In Jean's eyes there was a flash of flame. "In fact, I don't think you have much self-esteem at all."

"Everyone says that when they see what I wear. As if it doesn't take confidence to give Evil a hard-on while you're fighting it." Emma turned to smile at Jean with a grin that was as immaculate as her perfectly composed face. "My counteroffer."

Jean crossed her arms.

"I'll give up Scott if you be with me for one night." Her smile was even more perfect when she tilted her head to the side. "My date."

Jean casually, provocatively untucked her T-shirt from her jeans. "Sex, Emma? I'm so far beyond associating that with intimacy that you might as well be asking me to run a hand through your hair."

"No, no, I'd never let you muss my hair." Emma's eyes traveled Jean's body in open appraisal. "I have little desire to fuck you, Jean. Two doms never work out very well, and as far as redheads go, I've more than had that itch scratched. No. I want you to go to a club with me. I want the great Jean Grey to see if she can keep up with a mere mortal."

Jean smiled slowly. "You're testing me. You think you can break me. And yet, you have no idea how small you are. What's it to be, Emma? What will you force me to look at through my microscope?"

"First of all, your fashion choices." Emma got out from between Jean and the mirror, letting her see her T-shirt in it. "I have a surprising affinity for the Backstreet Boys myself, but that's no reason to emblazon myself with them. Allow me to put you in something decent before I'm seen with you. It will make a world of difference if I can tell myself that you really do choose to look like that."

An hour later, Jean had changed into a green one-shouldered evening gown by Jean Paul Gaultier, her feet slipped into Love Me Bright patent pumps by Michael Antonio. Even her underwear was different: dark red lingerie trimmed with tiny frills of dark yellow.

When Emma had given them to her, her smile had said she half-expected them to condemn them as obscene, but Jean had given her a knowing smile in return and slid away to put them on. She knew it was a reference to the Dark Phoenix, and she didn't care. She liked the way they looked. Just wearing them under her clothes put her in the mood. When she got back, she'd let Scott see her in them.

Emma had also insisted on doing Jean's make-up, coating Jean's eyelids with a thick aspic of dark blue eye shadow that made them almost look bruised and giving her lips a purple gloss. When Jean looked at herself in the mirror, her mouth had the appearance of a scrumptious piece of fruit. The overall effect was subtly whorish. Jean just smiled sweetly, as if it were a real date they were on and Emma had just pinned a corsage on her.

And she wondered who would like her appearance more, Emma or Scott.

"So where are we going?" Jean asked, mock-curiously. "A crack den? A cockfight? Where do you intend to shock me so?"

"What's your hurry?" Emma asked, reclining on the bed, the space between them dividing her room with abject symmetry. The understated masculinity of the way Emma wore her clothing and sprawled before Jean made the redhead feel like they were two opposite chess pieces. Just not light and dark, but fire and ice.

"Oh, we can stay in, if you like." Jean sat on a coy little loveseat with a psychic residue of Italy. "I'm sure you can offend me perfectly well here. What claws do you intend to sink into me? Pornography? A sex tape of you and Scott, perhaps? Do you wear interesting outfits?"

"I don't make sex tapes, Jean. I'm not some pop singer with a desperation to go platinum. No, I thought a little something to help us relax. You'll be no fun at all if you spend the whole evening like this."

She drew a flat cigarette case from where it'd been set on the nightstand, opened it, and unearthed a thin brown cigarette from within like it was a family heirloom. Carefully, she gave it a sniff and held it out to Jean, who took hold of it with her TK and brought it to her hand from across the room. She held it like a bomb.

"Have you ever has hashish before?" Emma asked, drawing another cigarette out from the elegant little case. "This is the very finest, my dear Miss Grey. It will take away even the sting of knowing that your husband has come in me five times a week these past few years. Or on me."

"Only five?" Jean returned. "He must've felt obligated."

Still, her back bristled. She hadn't had marijuana since she was a teenager, and never hashish. The Professor had her careful even to touch the mind of someone on a hallucinogen. With her power, it could be—

Emma held up a hand, as if she could hear Jean's inner monologue and wanted it silenced. "I'll only ask you to have a few drags. If you don't like it, you may stop."

That was too fair an offer for Jean to refuse. She'd be backing down if she let Emma make her put her foot down this early on. Still, the sheer unexpectedness of this gesture put a feeling of dread deep in Jean's guts.

"Light us, won't you date?" Emma asked, as sweet as frosting on a wedding cake.

Jean flicked her fingers and the tip of Emma's cigarette ignited, as did her own. She stared at the thin like of smoke that now drooled from her... 'hashish'.

"Slowly," Emma said as Jean brought the cigarette to her lips, "slowly."

Without further instruction, she took a drag from her own cigarette. Jean watched how she inhaled, then tried to do the same, but very gently. The taste of the smoke was strange, and the feel of its inhalation unexpected, but it was not so unpleasant and she was gratified not to cough. When Emma took another drag, Jean did as well, inhaling deeper and holding the smoke in the way Emma was.

They smoked in silence, matching each other another four times until Jean could hardly feel it going down. The smoke had become smooth as water. The fifth time, it seemed she was simply holding her breath.

"Do you feel anything?" Emma asked, sounding so like herself that Jean expected to look up and see the White Queen standing before her, corset and cape.

"Nothing," Jean replied, though her voice didn't sound like her voice. But she had so many voices. Marvel Girl and Phoenix and Dark Phoenix. Scott was her only constant.

Emma piqued an eyebrow, pulled on her cigarette like she was performing a sex act on it. "I feel the world, Jean. The world is so aroused. The world wants to fuck so badly, but it never gets to fourth base."

Jean wondered if she should've felt the same way, if this meant the hashish was not working. She'd been the Phoenix. She'd been aware of the universe around and inside her on a cosmic level. She still was, in the back of her brain, a quiet vertigo. But she could not imagine seeing it the way Emma did.

Emma got up and went to her, sitting down beside Jean. Her leg pressed against Jean's leg with a dull but steady pressure. When Jean looked down at her cigarette, she saw she'd smoked it down to a stub. How had that happened? No matter. Emma offered Jean her own. Her blue lipstick swathed the end, turning it into a rare jewel.

Like a robot, Jean took it and killed the feeling of dread inside her. She didn't even mind Emma's leg against hers. She pressed back to let Emma know she didn't mind, didn't care. She was as sexual as Emma Frost the libertine, even if she didn't advertise it with every breath she took.

Emma took the cigarette back. Breathed it in. Advertised. Her hand came out. It touched Jean's cheek—somehow, her mouth opened—Emma breathed the smoke into her open mouth—Jean didn't mind—she didn't mind anything at all. The sweet smoke licked its way down her throat—it seemed as deep as coitus—she pressed her warm thigh harder against Emma's—she would not back down.

Emma picked her up, got her to her feet, and with the smoke pooled warm and seductive in the pits of their lungs, they wandered out of the Institute, out into the evening air. Jean felt cold for a moment, then remembered Emma had put on mixed faux fur coats of gray and white, one for Jean and one for herself. They were two errant snowflakes, the same ice but different shapes—perhaps one pattern, just broken apart so they looked different. The smoke whispered this to Jean as she pooled into a car with Emma.

It was a 1936 Maybach Zeppelin Town Car, and Namor had bought it when he was part of the Invaders. He drove it now because it was the only vehicle he could stomach driving, much as his Tom Ford business suit was the only sort of human clothing he'd consider wearing. In the passenger seat, Felicia Hardy laughed and giggled, touching his bicep through his dark blue sleeve and drawing attention to her cleavage by splaying her fingers over it whenever she spoke. Her hands were in leather gloves with fur trim.

She was dressed the most casual of the lot, but her rock star chic I don't give a fuck look worked for her. A Lauren Moshi V-neck Tee with an oversized paw print on the front, a sleek black Michael Kors leather vest with faux fur collar, a set of Luichiny platform boots with fur cuffs, MOTO Grunge raspberry ripped skinny jeans, and a chrome wallet chain with a kitten pendant hanging from it. Jean thought of snuggling with her in a coat room.

"I couldn't believe it when Emma gave me the call," Felicia babbling, her words coming out of her as fast as the smoke from her thin brown cigarette. "Jean Grey, alive and well, and wanting us to welcome her back to the land of the living. Always so wonderful to meet a friend of Emma's, isn't it Namor?"

He looked at her with a mix of keen interest and condescension. "Emma has many beautiful friends."

Felicia laughed. This time she touched his thigh.

Even though the windows were down and the wind whipped through the car, trying to catch it as it hit upwards of seventy miles per hour, the odiously sweet hashish hung in the air as they drove. They were all crammed together despite the spacious ride. Sprawled out, limbs intersecting, hair pulled like puppet's strings to each other by the wind, going with their hands couldn't.

With Emma's calf overlapping her own, Jean realized that the deathly wonderful scent was not in her nose, it was in her mind. She was glad for Namor and the white-haired girl, the Black Cat, to add strength in numbers. She didn't trust herself alone with Emma. It was too easy to fall into a violent design. And alone—

She'd never been good at being alone. Not when her mind was meant to touch so many others. She'd always had friends, lovers, family. But dead... or the Phoenix... she was like a butterfly in a hurricane. Borne about and buffeted by forces beyond her understanding, the universe too vast and distracting and delicious for her to make a choice. The agony was too sweet. At least back on Earth, she mattered.

She giggled, suddenly feeling naughty. She'd picked up a mental whisper of where they were taking her. Namor was thinking of bare breasts, Felicia of putting a hundred-dollar bill in a G-string. A strip club, then. How droll. How Emma.

They went through some of the clandestine trappings that Emma enjoyed so much. She probably never would've joined the X-Men if you could just walk through the door; she got off on it being an exclusive club, and the same was true of her leisure hours. They went into a quiet subway, took something like a very futuristic mine cart onward, and ended up in a room of pitch black.

Jean threw her eyes wide against her squinting high, wanting to see. She even considered using her powers, but that felt too much like surrendering. She'd play Emma's game as long as she was able. Namor, kind sweet Namor from deep under the sea where there was no light, took her hand and guided her. His other arm was linked with Emma's, and Jean felt Felicia take her other hand in her cool leather glove, like a child wanting help from mommy. All together like Dorothy's quartet in The Wizard of Oz, they breezed through the black space with its interruptions of light, revealing murals, stone benches, artwork.

She felt more than saw the space narrow, becoming a hallway with little wandering lights on the floor like a mix between a dark theater's lighting and fireflies. Or maybe it was just the hashish. Emma gave her hand a little reassuring squeeze, but Jean did not squeeze back.

Finally, they came to a room with some light. It was like a dark forest in the moonlight of a cloudy night. Jean's hearing, the way the ambient noise bounced around, told her it was the size of an auditorium. Tables loomed out of the darkness, barely revealed by candles topping them, but they were pinpricks of light next to the stage in the middle of the room, ringed with lit candles that provided the space with the bare illumination it received. Jean held up her hand and looked at its casual lighting from the distant stage. Her wedding ring barely glinted.

She wondered if people could tell she was high. Her thoughts seemed normal, rational, the order they came in was just... off. Like a skipping record. She suddenly remembered Emma calling Felicia and Namor as she'd gotten ready, telling them to pick her up, but she didn't remember sitting down—suddenly she was sitting down, ringing one of the many tables with its own small flame. They were near the wall. Jean could see a red curtain flying up over them, disappearing into darkness. Where was she?

A waitress came by, wearing a concealing cloak and a lace mask to hide what little of her features showed under the hood. She bowed politely to Emma and the party. "What may I bring you, mistress?" Her clipped British accent stirred a memory in Jean.

"Drinks after the show," Emma instructed. "A bottle of your finest. And anything else?"

"Rum and cola for me!" Felicia almost cheered.

"I'll defer to the lady's judgment," Namor said with a sneer. "So few of your surface-dwellers' drink are worth the piss they end up as."

Their waitress scurried away.

The hum of conversation, politely muted as it was, filled the forest-room like the sound of cicadas in the night. It went still as spotlights thrummed on, illuminating the room from a far wall to the cusp of the stage. At the wall, the curtain parted. More darkness. But in it was a green shimmer. The greenness moved forward, into the slight, with a motion that Jean came to recognize as walking. A slow, sultry strut of swaying hips and shapely long legs. A woman.

The woman looked familiar, but Jean couldn't place her. She wore a sort of nightie that covered her from head to toe in green silk, a hood going up her scalp and hanging down over her eyes. But the material was translucent. As the woman came closer, approaching the stage, Jean could discern her form through the sheer material. Large breasts stretching the front obscenely, their jiggling the only thing that hid the color of her fat nipples standing out in the filmy, clinging material. The motion of her hips similarly hid the triangle of her sex, through Jean saw flashes of brown hair standing out against the pale skin.

She was practically naked. That's what kept Jean from recognizing her for so long, because though they'd known each other for years, in the past, Rogue had always worn layer upon layer of clothing, or a costume thick enough to keep from tearing. But the pride in her step, the confident sexuality that shielded her from the world, that made it obvious even before Jean saw her face. Rogue was explosive sexuality packed into taut-stretched clothing, like she'd taken a little beauty from every woman she'd ever touched. Or a little of the fantasies of every man she'd touched.

"That can't be her," Jean said softly, only to Emma. "Rogue would never—she wouldn't."

"Then who is she?" Emma asked philosophically.

"A shapeshifter. I've heard about these places. People who can assume other forms—they make themselves look like celebrities, superheroes, so they can sell their bodies."

"If you say so," Emma yawned. "You know her better than I."

Rogue—or the imitation of her—had reached the stage. A well-developed leg stepping out of the folds of her robe, bare and creamy, to take the first step. Another took the second. She made a production simply of climbing to the stage. There, she stepped briskly to the center, the ring of candles surrounding her blanketing her nightie with light. Her silhouette inside seemed more visible than visible to Jean; like an x-ray developed on her eyelids.

Rogue casually pulled the nightie up over her head. She had the perfect hourglass figure alluded to by the skintight clothing she often wore. Her hips slim and her waist even slimmer, making her perfectly rounded ass stand out just as her voluptuously full breasts did. Her slender frame curved in just the right places, a well-crafted artwork. And like artwork, not meant to be touched.

It was almost enough to sober Jean, the shock of seeing her friend's naked body with a group comprised mostly of complete strangers. She looked at Rogue almost timidly. Even if it was a Skrull or something, it felt like she was spying on Rogue in the shower. God, Jean could see her pussy. Her pubic hair had been pared down, letting Jean see the pouting mouth of her sex, tight and small like her own had been as a girl.

Rogue stood there, just letting her audience stare at her perfection. "Hello, lovahs. My name's Anna-Marie and I'll be dancin' for you tonight. Not my first show, won't be my last. But in case it's your first show, I'm gonna let you know a couple of mah rules, okay? First off, I don't have no problem with being touched, but other people do. Maybe you've hearda that. So unless we're friends, when I come by, I recommend you keep your hands behind your back. Don't worry about yer pecker or yer pussy: I'll take care of those. If Ah want you to touch me, Ah will let you know. But I'm not wearing my usual jewelry." She tapped the hollow of her throat. "So you'll be doin' at your own risk. Hope it's worth it, sug!"