Tell a story about the dumbest thing you've ever done.
Love is for the weak, darlings. Trust me on this. It's the dumbest thing a person can do. I fell in love not too long ago, and it hasn't helped me out in the least. It may, in fact, have been the stupidest thing that I could have done to myself. But, before we get to that part, I suppose explaining a little bit of my past might help you understand why it is that I believe love is for the weak. Being the middle daughter of the Winston Frost's quite mentally and creatively suppressed family, I didn't exactly have the most loved life. My oldest sister, Adrienne, was a selfish, vain, evil cow of a woman, and Cordelia herself was much too busy trying to be different from everybody else to actually love anyone...though it's safe to say that I was closer to Cordelia than I was to Adrienne. Cordelia at least had some semblence of a heart. There was, of course, my brother Christian, who I truly was close to, and who was perhaps the only person in my family who - in retrospect - I did love. I cared for my mother, but that was different. I didn't love her as a person, I only loved her because she was my mother, if that makes any sense to you.
In any case, the environment that we were raised in was very unloving, cold, and possibly even sterile. Winston - I gave up calling him Father so long ago - wanted us to be perfect little carbon copies of him. He especially wanted this for Christian, who was gay - something that Winston should never have discovered. Of course he did, and Christian was then hauled away into a mental asylum because of that, after attempting suicide. Really, my family was like something out of Dynasty or Dallas.
I then fell in love with Ian Kendall, my teacher. Again, I was shown that love was a weakness when Winston - as he was by now prone to do with the men in my life - got rid of him as well...though I did meet him later on in life. Again, a weakness. He discovered I was a mutant when I told him, and I had thought that he would understand. He didn't, and my heart was broken again, for a second time.
This was a theme that would repeat throughout my life every couple of years until I learned something important - being cold, frigid, and calculating may make you a bitch, but falling in love only to have your heart broken makes you love's bitch. Really, the former is much less painful than the latter. I can say this with full conviction, because I did a stupid thing again, recently.
Sometime very soon after joining the X-Men, I started a psychic affair of sorts with Scott Summers. Cyclops. Husband to Jean Grey, the host of the Phoenix entity. I don't know why I started the affair in the first place. It was pointless...but it was begun. Sometime, during this seductive affair in which I taunted Scott and played with him and forced him to see me in a more...romantic...light, I fell in love with him. Head over heels, stupidly in love with him. Not the way I loved Ian Kendall, not the way I had ever loved anyone else. This was...different. Powerful. Heartbreaking. Jean, of course, discovered our secret, and what ensued was a horrible psychic battle between myself and Jean. For all my powers, for all my abilities, for all the power that I had gained over the years, learning on my own, learning from Astrid Bloom, learning from Sebastian Shaw, it turned out that I was still nothing in front of Jean - everyone's favorite X-Woman, it would seem. She destroyed me. She went through the hallways of my mind, ransacking and raping it, pulling out every dark, heartbreaking memory of mine that I had tried for so long to destroy. She forced me to remember myself walking out on my family, she forced me to remember Ian Kendall and Astrid Bloom, and god, the way I had first begun my affair with Scott. She forced me to remember the deaths of so many of my students...she gave me the worst torture that anyone could give me by forcing me to relive my horrid past.
And why? Because I fell in love. Again.
I'm with Scott now, and Jean is out of the picture. For how long, I don't know. The woman can return from the dead any time she damn well pleases, it would seem. I am going to stick by him, for as long as this lasts. But once this is over...don't ever plan on me falling in love again. I couldn't bear another heartbreak.
Muse: Emma Grace Frost, aka the White Queen
Fandom: Astonishing X-Men
Words: 802
Rating: PG