Author: Tempest
Disclaimer: I don’t own any characters recognizable from “X-Men” or any of its affiliated comics, movies, etc, and I guess that should go without saying that I don’t own the comics, movies, so forth and so on either. Marvel™ et al own everything. I make no money off these works; I do this simply as a means of entertainment. No copyright infringement intended.
Foreword: Finally, the Tempest has come back to ffnet! So, yeah, here’s that sequel (finally), which will be chock full o’ stuff”hopefully good stuff”because I have quite a few ideas that I want to use. Maybe too many to even be used in this story, a possible part three maybe… hmm… What the heck am I even thinking? And no, I haven’t forgotten about “Deconstructing Ororo” or “Suckers” or “Codename: Storm” or “Beauty and Pain”. No, honestly, I haven’t! I just decided to add this to Odalisque cause I’m too lazy to write another summary. It’s easier to just update what’s already up. Wow, laaaazy. This was inspired by Muse, as I mentioned in the Epilogue, and a song called “For You” by My Dying Bride (who makes some rather sensual music despite the name).
Dedication: To Nick, who never lost his sense of humor despite everything he went through this summer with Katrina. You’re inspirational, boy!
Chapter One
Not The End
Okay, what was she doing here? That’s right; she was supposed to be making things right with Logan. That’s why she was standing outside his door trying to calm her nerves. When she decided to do this, she hadn’t expected it to be so hard. She pictured herself walking up the stairs, knocking on his apartment door, telling him to never let her go. Then, she’d make some lame joke about how she’d never seen the inside of his apartment before, and they would live happily ever after, just like in the storybooks.
Except real life wasn’t a storybook, and things were not going as she expected. Before she left her job, she’d been pumped up, ready to do this. She’d gotten a few encouraging words from her boss that made her feel like she could conquer the world”love included. She’d gotten into her car and told herself that she wouldn’t stop until she was at Logan’s place.
Then, she had a second thought. She couldn’t face him on an empty stomach. In the time it took her to eat lunch and drive to his complex, she’d started second guessing herself. The “what ifs?” were starting to take over her thoughts. She tried to summon up that courage she’d had before she gotten to his place, the courage she’d had when she decided that now was the time to reach out to him. But it wasn’t forthcoming. She didn’t even know how she made it up the stairs to his floor.
Now, she was just standing there like a statue staring at his door. Her lunch hour would be over soon, so it was now or never. She ran a hand briskly through her hair and raised her fist to knock on the door, but she paused before she could knock. What if he didn’t really want to see her? What if he had moved on after all these months? He could’ve moved on to the next available warm body, and she would be making a fool of herself.
Besides, what if he wasn’t home? What if he didn’t live there anymore? Once again, she had to ask herself what she knew about him? What did he do when he wasn’t working? Was he even still working at The Phoenix? Did he enjoy the solitude of his apartment or did he like to lose himself in a large crowd? Was she really doing the right thing?
She put her fist down in defeat. She wasn’t going to do it, and there was nothing she could do to make herself knock on that door. She backed away, watching the door, as if he would open it at any moment and catch her. She quickly ran down the stairs to her car.
She sat in her car breathing hard, trying to keep the tears from coming. Goddess, why did she want to cry? “Because I’m a coward,” she answered aloud. This was her one chance. What if she just missed her opportunity because she was too afraid to face him? What if this was the end because she couldn’t swallow her fear and leap without looking?
She composed herself and reminded herself that this really wasn’t the end. She’d work up her nerve sooner or later. Maybe now just wasn’t the time for her to rekindle anything with him. When the ball really got rolling, she’d be unable to stop what was”or wasn’t”supposed to happened between them.
By the time she got back to work, she’d convinced herself that what was supposed to happen would happen. If she was meant to be with Logan, she would be. Right? She believed in fate and all that good stuff, but fate might need a little prodding in the right direction. She walked into the building telling herself that she wouldn’t be discouraged.
She rode up the elevator, telling herself the same thing. This was not the end. This was not her last chance. She continued to tell herself that as she stood in front of an office. She pushed thoughts of Logan aside for a moment. Now, it was time to be business. It wasn’t the time to show how one man effected her. She pushed opened the door and paused when she heard music playing.
“I wouldn’t have pegged you as a Hall and Oates fan.” Ororo said when she entered the office. The dark-haired woman quickly turned off the CD player before turning to Ororo. “They’re just not dark and brooding as you usually like your music.”
“And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll never tell anyone, either,” the woman said, taking the CD from the player and replacing it with something loud and rightly obscene. “So, how did things go?”
“Things didn’t go at all. I backed out at the last second.” Ororo said. Her hand batted at a non-existent strand of hair, a habit she hadn’t been able to exorcise after she cut her hair. She waited for the woman to ask her what went wrong, but was pleasantly surprised when she didn’t. The woman wasn’t exactly known for tactfulness.
“So you’re in love with this guy, but you’re too chicken to get what you want. Oh well, you know what they say; amantes sunt amentes.”
“And just what does that mean?”
“Lovers are lunatics. That’s why I’ll never fall in love. People who are in love always make fools of themselves.” She said resolutely.
“Sometimes when you’re in love you don’t mind making a fool of yourself.”
“Whatever you say, Ororo. You’re all sunshine and rainbows, anyway,” the woman said, not looking at Ororo. Ororo just shook her head at the woman. The woman frowned at the spastic, crazed lyrics coming from the CD player. “God, they’re awful. Aren’t they awful? Who writes this kind of shit?”
“I don’t even know what they’re saying, Selene.” Ororo said. She couldn’t understand a word of the song, and she was starting to believe that the other words were insignificant in the wake of all the profanities in the song. Ororo thought it was amazing how some groups couldn’t say one clear word except “fuck.”
“Unimportant, they’ve already bombed with me. Lunch?” Selene asked standing up from her desk. She didn’t even bother to turn the CD off. She started digging through her briefcase, mumbling to herself.
“It’s not time for lunch, yet, and don’t you have a meeting in an hour? And I just went on my lunch break.” Ororo reminded her. Selene had given her an early lunch break to handle some unfinished business”that funnily enough was still unfinished.
“How many times do I have to tell you, Ororo, my dear?” Selene said, looking up from her briefcase. She looked down again and continued to rummage through her papers. Ororo heard her say “a-ha!” as she pulled a compact from beneath the storm of papers.
“I know. I know. You’re the boss.” And when you were the boss of your own music magazine, you did whatever you wanted, and Selene never let her forget that. “The others already think you’re playing favorites.”
“And if I am? You’re the only person worth talking to in this dump.” Selene said.
Ororo started working for Selene not too long after she came back to the States. She mostly applied for the job because she needed something to do. After spending a few months in Spain, she decided her place was back home, especially after Joaquín asked her to marry him. She still had things she needed to sort out. She enjoyed Joaquín’s company, but she wasn’t ready for the marriage thing again.
So, she’d come home, telling herself that she was going to see how things with Logan would work out. When Logan followed her to Spain, she told him that she wouldn’t make him any promises, that she would wait to see what happened once she got back to New York. There was only one problem now. She’d been back in the city for months, and she hadn’t tried to contact him once.
“But you hired every person who works here.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I like the little suckups, and you were the only person I hired because I thought you were good conversation.”
“And here I was thinking you hired me for my editing skills.”
“I like your conversation skills better.”
Ororo knew that Selene would never admit that she might be lonely. She always told Ororo that she’d taken the cutthroat route to gain her status as one of the most dominant women in the industry. Needless to say, Selene hadn’t made many friends along the way, and the few she had she’d lost a long time ago.
Selene could be a ruthless bitch. Ororo couldn’t take that away from her. When Ororo had her first interview with Selene, the woman had treated her like the dirt of the earth. Ororo was sure she hadn’t got the job. She’d listened in near silence as Selene ranted about hard work and dedication. The business wasn’t about making friends. It was about being successful, being dominant, and ruining the competition.
Selene was caustic, overly demanding, and highly selective among other things. She said whatever she was thinking no matter how it might sound once it was in the air. The opinions of others mattered little to her, and she was like a slave driver when it came to her magazine and deadlines. It was almost as if she worked in a community that was ruled by the iron hand of Selene.
And though Selene always told Ororo that everything was about the business, Ororo thought that somewhere along the way Selene had stopped believing that. She kept up the act because that was what people expected from her, but if she truly believed that everything was about the business, she would’ve never hired Ororo because she liked her “conversation skills.”
Selene primped into the compact mirror, making kissy faces at herself in the mirror. Selene liked to tell everyone that she would be young and beautiful forever, no matter the cost. Ororo wasn’t sure how old Selene was, but she knew Selene had been around the music scene for quite some time, and she still didn’t look any older than 30. Behind Selene’s back, the others joked that she sold her soul to the devil, or stole the life force of others like a vampire, or something equally as ridiculous. Ororo thought that Selene just had a good plastic surgeon, a damn good surgeon.
She knew Selene would try to pry what happened out of her, but she wouldn’t just come out and as Ororo. She find a way to subtly bring up the subject. It didn’t matter that Selene treated love like some kind of community disease that she had to avoid. She always wanted to hear the sordid details of such things.
Ororo hadn’t went into everything that happened before she left for Spain with Selene. The only reason that she’d even told her as much as she had about Logan was because Selene suckered her into going to The Phoenix one night where Ororo had hid in the darkest corner she could find the whole night with her hoodie pulled tightly over her head.
Selene had wanted answers for Ororo’s odd behavior at the club. No, “wanted” wasn’t the appropriate word. Demanded was a better choice of wording. So, Ororo complied, giving Selene the extremely condensed version of what happened, and she’d been getting unwanted love advice from a certified love hater ever since.
She didn’t want Selene analyzing her relationship with Logan. She didn’t want anyone analyzing it. She found that people always knew exactly what they would do if they were in her situation, but if they were face with the decisions, the feelings, the thoughts she had, would they really know what they would do?
It was her experience that love was a many-layered thing that required more than one reaction. At any given time, it could elicit a million different responses from a person. What one answer to those emotions could truly be the “right” thing to do? Was there even any one way to go about dealing with love? She didn’t think so, but people forgot that love was complicated, multi-faceted, and confusing.
And while she didn’t mind advice most of the time, she found that a lot of advice didn’t take her feelings into consideration. She was supposed to be this cold, emotionless woman who could separate herself completely from love to do what she had to do. She couldn’t, and she didn’t know many people who could. Your love for someone would always effect the decisions that were made in regards to that person, no matter how much pain they caused you or how confused they left you.
Ororo continued to think about that as she walked with Selene to a deli a few blocks from their building. She tuned Selene out as she thought about Logan and what she really needed to do about him.
If Logan had waited for her, did she truly deserve it? She’d blamed him so much for holding her back, but what about her? Hadn’t she all but told him to wait for her that night in Spain? Hadn’t she asked a lot of him then? While she spent her days in Spain with a man she cared for but didn’t love, hadn’t she put a lot of pressure on Logan to just wait? Had that even been fair to him? Had she kept him from true happiness?
Maybe she wasn’t what he truly needed. Maybe he’d spent these last few months denying himself what was truly good for him. And… maybe she just needed to stop over contemplating before she gave herself a blood clot in her brain. She tried to focus on the conversation Selene was basically holding up by herself, but she couldn’t, even after they sat at the table. She nodded and added a one-word syllable at the appropriate places, but she wasn’t truly listening.
“Christ, it’s Emma fucking Frost.” Selene said with a growl, looking at a point beyond Ororo’s head. That was the first thing that caught Ororo’s attention since Selene started talking. “Somebody up there hates me.”
Ororo smiled and shook her head at Selene. She wasn’t the biggest Emma fan, either. Emma was always half-dressed no matter what the season, but it wasn’t Emma’s manner of dress that bothered her. Something just didn’t settle right the few times she’d been around Emma for any significant amount of time. There was something devious about Emma’s manner. She was like a predator waiting to pounce.
And she didn’t know how Jean ever overlooked Emma’s arrogance. It followed Emma like a cheap perfume “ repelling some, fascinating others. Then again, arrogance was an attitude that Ororo found prevalent in those who always got what they wanted. And Emma never made it a secret that she was born into affluence.
Ororo turned to look in the direction that Selene was staring. Her eyes widened for a moment when she saw Emma hanging on Scott’s arm. She averted her eyes quickly as if she’d just saw something vile. Ororo turned back around quickly, hoping that they hadn’t seen her staring at them. Please, don’t let them see me, she said to herself. Maybe if she hoped hard enough…
No such luck.
“Ororo, is that you?” Emma asked behind her. She grimaced before putting on her best fake smile. She turned around and smiled at the couple. “I knew that was you. When I saw the hair, I had no doubts. And Selene, what a pleasant surprise.”
“I wish I could say the same.” Selene said, twisting her lip at Emma.
A cruel chuckle passed Emma’s lips. “You always were a little too vocal for your own good.” Emma said, her mouth cocked into a smirk. Ororo watched Selene’s black lacquered nails grip the table. Ororo knew that Emma had about three seconds before her face ended up under Selene’s nails instead.
“You know me. I’ve never done anything that was good for me.” Selene’s jaw tightened with her response, her eyes narrowed, her nostrils flared, the line of her mouth became hard and cruel. Ororo had seen that before when things were going wrong at the magazine. That usually meant that someone was about to become intimately acquainted with Selene’s fist “ damn the consequences.
“So true, dear.” Emma said with a conspiratorial grin. “And how’s Sebastian these days?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Selene said through clenched teeth, pushing her chair back a little. Emma only continued to grin that same infuriating grin. Ororo let her head sink to her hands, praying that Selene wouldn’t get them banned from another restaurant. Eating options were starting to become limited with Selene.
“Ororo, I thought you were still in Spain.” Scott said, interrupting the two women before things could go wrong. She’d almost forgotten that Scott was standing there through the fog of tension Selene and Emma were generating.
She could already feel the awkwardness starting to pinch her skin. She almost wished that things had jumped off between Emma and Selene if it meant avoiding talking to Scott. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to act with him. On one hand, she knew that what happened before she left for Spain was one big mess, but at the same time, she still felt some loyalty to Jean”however sad that may sound.
“Oh… I’ve been back for a while, now,” she said, deliberately not looking at Scott. Her salad suddenly became just a tad bit more interesting. They fell into an uncomfortable silence.
Maybe, if she’d been a little braver, she would have asked him about Jean in front of Emma. She still didn’t know what happened with that situation, but apparently, it hadn’t gone too well. When she’d come back from Spain, she hadn’t wanted to get involved in that drama again. Maybe that was part of the reason she hadn’t let anyone know that she was back.
Then a thought crossed her mind, making her breath catch in her throat a little. If Scott was with Emma, did that mean Jean was with Logan? She just didn’t believe that Scott was the type that would cheat on his wife, but she hadn’t thought Jean was the type to cheat on her husband. Look how wrong she’d been there.
After more strained conversation and death-dagger glares being tossed by Selene and Emma, Scott and Emma finally left them in peace. Ororo couldn’t think of a time she’d been more uncomfortable.
“Trash. It’s true that money cannot buy a woman decorum.” Selene said, rolling her eyes after Emma. “Can you believe her nerve?”
Ororo shook her head in response, but what she couldn’t really believe was that Scott actually liked a woman like that. It wasn’t just the fact that Emma was suposed to be Jean’s friend. Though, she thought Emma would be the type of woman who would take another woman’s man. No, what bothered her was that Emma didn’t seem like the type of woman that Scott would appreciate. She was nothing like Jean.
But she couldn’t put Scott in a box. It wasn’t fair to him to think that he was supposed to be interested in one type of woman. But it was Emma fucking Frost, to borrow from Selene. “How do you know Emma? And who is Sebastian?” Ororo asked.
“I won’t tell you about Sebastian, but trust me, you don’t want to know how I know Emma. How do you know Emma? You don’t seem like the kind of person who’d associate with that bottom feeder.”
“She’s a friend of a friend.” That wasn’t completely a lie. She had been friends with Jean when she met Emma. If Jean knew about Emma and Scott, she had to be in some state of hysteria.
“Your friend has bad taste in friends, but I refuse to let the little bitch take over my conversation. She’s not worth it. So, on to the real point of this lunch. I have to go to this benefit this weekend at Xavier’s Institute for the Gifted. The benefit is also a banquet to thank all the businesses who have donated to the school to keep it open and able to accept children of all walks of life. I’m not going by myself, so you’re my guest.”
“Your guest? Selene, I didn’t know you cared.” Ororo put a hand to her chest in mock gratitude. She decided not to mention how Selene hadn’t asked but told her that she was going to that benefit.
“I don’t. I’m just not going there to be bored by a bunch of stuffy businessmen and women who want to talk about their portfolios and the stock market. And I want to take someone that I know won’t lose their all their sensibilities when they’re around a few rich snobs.”
“I’m honored. I’ve always thought the Institute presented wonderful opportunities for children.” Ororo said, chewing on lip thoughtfully. Then, she stopped abruptly. “Wait… you donated to a real cause?”
Author’s Notes: I’m getting there with the interaction. No worries. More will happen, soon. For those of you who know Selene from comicverse, I know she’s meaner, but for some reason, I’ve always harbored some soft spot for her and had to make her less mean. Just work with me here. LMAO. Everyone go see Memoirs of a Geisha on the 23rd. (And hope they did the book, which was beautiful, some justice!) Excuse any mistakes. I’m correcting as I go along.
