Brief Candle
by Karen

Emma runs the smooth fabric through her fingers enjoying the feel of the silk against her skin. It's been a long time since she's had the chance to just get out and browse the fancy designer stores. You'd think that after spending most of her young adult life pushing this sort of merchandise as a sales girl she would prefer the more adventurous and often more dangerous exploits as a member of Mutant X.

No, sometimes we wear masks, sometimes we can be ourselves, sometimes the masks are truer than our own face." Emma breathes a sigh and lets the bolt of silk fall to the display table while she tries to block out the wave of emotions that suffse through the air and filt through her senses of those around her. Yes, she'll pick up the more mudane sort of attention but that's only to be expected.

No one ever told her from the get go that being a tele-empath would ever be this difficult, of course she's learned the hard way, that nothing worth having was ever easy. A random phrase floats up from one of the many rambling speeches Adam has given them ,"Okay, you know you've lost your mind when you laugh and cry at the same time."

Just take her most recent experience, for example, actually split into two identical yet seprate halves of her personality. "Everyone should get the chance to be beside themselves, it's a very diverting experience." She laughs, and it's a brittle one, one she hardly recognizes as her own. "Bad Emma, wonder where, buried deep in my psyche she came from? Or was it just an effect of the persoanlity split. I know Adam, being Adam, will never tell me, just as Adam only tells us so much that he thinks we need to know and nothing beyond that. Still, I wonder if I could summon that Bad Emma, take no quarters Emma back again?"

Emma doesn't completely remember all the details of her experience, she does recall with some satisfaction punching Mason Eckhart in the face, now that was satisfying, with or without her powers. The rest of the time events and faces swim in out of her consciousness and everything else is pretty much a blur, sounds and voices a white noise in the background of her mind.

On the heels of that thought, she thinks of Jesse Kilmartin, and wonders if he's still waiting on the bench outside the shop. As well as they've got this shopping routine, cute couple thing down, hell, they could prbably pass as an old married couple. "Wonder if we could pull off a convincing undercover mission using that as our background story," Emma muses over the possiblities and the various scenarios that might play out and then discards the notion. It was not so much that it was a crazy, wishful thinking at best, or that they would not be able to pull it off, it was more whether or not Jesse would even agree to such a proposition.

After a few more moments of thought the answer ends up where she expects it to, firmly in the negative. Emotions are a tricky thing, and sometimes it been difficult for her to seperate her own from those of other people that are filtered through her own mind.

"Laughing and crying at the same time, huh Adam,' Emma mutters under her breath, "Guess it must be like trying to walk and chew gum at the same time. Better go collect Jeses, he's probably bored out his skull while I've been shopping."

Emma realizes that out of all her friends and teammates in Mutant X, it was Jesse who finally brought her back to her senses, even if reversing the electricl synergy charge the other new mutant girl orignally hit her with, had Brennan's doing. "Get a grip, girl. We're just friends, right?

If they were just friends why then is she having these random thoughts? She loves all of her friends equally, but is there more to it than that? Maybe, but right now its not a question that requires an answer right away.

 

Silverlake: Authors / Mediums / Titles / Links / List / About / Updates / Silverlake Remix