Title: Man without His Woman
Author: Tempest
Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable from X-Men. Marvel, et al, owns them, and I'm just borrowing them. No characters were harmed in the making of this fic. No copyright infringement intended.
Note: Written for the psych30 community on livejournal. I'm not totally against the Scott and Emma pairing. Of course, I don't think it's in any way better than Scott and Jean. Anyhow, I tend to see Scott's feelings for Emma as nothing more than transferred emotions, so I knew they'd be the perfect couple to write about for this particularly prompt. About the title. It's said that an English teacher wrote those words on a chalkboard and told his students to punctuate it. The men wrote it as "Woman, without her man, is nothing." The women wrote it as "Woman: Without her man is nothing." Or so it goes. The title and the opening to the fic is a play on this. Also, I would like to thank SassyLilScorpio for her impromptu beta of this story.

Man without His Woman
Scott Summers/Emma Frost
481 words

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Transference (n.) – In psychoanalysis, the process by which emotions and desires originally associated with one person, such as a parent or sibling, are unconsciously shifted to another person, especially to the analyst.

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Man, without his woman, is nothing.

Despite what anyone thought of her (especially a certain haughty weather witch), she was neither dumb enough nor blind enough to believe that any feelings Scott harbored for her had anything to do with love and devotion. There was love and there was devotion, but it was for a dead woman's ghost, feelings he'd thrust upon her because—face it—the man had a running track record with telepaths. Had she not been around, he probably would've attached himself to the first woman who claimed to read minds.

While she did believe that Scott cared for her in his own skewed way, every whispered "I love you," every tender touch, every intense emotion—both physical and psychological, was not truly meant for her. He thought he said and did those things because he really felt that way about her. Scott failed to realize that he was the puppet and his emotions were the master, and they were blinding him like blood in the eyes.

Maybe he did love her somewhere deep in his psyche, somewhere that she couldn't quite reach with her mind because of the strong mental walls he had due to Jean. But she would never know until he was able to separate the woman from the emotions. She could only continue to chip away at the mental barrier between him and her and hope that once the real feelings emerged they would be in her favor.

It was funny when she really thought about it. Scott was a capable leader (or anal to the point that he was sometimes too hard on everyone—even himself, it depended on who you asked), a natural born strategist, a logical thinker, but he didn't know how to deal with love when his dead fiancée couldn't decide if she wanted to stay dead or not. Though, Emma rather hoped she would this time. This Phoenix thing was really starting to become the proverbial thorn.

And somewhere in the back of her mind a voice—that she called Little Emma, but that was between just her and Little Emma—told her that she needed to back away from Scott. She needed to let him sort through his muddled feelings about Jean and her, and if they were truly meant to be, he'd find his way back to her. But she couldn't because she did love him, and love made her stubborn and unwillingly to accept the simple truths. The fact of the matter was: She was no Jean Grey, but she'd decided a long time ago that she'd rather accept transferred love than not have his love at all.

Woman, without her man, is nothing.

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