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She woke to a knife in her head.

Emma had learned not to groan at the pain; it alerted the orderlies to her waking long before she had prepared herself to deal with their thoughts like razors across the edges of her mind. She didn't move, didn't open her eyes, but slowly and carefully gathered together the small amounts of control she had developed and worked at dulling the pain of too many voices inside her mind. It was only when she had managed to reduce it from migraine-level to not-nice-but-could-be-dealt-with-headache-level that she opened her eyes.

To a world she did not in any way recognise.

Instead of the white, bare walls of her cell (they could call it a room if they wanted to, but she was well aware of what it really was) in the asylum, she was on a camp bed in an office. A luxuriously appointed camp bed, she noted. In an office full of electronic equipment that looked nothing like she was used to. Winston had certainly had the most up-to-date computer equipment available to him, but it was hideously bulky in comparison with the sleek, slim whiteness of all of the equipment in the room. The office almost seemed made of light, so white was the decor. Emma glanced through the window of the office and noted that the whiteness seemed confined only to the single room; what she could see outside was more what she'd consider conventional decor for an office.

Emma contemplated for a moment whether it was some kind of test, some sick orderly joke (and she'd been subject to enough of them to be wary) but in the end, curiosity won out and she sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the camp bed. She reached out carefully and stroked the edge of the sleek computer that sat on the desk, confirming its solidity.

Then she laughed at herself. Solidity. Whatever this was, this was not solid. She was in the asylum and none of what was in front of her could be real. This was either - some kind of waking hallucination or they'd managed to get the drugs back into her somehow and the anti-psychotics were producing one of the more unusual reactions to her telepathy that she'd come across, but not entirely unprecedented.

Reality was not this. There were no sleek dreams of technology or open doors in reality. There were the walls and there was the knife in her head and there were the things he did to her when he thought no-one was looking.

There was one way, Emma decided, to prove it to herself. Settling back down onto the bed, with a quiet sigh, Emma released the pitiful shields she had managed to put together and opened her mind.

Beyond anything she had ever felt. Thoughts came at her in waves, in pounding waves, in torrents and streams of thoughts that pierced her mind, beyond knives, beyond pain, the thoughts of the mad and the broken clawed at her in such volume that she couldn't even grasp the simplest shape of what they were saying, too many thoughts in her head so there was nothing left of her, falling into the hole that was everyone else, so Emma Frost whirled away, broken into fragments that she could... not... hold... together...

A very, very long time later, after she'd regathered the flotsam and jetsam of her own mind and stitched it back together, rebuilding the fragile shields that held out the worst of it, Emma cried quietly into her pillow for a short time. Eventually she sat up and, crossing her legs, settled into the lotus position, waiting. Someone would come for her. Someone always did.

The figure that finally opened the door wasn't clad in the white pants and shirts of the orderlies, or even the green-grey coveralls of the cleaning staff. He wasn't tall, and built slenderly under the tan trenchcoat he wore. The only thing remarkable about him (past him being a stranger in the first place) were his eyes; red against black. They flickered around the room for a moment, taking everything in. Unlike the orderlies, his thoughts didn't blare at her as he got closer. Instead, it was like a whisper, barely there and flickering like a constantly changing radio.

"Emma. Can you hear me?" The fact that Remy and Emma were often at odds didn't stop him from learning all that he could about his erstwhile partner. He'd looked between the lines of her public history to know about the asylum, and was smart enough to guess the connection between her eventual escape and the mysterious deaths that stalked some of the former employees years later. He also knew about telepaths, and how more than a few ended up damaged, burnt out, and completely mad from their powers before they could learn to control them.

Which meant he knew enough to know that Emma Frost could be any number of things right now, and most of the options were not good.

The smile that curved Emma’s lips was the sickest thing that had dwelt there in a long time, as she took in the details of the man who stood before her. “Why shouldn’t you know my name?” she murmured. “It’s not like I’ve got any privacy outside my head, so why would inside my head be any different?” The effort of talking meant taking some of her fierce concentration away from her ragged shields and a lance of babbled thoughts ripped open her mind for a few seconds. Closing her eyes, gritting her teeth, Emma swallowed down the pain again. “No secrets here. No secrets from me.” Carefully Emma patched her shield again. “I don’t want your secrets,” she hissed as the voices quietened. “Go away!”

"I can't do dat." Remy said, coming into the room slowly. He didn't want to spook her, but right now, she was the fragile link. He needed her abilities to help reverse this, but more importantly, he needed her under control. With Emma's position and stature, the sudden regression could do an unparalleled amount of damage.

"Where do you think dat you are, Emma? Who's office is dis?"

Emma grinned, baring her teeth. "It's not an office and you know it, no matter what it looks like. I don't know what you've done to me, but I'm not going to pretend that this is some special world where I can walk out the door and back home to Daddy dearest. I am not going to let you play those games with me. I'm on the ward, you will not unlock those doors and let me out and you have - you have -," she gritted her teeth for a moment, "you've changed the drugs or something. This is not real." She banged the heel of her hand against the centre of her forehead for a moment. "I can feel them in my head still. They're mad. I'm mad. And I do not believe this."

"Maybe dat's true." Remy had gotten closer but stopped a safe few feet before the camp bed. He sat down at the edge of a white guest chair facing her. "Maybe what I am is just part of you own mind. Dat means you created me. Concentrate on me."

He'd spent hours talking about telepathy with Betsy. If there was one weakness in Remy's profile, it was against telepaths. No matter how good your shields, a determined telepath would get through them eventually. The key wasn't necessarily the thickest walls but the most flexible ones. And those talks had provide the Cajun with a lot of information to add to his often over-looked analytical side.

"Shouldn't all of my secrets be obvious already? You can't hear dem de same way, can you?"

The sidelong look Emma shot at Remy was wounded, like she'd been betrayed by her own thoughts into opening herself to more pain, but then it shifted into something more speculative. Slowly she settled back onto the camp bed and composed herself, her expression shifting into something almost meditative before she finally risked reaching out.

It was no barely noticeable tendril of perfectly controlled, precisely aimed telepathy that Emma sent towards Remy's mind. Instead it had all the subtlety of a caveman's club flailing at something in the dark for a few seconds, randomly trying to connect with whatever monster lurked outside the firelight. The blow against Remy's shields was heavy but so clumsy it was easily deflected. Then it was gone.

It took several minutes, but finally some colour began to reappear in Emma's cheeks, drained snow-white as she reached outwards, and shortly afterwards she opened her eyes to look at Remy again.

"What are you doing?" she demanded. "How do you do that? I need to know."

"I want you to think about all de noise in you head, like de were all individual speakers. Focus on one, just one, and listen to it. Focus on it. Focus hard enough dat de rest of the noise is just dat, noise." This was Betsy's words coming out of his mouth. He had discussed this in theory, and helped that she was right.

"Can you hear it? Just dat one voice."

Emma closed her eyes again and concentrated on the babble inside her head. She's muted it down to levels she could bear, but now she plucked one of the voices out of the maelstrom. Slowly and carefully she focused her concentration until she could begin to distinguish it from the rest of the babble. Finally, the single muttering voice became clear, an inner dialogue around shopping for something called an iPad in the sales, and Emma opened her eyes and nodded at the man in front of her.

"I can hear it," she said. "Just one. That's what you want?" She nearly lost the voice back into the babble again, but flailed after it and caught it before it slipped away. What, she wondered idly, was a facebook and why on earth would you friend someone with it? Let alone - tweeting?

"Bien. Now, de one you focused on? Let it go and focus on youself." He hoped he was getting Betsy's lesson right. She'd explained it carefully one night, over drinks in a tiny pub in West Germany, while hunting down a contact.

For a moment, Emma tried to puzzle out what the stranger meant by "focus on yourself" but then she realised that she was just trying to put off letting go of that single voice in her mind. Concentrating on that one voice, she realised, had made the others recede backwards into - some form of peace. Letting go of the one would bring them back, she thought, and then understood what she was being told. Let go of the one voice and listen only to her own voice, that's what she needed to do. If she could hold her own inner voice at the centre, then the rest should fall away...

Her inner voice had been swamped for so long that it took some time before Emma could pick it apart from the babble that surrounded it. Finally she found herself listening to only two loud voices: the one who was apparently ecstatic about their purchases and her own, fiercely determined, inner monologue, the mind that had held itself together for so long despite all the things that had been done to it.

With a soft sigh, Emma let go of the other voice and listened, for the first time in a very long time, only to her own voice in her head. There were others, but they murmured in the background like a conversation you could listen to if you wanted to, not a shouting cacophony of crowds all trying to to get her attention right here, right now.

For the first time since she had woken, Emma Frost felt no pain.

"You still wit me?" It was odd talking to Emma Frost like a child, but Remy had to keep the situation in perspective. They were children, and trying to treat them like the adults they had been wouldn't work. And he needed them if he was going to stop this from continuing.

"No," replied Emma, very gently. "I think I'm with you for the first time." She tilted her head at the stranger in some kind of acknowledgement, still enthralled by the quiet in her mind. "I don't know what they did to the drugs, but you are by far the best hallucination I've had since daddy dearest put me in here." She pursed her lips for a moment. "Well, except maybe for that one with the girl that time, but she might have been real. I'm not entirely certain and no one ever tells me anything in here."

Remy's hands twitched. He didn't know what Emma's life had been other than broad strokes up until now. Suddenly, a lot of adult Emma made more sense.

"Well, dat's fair. I'm going to tell you de truth, whether you believe it or not. De important thing if dat I need you help. So you tell me what it is dat you want for it. We make a deal, non".

"Make a deal? With my own imagination?" Emma shrugged. "If that's important to you. Keep the voices out. Make this - this quiet keep happening and I'll do whatever you want." She looked at Remy speculatively for a moment. "If I follow you around, maybe you'll even be able to teach me to do other things." She waggled her fingers at him, like a cartoon version of casting a spell. "Kill you with my brain, or something." Her drawn intake of breath was very quick and very shallow and her next words were murmured to herself. "Kill him with my brain. I'd like to know how to do that."

Remy made a point not to look too close. Emma's privacy was deathly important to her, and she wouldn't appreciate him using this situation as an opportunity to gather intelligence.

"Let's go den."

Her adult feline movements weren't there yet, but Emma still uncurled with a startling grace, sliding to the end of the camp bed and onto her feet. She gestured lightly with her hand, indicating Remy should precede her.

"Lead on, MacDuff," she said, her eyes suddenly bright. "I can't wait to see where you're going to take me next."