Heyoka: Chapter 7
by Minisinoo
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Notes: They're Marvel's (mostly), not mine. Regarding the issues of distance and other limitations on Grey's telepathy, I'm going by what the movie implied, not the comics. She seemed able only to read minds if she was in fairly close proximity, and with some concentration on her part. Again, a warning for the squeamish. Blood ahead. The picture at left isn't the best, but it's better than the other I had. See Part I for other disclaimers.
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The light of the bedside lamp flashed off glass. Hypnotic. Jean Grey turned the bottle in her fingers, round and round, watched the yellow light flash off glass.
White pills lay inside, inscribed MF. RU 486. Mifeprisotone. And Misoprostol, too, the other half of the equation. One to cause the uterus to shed its lining and its new occupant and the other to induce the uterus to expel it all a few days later. She'd written a prescription for herself and had it filled last week, just in case. She had seven weeks from the date of conception to make her decision. Seven weeks. But the sooner the better.
Her hand went to her abdomen and she glanced down at the book sitting open beside her on her bed. Old medical textbook. Obstetrics. It had images of embryos and fetuses at each week of gestation. At three weeks, the thing inside her looked more like a bug larva than a human being, a bug larva the size of a grain of rice. Lots of early pregnancies ended naturally. So what if this one had a little help? She'd had to kill before.
But not like this.
Didn't you swear an oath, Jean Grey? To preserve life. Not take it. "First, do no harm . . . ."
Light flashed off glass. Hypnotic. Tempting.
The door opened. Jean jumped and slammed the textbook shut, dropped the bottle on the floor and had to grab for it, shove it in the pocket of her suit jacket
So much for inconspicuous.
Scott was staring at her. "Jean?"
"You just startled me." She picked up the textbook and took it back to slide into its spot between the others in the shelves that ran along one wall. His books, and those of hers she didn't use much. Which was why the obstetrics book was here instead of in the lab.
"What's going on?"
She swallowed. She'd more or less promised Ororo that she was going to tell him, but now that the moment of truth had arrived, lying looked far more appealing. The return of Logan had thrown everything off kilter. If she just hadn't reacted to him so obviously. If Scott just hadn't gone to stand by Grace. But neither of them had ever been good actors.
Now, she said, "It's nothing. I was just thinking." That was the truth. But it was also the sort of vague almost-challenge that she knew would get him to react instead of act.
"About me?" he asked, predictable. "Or about Logan?"
About neither of you.
But she didn't say that. Instead she turned away. Let him assume what he wanted.
And because she wasn't looking, wasn't paying attention, he had his hand inside her jacket pocket before she could stop him, had the bottle and its deadly white pills. She grabbed for it on instinct but he pulled it away, above their heads. He wasn't taller than her. In fact, she was half an inch taller than he was. But his arms were longer and she didn't try very hard. It was too late anyway. He shoved the bottle almost under her nose. "What the hell is this? Are you sick and didn't tell me? Is that why you've been acting so strangely?"
He was worried about her. Genuinely. "It's Mifeprisotone and Misoprostol. And I'm not sick."
"So what are the pills for?"
She didn't know what to say, waved a hand and started to cry, put her other hand over her mouth. He watched her a minute more, then shook his head and, bottle still in hand, went over to the bookshelf. She didn't think he could possibly guess which book she'd put away, even though he'd seen her do it. But alarm made her forget his mutant ability to track motion. His eyes didn't see like others' did; he could triangulate and pinpoint with astonishing accuracy. Nobody at the mansion would play pool with him. No doubt, too, in her haste, Jean had shoved that book in a bit further than the others. He picked it out easily, weighed it in his hand.
God, what she wouldn't give to see his eyes right now.
When she'd slammed the book shut, she'd wrinkled the page. He found the right spot, although she doubted he needed the confirmation. The title alone said enough.
His hand was shaking when he put it back. This wasn't the way she'd meant him to find out. "Scott "
He cut her off. "Which one of the girls is pregnant? And which of the boys did it?" There was rage in his voice. "Don't protect them, Jeannie. We have to deal with this. I assume the professor already knows? And what are the pills for? Isn't it a little late for birth control?"
She almost laughed. He had it all turned around.
"I'm the pregnant girl, Scott. And you're the boy who did it."
He gaped. She'd never expected to see that expression on a real face, just in bad romance novels. But he honest to god had his mouth hanging two inches open. Shut it with a snap. "How long have you known?"
"For certain? Only since this morning."
"For certain?"
"Well, a woman doesn't usually take a pregnancy test for no reason."
"But how?" he asked now, baffled.
"For pity's sake, Scott!" she screamed at him. "How do you think this happened? You're the math teacher! I'm three weeks pregnant! Do the math! What were we doing in here three weeks and three days ago?"
Because God knew, they hadn't done it since.
"We weren't careful that night," she added, more calmly.
"Once is all it takes." He sounded rueful. Then he ran a hand over his face, careful not to dislodge the glasses. "Christ. I didn't even think about it later. Or obviously at the time."
"Men never do."
"That's not fair, Jean. And it's not true, either." It wasn't, but she didn't apologize. She was frightened because she couldn't read him right now and her fear made her cruel. His body language was all Trademark Summers Control. For the first time, she realized just how much she hated that. Men never said what they felt, just hoped their women could read their minds. How perfect for him that she, literally, could. How lazy it made him. How thoughtless. How cold. "So why the pills?" he asked now, voice level. "The mif-whatever?"
"I'd think that would be obvious," she replied, still feeling vicious. "You don't want a baby right now. You've made that very clear in the past."
It took him a long moment to get that, to understand it. Then he looked down at the bottle still in his hand. "My god. What is this stuff, Jean?"
"I told you already. Mifeprisotone and Misoprostol. The abortion pill. Pills, really."
Caught gaping twice in one night, though surely he'd half-guessed the answer already. Then in one fluid motion, he raised his arm and hurled the bottle at a wall. Jean flinched, thinking for an instant that he might hurl it at her. Glass shattered, wainscoting cracked, white pills exploded in random scattery.
"Godfuckingdamn you! It's my baby, too!"
"And it's my body! Don't tell me what to do with my body!"
"I thought you were afraid I didn't want it? It sounds like you don't!" He spun away from her, stalked over to their bookshelves and back an explosion of motion to release anger, muzzle it. Then he stopped in front of her again. "Couldn't you at least have asked me first? If we're a couple, it's a decision we should make together. Like we made the baby together in the first place."
"But we're not a couple, are we? We're a habit. It's not me you want anymore. It's not me who you watch at the dinner table, or out in the yard!" She wiped hair out of her face; her hand was shaking. "You used to hang around the lab. Now you hang around her office. I meant this to be freedom. I was trying to give you your freedom. Isn't that what men always want?"
"Can you touch my mind and tell me there where you can't lie to me or to yourself that it wasn't your own freedom you were thinking about? Logan's back."
"Fuck Logan!"
"That was your idea, I thought."
She slapped him, hard enough to knock his glasses off. Luckily, he snapped his eyes shut in time. She didn't fetch the glasses. Let him crawl after them himself. She was tired of crawling for him. She took a deep breath; it hitched. "I am thirty-four years old, Scott. I don't have forever to wait. I might have wanted this baby if it would have been ours, not just mine. But I am not raising a child whose father doesn't want it, or me. Especially not when he lives in the same damn house."
Lips thin, he shook his head, knelt to feel around until he found his glasses. He held them up towards her. "Are they broken?"
She might force him to fetch them, but they were both too responsible for her to ignore his question. A single fracture and the quartz would explode under the blast of his eyes. These weren't as tough as his visor. "No, they're not broken."
He put them on, then stood up and stalked over to his dresser, pulled out some clothes, went into the bathroom and collected his toothbrush, his razor. She didn't move from where she stood beside the bed that had been theirs for not-quite-three years. Rage turned her belly over and made her belch, made her body shake in little tremors. Rage left her burned up, grey as ash. Jean grey.
This was what the end felt like.
When he had what he needed, he shoved it all into his mission scrip, grabbed his briefcase with lesson plans for tomorrow and paused in the doorway. "I might have wanted the baby, too, if its mother had been willing to trust me now like I trusted her once. Feelings come and go. If you want a marriage based on feelings, you don't want a real marriage. We can figure out later when I can get the rest of my things. Do whatever you like with those damn pills."
And the door shut. He didn't slam it. He was Scott Summers; he didn't slam doors. He never lost control. Except when he was getting her pregnant. Except when he was smashing bottles into walls. It took Jean a long time to find all the pills.
It was perhaps three hours later, near eleven o'clock, when a knock came on her door. She'd been lying flat on her back on the floor, still in her work suit, arms spread wide and pills clutched in one hand, staring at the ceiling with all the lights in the room on, even the bathroom. She'd needed all the lights on. Her first thought was that the professor had come to say "I told you so." Charles Xavier's doubts about her relationship with Scott had never entirely faded, despite three years of constancy. If he hadn't gone so far at the outset as to call it "inappropriate," she'd heard that word whisper inside what he had said to her about a thirty year old woman who'd just completed her residency and a twenty-two year old man who'd given up his graduate work so he could be with her. No, Charles Xavier had not approved. But if things had gone the other way? If she'd given up her dreams of medicine to be with Scott? No one raised eyebrows when a woman followed her man. Scott had said only, "He's in his sixties, Jean. He still has some unconscious prejudices." They were always defending each other, Scott and Charles, and she'd always known that as much as the professor loved her and he did love her if push came to shove, he would favor Scott. Scott was his son; Jean was just the daughter-in-law.
But maybe Xavier been right in his doubts, if not for the right reasons. She got up and went to the door. It wasn't the professor. Logan stood on the other side. She was too surprised to do more than stand and stare. "Can I come in?" he asked, cautious.
She moved and let him, watched him study the room. Of course he'd never seen it, there had been no reason for him to, before he'd left. "Lots of books," he said now.
"Scott and I like to read."
"I guess so." He turned back to her. "I saw One Eye come stalking out of Chuck's study, looking as pissed as a wet cat. Then he took off on the bike. All of which was after I'd seen him leave a bag and his briefcase in a spare room down the hall from me. I ain't Sherlock Holmes, but I think even I can figure that one out."
So. Scott had run to the professor, run to Daddy. But apparently Daddy hadn't made it all better. She wondered what Charles had said to Scott, to make him take off on the motorcycle.
"Are you okay, Jeannie?"
"I'm fine. Thank you." But her face felt stiff as she said it. She started to move for the door to show him out. He moved faster, slammed a hand against it to hold it shut.
"What'd that little dick do to you?"
"He's not a dick."
"You don't have to defend him any more." He brushed stray hair off her forehead. "Tell me."
She was tired and drained and feeling alone. So she told him, recounted the whole conversation. "It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion," she finished. "I knew what we were doing to each other, but I just wanted to hurt him so badly. Sick, isn't it?"
"C'mere," Logan said, patting the bed beside him. He'd taken up residence there while she talked and now, she obeyed. He slipped an arm around her shoulders, but a companionable one. "Are you going to keep the baby?"
"I don't know. I don't know if I can carry his baby and not hate it like I hate him."
"You don't hate him."
She looked up at him. His eyes were indeterminate hazel, but they were eyes she could see, eyes she could read without being forced to read the mind behind them. Calm now, patient. "Yes, Logan, I do hate him, a little," she said now. "Or at least, a part of me hates the very thing about him that I thought I admired most. His control. It's what we need in a field leader, a hero." She spit out the word as if it tasted of rotten-egg sulfur. "But it's not what I need in a lover. And I really, really hate it that I can't see his eyes."
He pulled his arm away from her shoulders and folded his hands between his knees, looked down at them for a while, then finally at her, sideways like he could, caught somewhere between wolverine and curmudgeon. Finally he nodded to the wall against which Scott had thrown the bottle. "Pretty big dent in the woodwork for a guy who's always in control."
Jean had no reply to that. She looked away.
Logan patted her knee, solid, friendly. The movement released man scent and cigar. "Wanna hear a secret?"
"I don't know. Do I?"
"Men don't really like to be free."
She glanced back around at him; he was grinning wicked. "Inside, we're all little boys. We want a woman around to tell us what to do. Almost every bachelor I've ever known including me spends most of his time eating double-chocolate ice-cream while he watches a ball game in his underwear, wishing he had some ass to chase instead of actually getting out and chasing any."
She laughed; she couldn't help it. "Scott doesn't watch the ball game in his underwear."
Logan's grin turned feral. "I just bet he don't." But then his frown returned. "And that's a big part of his problem, y'know? He's too much of a prude to tell you what fantasies he got rattling around up here." Logan tapped his temple. "And I bet he never talks dirty in bed."
The very idea of Scott talking dirty made her snort with anxiety and a savage amusement.
"But he's got fantasies, Jeannie. He ain't dead." He sighed, rubbed a thumb thoughtfully across his brow.
"I guess what I'm trying to say is this all guys got fantasies. It goes with having a pair of nuts between our legs. You women have no idea what a bitch testosterone is. Pretty woman walks by and the flag goes up in tribute. But think of it like a body compliment. It don't mean we're gonna act on the fantasies, or even want to. Some men do. And some of the ones who play most lily pure are the ones who act on them most. But One Eye ain't one of those men. I'll give him this he keeps his word."
Logan looked at her again, reached over to take her hand. "I'm not going to pretend with you, Jeannie. It ain't just the flag going up with that little Sioux girl. But if he told you to trust him, you should. He loves you. And we all gotta make choices."
She would never have expected to hear Logan defending Scott, much less echoing Scott's own sentiments, however Loganized. "I want to be more than his choice," she said now.
He opened his mouth to answer, but never got the chance.
The door slammed open and Scott stood there, hair creased and damp from the bike helm. He was wearing his visor, as he often did when he rode. "Jean, we need to "
Seeing Logan, he stopped dead and his mouth fell open. Three times caught gaping three times in one night. Then he exploded at her, "You fucking whore! You can't even wait one goddamn day before you've got him in our bed!"
Logan let go of her hand and stood up fast. "Watch your mouth, kid. This ain't what you think."
Scott stalked into the room, right up to Logan, paused. They glared at one another. "I was just talking to her," Logan said.
Scott hit him.
Taken by surprise, Logan fell backwards into Scott's bass equipment. The Wal went over with a crash, and Logan cracked his head on the edge of the speaker cabinet. Scott dove after to land square on top of him, knees on his chest, and tried to smack his head against the cabinet again. Jean screamed his name with voice and mind both, but reached nothing coherent. All Scott wanted was to beat in Logan's face with his bare hands. Make him bleed. Make him hurt like Scott hurt.
Logan still had his wits about him, if a little dazed, and was trying to keep Scott at arm's distance. But Scott had gone into full attack mode. He yanked Logan up, then swung his leg at a perfect angle to smack his heel fast and hard into Logan's jaw. Jean heard the jaw crack, then a different, but audible snick.
Logan's claws had come out, six silver metal kisses.
"Scott! Stop it!" Jean screamed. Scott might have been trained to fight, but Logan had been conditioned to kill with the right triggers. Now, he swung hard at Scott, would have taken the younger man's face off had Scott been less nimble. Yet the visor obscured Scott's peripheral vision and hand-to-hand wasn't his forte. He was going to lose. He was going to die.
Jean was no fainting virgin to be fought over by two idiot males while she looked on helpless. She considered sending a heavy book at Logan's head, but if she missed knocking him out, it would just drive him further into primal defense. So she attacked, physically, from the side. If she could just grab one of those deadly arms long enough get his attention, he'd snap out of it.
Animal senses must have alerted him. He twisted at the last second, his fist there to meet her gut full on. A fist full of knives.
They were so sharp, it actually took her a second to realize that they'd gone through her. A second more for the pain to register.
Mouth open, she stared at him. He stared back in shock.
She'd gotten his attention.
She remembered Rogue, almost eight months before. What a strange repeat.
Horrified, Logan jerked a little, involuntarily, and the knives sliced. She made some sound, more squeak than scream, and then there was the sliding snick of metal retreating. White pain filled the void. She'd always heard that abdominal wounds hurt the worst. She slapped a hand over her belly to keep her guts from spilling out.
"I think the doctor needs a doctor," she whispered. And in her mind, she sent a thought arrowing to the professor.
"Oh, Jeannie," Logan whispered. "Oh, god."
Scott snapped back into sense abruptly and was moving: the X-Men field leader. Cyclops. He had her down and the top sheet off the bed, threw it at Logan. "Rip it. I need strips!"
Logan did as he was told. Scott was tying them around her, keeping her intestines from sliding out like pink snakes. "Hold on, Jean. Can you reach the professor?"
"Already. Did."
"Hold on, hon. I'll take care of you."
"I know."
From her prone position, she could see Logan standing behind Scott. If guilt could kill a man, he'd be dead despite all his regenerative power. She wanted to weep for him, held up a hand. He dropped down immediately and took it. So much easier, to use her mind; no breath required, no breath to move her wounded diaphragm. Not your fault, she told him. My fault. I got in the way of your fist.
He was crying. That, more than the white of Scott's face, told her that she wasn't going to last long enough to make it to the hospital. Logan's knives must have hit an artery. She could feel how wet her clothes were, the floor under her. Scott's hands were bright with it; his fingers slipping as he tried to tie knots in scarlet-stain fabric. Six quarts of blood in a human body. The pain was getting bad now. Weren't women supposed to have a higher pain tolerance? She squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lip to keep from screaming, caught Scott's hand, gripped hard. I'm sorry.
Shhh. This is my fault, not yours.
Guilt might kill two men.
She could hear the door slamming open behind. Ororo's gasp, then her voice, issuing orders. Running feet and the cries of frightened students. And then, in her mind, the professor. Hold on, my dear. Help is on the way. We've called 911.
She actually laughed, which made her cough blood. God, that hurt. Her eyes snapped open. How did they expect to explain the knives that had gone through her belly to personnel in ER? Get Logan out of here, she sent to the professor. I'm not going to make it. I don't want him convicted of manslaughter.
Yes, you are going to make it.
No, Charles. I'm a doctor, remember? Too much blood. Too fast.
Something small shot through the door, under Ororo's arm. Jean could see only dimly now. The severed artery in her abdominal cavity was pumping her life away. The newcomer had dropped down beside Scott.
Grace.
Brown hands on Jean's white ones; brown and white on red. Red power of life. Red Power over life. "I can keep her from dying. Get out of my way."