Fandom: X-Men Movieverse
Wordcount: 1160
Description: Jean-POV, X1, post-"stay away from my girl." Scott/Jean + Logan references.
Rating: PG-13
Jean decides to give the boys five minutes alone.
She has barely stepped out of Logan's room, and they're already snarling at each other. Boys and their toys, sometimes forgetting she isn't one of either.
She decides to humor them, but only for five minutes. If Scott hasn't joined her by then, she'll go back down the hall and make sure they aren't killing each other. Not that either of them could, even if they really wanted to. But they would be sure to make a lot of noise, and she and Ororo would end up having to explain it to the students.
They're supposed to be the grownups here.
Seriously. Boys.
It doesn't take five minutes. She kicks off her shoes and has hardly settled on the bed when Scott comes banging through the door. So. He must have postured for a bit, then stalked off with a quip, contemplating ways he could take his annoyance out on Logan, later. She's known Scott for half of her life – half of her life, half of his life, an entire lifetime stored up between them. This isn't exactly the first time someone has rubbed him the wrong way. Or vice versa.
He heads straight for the bedside drawer, and yanks it open. "I'm going to the Danger Room to blast something. Where's my visor?"
A rhetorical question, obviously. The visor is exactly where he put it, which is the place he is now looking, and there is no way in hell that he needs her to tell him this. Instead, she poses a more interesting question of her own. "Did you tell him to stay away from your girl?"
"No." He retrieves the visor and turns his eyes to the wall as he starts to pull off his glasses. Then he settles them back in place, looks at Jean, and says, "Not immediately."
A smile plays at her lips as she takes note of Scott's scrupulous honesty – not so much virtuous as inevitable, in a man raised by one mind-reader and in love with another. He starts to lift the visor again. She bites her lip, focuses, and uses her mind to yank it out of his hand.
"Jean!" He makes a grab; she lifts her eyes and it floats above his head. This is maddeningly easy – should it be this easy? – and to test herself, she floats it over without looking, then lets go, reaches up, and feels it slap into her palm.
She crosses her legs, and sets the hand with the visor in her lap. "You want this?"
"Jean." He steps toward her, holding out his hand. "Come on, I've got a headache. I just need to work off some energy –"
"You already did that today," she points out. He insisted on target practice, out in the gardens, for almost an hour – not coincidentally, while Logan was getting the tour of the grounds. Because watching Cyclops take out a couple of Brotherhood goons hadn't impressed him, but watching Scott Summers blast some Frisbees would, apparently. Boys and their toys. See earlier observation.
"You already did that," she repeats. "That's why you have a headache." Anyway, she can think of better uses for that energy, which is more than Scott, distracted as he is, has managed to do. He'll get there, she is sure. It just might take a little work to undistract him.
Still clasping the visor, she puts a hand behind her head and lies back on the pillow. "I've got sort of a headache too. The week I've had. Dealing with all those idiots."
Scott sits on the bed, his hip inches from her curled feet, and leans back on his hands. "There's only one of him."
"I meant Congress."
"I meant Logan."
"I know, sweetie." She leans forward and touches his neck. "I cracked your code." The back of her hand travels along his shoulder and she feels the stiff lines slowly start to relax. "Logan's been through a lot," she says. "Maybe give him a break."
"He's been through a lot?"
"Think about it." He shakes his head, but she starts to massage his shoulders and he leans in to her touch. "Think about you and me. What it was like for us when we were kids. What if the Professor hadn't been there? What if we didn't have this place?"
Scott turns on his side and looks up at her, his hair a mess from her playing with it. For a second, he looks like the sixteen-year-old boy she fell in love with. She thinks about Logan, who can only remember fifteen years of his own life. He's older than all of them, probably, but viewed in terms of memory, he's hardly more than a teenager himself. And if I have a weakness for psychically wounded adolescents in desperate need of a family, she's tempted to say, you might take a guess where that comes from. She won't say it. Among other reasons, comparing Logan to Scott's younger self won't win him any slack. There is no one Scott is harder on than the boy he used to be.
"If we didn't have this place – I don't know, Jean. I'd like to think maybe we would have started it." He's so earnest about it, that for a moment she wants to believe he's right. As much as she cares for Charles Xavier, as important a shaping force as he has been, there is a comfort in believing that the two of them could somehow have found each other, could have built a life together on their own. The truth is, though, that no one has ever needed the help this school provided more than the two of them. Without the Professor, she can't believe that either one of them would even be alive.
So she flicks the hair out of his eyes and kisses his forehead. "You realize that's absolutely ridiculous."
"Probably," Scott concedes. He raises his hand to touch her face. "You realize that we do ridiculous things every day."
Logan echoes in her mind again -- This is the stupidest thing I ever heard of -- that typically teenage desire to deny uncomfortable truths by sheer force of negation. And the thing is, it's probably true. There's something liberating in admitting that their entire lives are the kind of stories you wouldn't believe if you weren't actually living them. "Ridiculous." She leans down to kiss him. "Think about our story. Boy meets girl. High school sweethearts. When does that ever work out?"
"Never," he says, "absolutely never," and, as he draws her deeper into the kiss, she is glad that she learned when she was young to believe in things that simply could not be true. Time and again, she has seen that grownups are far less willing to step toward the impossible. Right now, Jean is thankful for her life, full as it is of jealous, temperamental, idealistic and gloriously frustrating boys.
END