Jean and Jack - training

[x-jeangrey.livejournal.com]

As promised oh-so-long ago, Jean and Haller finally take the chance to start his TK training. Jack, of course, takes the chance to run off at the mouth.



Two chairs. One table. Plain, anonymous, like so many other rooms in his life. The figure in the chair was motionless, eyes narrow as they fixed on the far wall. No sound, no movement -- except for the relentless clatter of a pen, slammed back and forth across the tabletop by unseen hands.

The door opening was the only warning the non-telepathic personality had that Jean was here - she'd added a few minutes onto the time that Haller had said he'd probably ready by, just to be sure. The warning that Jack wasn't likely to be in the best of moods had been met with a dry look and a question about whether or not Jack actually had good moods. Shutting the door behind her, Jean considered the tall man in the chair. "Afternoon."

The alter didn't even bother hurrying to take his eyes from the wall to the opening door. Jack turned his attention to the other telekinetic with deliberate slowness. The pen stopped its violent skitter across the tabletop.

Then it whipped into the air straight at Jean's face.

And stopped three feet from her face, not bouncing from a shield but simply stopping as Jean reached out and neatly severed Jack's lines of force, replacing them with her own. Not saying a word she simply arched an eyebrow at the man.

The opposing force on the pen surged for a moment under Jean's grasp, then, blocked, dissipated.

"Glad to see you have reflexes," Jack said. Grey eyes narrowed on her from behind the table, still unmoved since she'd entered the room. "This would have been pretty fucking pathetic if that beach was your bar for speed."

"Which is the older but no more mature way of pouting and saying 'I meant to do that'." Jean shrugged, unruffled.

The smile that flashed across the young man's familiar features wasn't crooked like Jim's. It was thin and even, and not pleasant, and left a split-second after it appeared.

Jack leaned back in his chair, knees wide apart, hands hanging at his sides as he met her eyes. His slight drawl pulled into a mocking lilt. "You wanted me. Now 'Jim's' finally stopped dodging. So what's the lesson plan, teacher? Since I'm so sore in need of mastering my powers to become a good and productive member of a team and Haller's reactivation doesn't mean shit while the crackpot gets comms every time there's a crisis."

Jean finally stepped more into the room, pulling out the second chair and settling into it. "You already know your own weaknesses - you lack focus, fine control, an ability to multi-task, and the upper limits of your abilities are well below where they probably ought to be. In later sessions you can choose which things you want to work on and, if you have ideas, can suggest methods for practice. For today, it's focus. It's going to be you, the pen, and long periods of holding it up and still."

The alter's narrowed eyes held on her, expressionless, measuring.

Then Jack said, "I don't do 'still'."

The table leg nearest Jean exploded and caved like someone had hit it with an aluminum bat.

"Yes," Jean said, no flinching. She even caught the table so it didn't totter, holding it level and placing the pen back on it in front of him. "And that's a problem."

Jack gave her another one of those knife-thin smiles. "Now there is a funny thing. Everybody always sells self-control. Discipline. I got a question. Why do I care?"

There was a sharp crack as a second table leg was obliterated. The broken pieces struck the opposite wall and bounced, splinters spraying across the floor.

"Well, I could appeal to the better side you don't have, tell you all the good you could do as an X-Man, or I could be all counselor like and ask what everyone else in there thinks, if they want to be on the team and if you want to stand between them and that goal, which would likely get me just as far." Jean shook her head. "I could goad you. Point out how, currently, you just suck as far as macrotelekinesis goes. Which would be entertaining, I think, but not terribly productive. Or I could skip it and ask why you bothered to show up at all if you're not interested."

"I don't make sense anymore," Jack sneered, the light Texan accent shifted to a mocking imitation of Jim's more pronounced New York cadences. "Because I am nothing but an expression of David's inappropriately compartmentalized emotions. Inexplicable." Another bang, more fragments flew. Now the table between them hung on only one leg.

"And how does that make you feel?" There was a definite sarcastic bite to the standard psychobable question.

"How would you feel, everybody else having an idea of what you should be? Throwing it on you with every look, every word, til it chokes you?" The last table leg shattered as Jack's lips curled in cruel disdain. "Better yet, how did it make you feel, Jane?"

"As the kids say, it royally blew, no question. And it made me crazy, and still does some times. That's life, life sucks, get over it and grow up." The table was now being held up solely by Jean's mind, and it didn't wobble in the slightest.

"Right. Because you're the master here." Jack leaned forward over the shattered table, hands resting on his thighs. "So, doctor, in your expert opinion, if David wants to destroy himself who should I be fucking on camera?"

"Oh, no question me." Jean didn't even flinch, but her eyes narrowed. If Jack had thought he'd get her to back down this way, he was seriously mistaken. "Betsy would either kill herself or go homicidal hunting me down, and Jim would get to deal with the guilt of what it would do to Scott, on top of how he already feels about the last time it happened. Honestly, though, been there, done that. Can't you come up with anything original?"

"Oh don't worry, I'm having nothing to do with destroying Scott. That's regular as the change of seasons. Especially when you're involved, if 2006 was anything to judge by. It takes a special person to leave their husband right after he's kidnapped and tortured." Jack's unpleasant smile took on an even more brittle edge as he leaned back, knees spread. "Nothing like watching the sucking chestwound you tore in him bleed til he'd even shred the only woman who'd ever take Haller right there in front of us. I am impressed. Not just burning the field, but pouring a fucking dumptruck of salt on that scorched earth. But what the hell, huh? Because you came back. And that's what counts."

There was a short, sharp crack of power, and the wooden table split down the middle.

The two halves of the broken table didn't even wobble - there was a strain around the edges of Jean's eyes, but it had more to do with not setting the table on fire than keeping it steady. Jack had struck a nerve. "Oh, cause you've no understanding of being upset and lashing out at everything that comes in range, whether they give you a reason or not. Totally outside your sphere of experience. So are you going to keep on with the pointless verbal abuse or can we get on with things??"

Lips curved back over white, white teeth as Jack leaned forward. January had started with peace. Sometimes they could find it even now working with the students, or the careful mix of paint, or in the slick of Betsy's skin. But it wasn't the same. One moment had seen the fragile truce between Jim and Jack shattered, and now the rage was back. Rage that Jim, unable to call up Jack by cooperation or meditation like Cyndi, had finally had no choice but to sink into just to enable this session to happen.

Jack's reasons were known to only a handful of people in the world. Outside of those few -- people who'd either been Jim's choice, or been no choice at all -- no one.

And he was powerless to do anything about it.

The air stirred as power began to bleed, eddying invisible and oppressive. The alter's black hair rippled like weeds moving in a current, back and forth, caught in clashing waves of a building tide. Jack sat back and took a breath.

"Fine," he said to the woman on the other side of the cracked table hanging in empty space. "You're right. Let's stop shitting around."

And slammed forward to the edge of his chair to strike at her with a rattlesnake-fast telekinetic blow.

It was a sudden blow, but not wholly unexpected - Jean had been expecting it to come to this from the moment she stepped in the door. Jim had said it might well. A strong blow, too, possibly near the upper limits of his controllable force, Jean realized as she caught and dispersed the blow around her, the force slamming into the wall behind her, cracking the plaster. But the upper limits of Jack's skill were no where near the upper limits of Jean's.

With something that was rather too close to a snarl, Jean ripped Jack's body out of the chair which clattered the floor ignored as she slammed him against the wall behind him, standing up to stride closer. "You will stop this. I don't care why you decide to do it, or why you decide to go on with these lessons and behave in them, but you will decide and then you will do it."

Jean's grip was met by neither physical nor telekinetic struggle. With as many limitations as David tied him with the effort would have been futile, and so the alter didn't even bother.

The rage, that hot coil in his chest for as long as he'd existed, seethed to retaliate. Withering everything around it, a fire he couldn't bank no matter what he did. But today his hadn't been the power he'd been looking to see proven.

Still hanging pressed to the wall by Jean's mind, Jack looked into her eyes and smiled.

"Now you I just might learn something from."

Jean's answering smile was as thin and dark as Jack's. "You're as bad as Logan," she said, dropping him suddenly and without warning, her posture not relaxing an inch.

The man landed on his feet, knees bending to absorb the impact. He uncurled from the crouch and smirked. "Sorry," he said, "you're not cracked enough for us."

Jack raised a hand. The pen streaked from the shattered remains of the table in erratic flight. Without moving his eyes from Jean's, the alter's hand snapped it out of the air. He held the pen out, balanced in his open palm.

Jack lowered his hand. The pen remained behind, a line of silver suspended in the space between them, trembling a little with the effort.

"Still," Jack said.

Jean nodded, holding his gaze. "Still."