Jean and Val Cooper, Tuesday evening

[x-jeangrey.livejournal.com]

Jean gets a surprise trip to an isolated federal facility, courtesy of Val Cooper. She's called in to consult on the basis of her medical expertise, but winds up putting her other talents to use.


The federal facility in question, it turned out, was over two hours by helicopter from the airfield closest to the mansion. The agents on the helicopter with Jean had identified themselves as FBI, if not by name, but as they landed in front of the low, two-story building nestled among the mountains, one of the people waiting for them was instantly recognizable, and definitely not from the FBI.

"Thank you for coming," Val Cooper told Jean once the two FBI agents had ushered her off and away from the helicopter, which took off again almost immediately. Cooper looked graver than usual, but curiously, almost relieved as she took Jean's arm and led her towards the building. "We've had Doctor MacTaggart on the phone from Muir Island, but she says she needs your on-site opinion."

"Of course," Jean said. There weren't many women who walked fast enough to put Jean, with her long stride, out, but Cooper was fast enough that Jean had to move to keep from being pulled by the firm hand on Jean's arm. "What can you tell me about the situation, aside from the medical details?"

"His name is Paul Traore. French national of North African descent, twenty years old." There were soldiers at the door, fully armed and equipped as if they were prepared for a full-scale battle to break out here in the mountains. It was a strange, discordant note. They opened the door for Cooper and Jean. Inside, a long hallway stretched out in front of them. It was dim, and surprisingly quiet. Cooper started off at an even faster rate towards the end of the hall.

"He was taken into custody in New York," she went on. "He's confessed that his target was the United Nations. Specifically, the conference being held there this week on the Smichov incident."

Jean's eyes narrowed slightly, a part of her mind running down the list of people who were at that conference, but she needed to focus on the here and now. "He's a Preserver - has he given any information on them yet? Or, if you can't tell me, in the medical vein, what's his mutation?"

The look Cooper gave her was oddly haunted. "He appears to be an energy-projector. It's-" She paused, then shook her head. "It's not a pleasant sight," she warned Jean, then pushed the doors ahead of them open.

The first and most obvious thing in the room was some sort of containment unit. Clearly jury-rigged, it was equally as clearly barely managing to do its job. There was a figure lying on the stretcher enclosed by the containment unit, a young man whose face was barely visible, as his whole body was surrounded by a nimbus of crackling blue energy. Two white-coated medical specialists were conferring with obvious anxiety over monitors that seemed to be flickering on and off, reacting to the surges of energy.

The young man was utterly silent, but the way his body convulsed and shook told anyone who had eyes that he was in agony. For a telepath, it was even more clear.

"Holy God..." Jean breathed, staring for a second. For a moment Cooper was forgotten as she moved into the room, aiming straight for the monitors and the other two specialists. She needed data.

One of the doctors, a harried-looking middle-aged man, looked up as Jean approached. The soldiers on the other side of the room - two of them, just like on the doors - came to wary attention, watching her. The doctor ignored them utterly.

"Sullivan," he said wearily, then inclined his head at his colleague, who was slightly younger and very much concerned with recording the flickering readings. "This is Tolliver. We're from the Medical Corps."

"Jean Grey-Summers. I'm a colleague of Moira MacTaggart's." It was the best way to sum up what had brought her into this mess. Casting an eye over the charts Tolliver had been filling in she winced. Saying the results didn't look good was a severe understatement.

"Doctor MacTaggart's given us what advice she can," Sullivan said, "but we can't tell much right now. Apart from the obvious," he amended tightly, his eyes flickering to his patient. "We need to monitor him for a while longer, finish running tests, before we can draw any conclusions. Whether he survives for long enough to let us do that, however..."

"He needs to," Cooper said sharply from behind him.

"Agent Cooper, I can't change the fact that something is killing this young man."

Turning her head to say something to Val, Jean was distracted by the readouts on the normal bio-monitors. "Even aside from the obvious loss of control of his mutation," she said, "his heart rate is incredibly erratic. Blood pressure's through the roof. Has he been running that fever this whole time?" And who knew what any medication they could give him for the normal symptoms would do to his mutation. "He can hear you through the containment unit," she said with the assurance of a mind reader. "If you have questions, I'd start asking them before his fever spikes higher and he loses any chance at coherency."

Cooper gave her a sharp look, but then came around to stand by the end of the containment unit, leaning forward slightly. "Mr. Traore. Can you hear me?"

The young man tossed and moaned something in French. Cooper frowned, answering in the same language. She listened for the answer, then looked up at Jean. "He says 'he' didn't tell him it would hurt so much." Traore moaned something else, the blue energy flickering more brightly around him as the monitors faded in and out. Cooper's scowl only deepened, and she snapped a question in French, her tone demanding, imperative.

"It wasn't supposed to happen this soon," she translated. "Not until the conference."

"He was expecting this," Jean said; it wasn't quite a question as she'd picked up that much from his thoughts. "It would help if we knew how much of what's happening to him he understands. He may know something we're not going to be able to get from the sensors."

Another question from Cooper, in her rapid-fire French. Traore didn't answer for a moment, but then started to talk, his voice breaking, a raw scrape of pain that was somehow filled with pride, as well. Cooper's expression grew more and more grim as she listened, and when he finally fell silent again, she looked up at the three doctors.

"Someone did this to him. He let them. They made him believe this was the way to prove himself... something about his mutation being weak, making him unfit." She shook her head, looking down at the young man. "This is a weak mutation?"

"That might explain some of these readings," Tolliver said, speaking up for the first time. "Some sort of... amplification effect, that his body can't take?"

"It's possible," Jean said, looking at the younger man and thinking about Shiro and his addiction. "We've run into a few instances of substances being able to amplify powers, most of which have had some unfortunate side effects. I've never heard of one which could so thoroughly amp powers up, but there's no reason one couldn't exist. And the Preservers have a known obsession with purity of mutation."

"There's no trace of Kick in his system," Cooper said, almost too quickly, and frowned. "That was the first thing I had Dr. Sullivan test for."

"Which was before he started melting the needles I was using for blood tests," Sullivan muttered.

Traore started to struggle against the restraints holding him to the stretcher, shouting in his broken voice. Cooper took an involuntary step back from the containment unit, and the soldiers took a step forward. She raised a hand, listening. Frowning, again.

"'He laid hands on me and made me holy'," she translated, her eyes flickering back to Jean. "This sounds quasi-religious. I'm disturbed."

Jean's eyes widened. "Why am I getting disturbing resonances to suicide bombers in the middle east?" she asked, sounding vaguely horrified. "I didn't hear of them finding any traditional explosives at any of the bombing sites..."

"It was one of the possibilities. Suicide bombers, I mean. There were others, but this..." Traore began to rave again, and Cooper hesitated, then gave Jean a look that was almost wary. "I hate to ask. I know you're here to consult in the medical sense... but this may be the only chance we have to get information directly from a Preserver. And who knows how many more of them are out there."

Jean took a deep breath, biting her lip. She didn't have to be telepathic to know how much Cooper disliked asking this of her - she could see it in the other woman's eyes. "His mind's already fraying from the fever," she said, "and my French is less than fabulous. I'll try, but I can't promise anything."

Cooper nodded, stepping aside from the containment unit. "Try and see if you can get anything on who did this to him?" she said. "Or any contacts he might have had here in New York. If we have local Preservers, we need to know about it." She didn't need to point out how many potential targets there were here on the Eastern Seaboard.

Jean moved to take Val's place by the containment unit, giving one last glance towards the monitors - it was hard to tell if they'd become more erratic and, if they had, it if it was simply a physical response to Val's questioning. Centering herself firmly, Jean lay a hand on the top of the unit and dropped into the boy's pain-wracked mind.

Between the pain and the fever, his thoughts were a confused jumble. Images of faces, one in particular - male and Southeast Asian - dominated, but there were flashes of places, as well. Manhattan, seen from a distance, and its familiar skyline seen from the inside of a small, but palatial-looking apartment. But that same thin, dark face reappeared, overlaying a very different room, one whose decor was distinctly European in nature. It looked out onto a landscape of rolling hills - and up at a massive, looming fortress.

It was too much to sort through at once - too many things which might be helpful, too many details she must remember to devote any time to analyzing it now. Instead, Jean simply absorbed it, fixing as much of it in her memory as she could to tell Cooper and her analysts before the confusion and pain became too much to handle.

Cooper was peering at her closely, a trace of actual anxiety in her eyes as Jean resurfaced from the telepathic contact. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"His vital signs are actually a little steadier," Sullivan said, bemused - and then swore. "Spoke too soon," he said, the blue energy crackling and the monitors flickering in and out.

Jean flinched back away from the sudden flickering, still mentally open enough to pick up far more of that lash of pain than she wanted. Looking slightly pale she turned to Val. "I've got... a lot of information. Not sure how much of it's useful and it's going to take a while to go through. He was looking at Manhattan from a window, an apartment or hotel. And I have faces."

Cooper looked at her, then at Traore, and then seemed to realize something. "Why don't we step outside and talk about this?" she suggested quietly, her expression settling back into professional lines. "It might help. The distance, I mean."

Jean scrubbed her hands over her face for a second, then nodded. "Yes, thank you. If we can find somewhere with a chair, that would help, too." She could still taste the psychic grit that was the man's fear and knowledge that he was dying, his hope that the doctors could do something, and his confusion all wrapped up together.

Cooper actually opened the door for her. "I'm trying to figure out how best to go about this," she said. "A sketch artist, maybe. And you said you saw a location?"

"Somewhere in Manhattan, yes," Jean said, stepping out into the hall. "And somewhere else, probably European."

"It's more than we had," Cooper said. "This way, there's an office down there... you can catch your breath while I make a few phone calls." She actually offered a somewhat thin smile. "I think we've got to go with the sketch artist, at least... for the locations, as well as the faces."

"You'd know best," Jean agreed, following the other woman to the office.

It was likely only the fact that she'd been so recently connected to the man's mind that she got as much warning as she did. An intense pulse of pain had her turning back towards the door they'd come through even as she caught the sudden spikes of fear from those still in the room. It was not much warning, but it was enough and her shields were already going up as the door burst towards them, followed by a rush of searing heat.

Cooper was turning as well, blue eyes going wide as she saw the debris flying towards them, ahead of the blue-white expanding fireball. To her credit, she started to reach towards Jean, clearly intending to try and pull her out of the way. It would have been a futile gesture, had it not also been an unnecessary one.

The debris simply stopped at the telekinetic wall, but the heat was rushing down the hall as Jean thickened the wall. There were other people in the building - she could sense them as she dropped her telepathic shields to focus entirely on keeping herself and Cooper alive, and she did what she could for them, although it was little more than a telepathic #RUN!#

It was all over in seconds. The forensic teams, in the end, would conclude that the containment unit had blunted the explosion at least somewhat. But all that meant was that it left part of the back of the building still standing. The energy wave tore through the rest, destroying everything in its path.

The brevity helped. Jean had stood up to the full force of Scott's optic blast once, had held back a lake, lifted a jet, helped stop a tsunami. And she was still damned grateful that once the energy wave had passed all she had to do was keep the ceiling from smothering them. That, comparatively, was the easy bit.

There was silence in the wake of the explosion, shocking in its suddenness. Dust swirled everywhere, except inside Jean's shields. Her hand shaking visibly, Cooper reached out and laid a hand on Jean's arm. She was white around the lips, but surprisingly composed.

"Are you-" She stopped. "I can't hear myself."

#Shockwave,# Jean told her. #It will pass. If you'd rather I not do this, I won't.# Telepathy was easier than lip reading...

Cooper's eyes flickered to the debris beyond the shields, pushing in from all sides. There's not-I've never-twelve other people- Her lips tightened, and suddenly the flow of jumbled thoughts slowed, clarified. Did he just blow up?

#Yes.# There was a certain distraction to Jean's mental tone that came from holding large portions of what remained of the building off of them. She could feel the minds of a few other survivors and was trying to figure out how to get herself and Cooper out without accidentally crushing anyone else. Without and overview of the site it was impossible to tell how the ruins would move if she just punched her way out. #Yes, I would say he did. Weak mutation indeed.#