Kaiten: The Sun In His Eyes

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Ororo and Jean are the first ones on the scene when Scott has a serious powers accident in his office. His optic blast has turned itself back on, and a frantically worried Jean isn't sure why - until she starts to review the last few days with her husband, and realized that something happened on the Preservers mission in Portugal.


He was going to have to face it; he was definitely coming down with something. Scott sank wearily into the chair behind his desk, wondering at the fact that his muscles seemed to be trembling just from the effort of getting here from the third floor. He felt vaguely feverish, too. Jean had already been down in infirmary by the time he'd hauled himself out of bed today, which was telling. Perhaps he ought to just finish up this little bit of paperwork he hadn't gotten to yesterday afternoon, and then stop down there to see her. Maybe he'd take the elevator, too.

Scott took a deep, unsteady breath and applied himself to the paperwork. Mostly school-related, of course. Nothing critical, but he'd had a few disruptions to his regular work schedule lately and he was slightly behind. He worked for twenty minutes, his attention wandering badly for the entire time.

What the hell was wrong with him? he thought dimly. These sorts of muscle tremors reminded him too much of how he'd felt late summer, those first few weeks after Wyoming, and that only made him more unsettled. Scott rubbed at the back of his neck with a shaking hand and got up. Time to go see Jean, definitely.

He was already reaching down the link to let her know he was coming when his knees buckled, all at once. Scott grabbed at the filing cabinet, trying to catch himself, but all of his muscles were spasming suddenly. Falling seemed like a horribly slow process, slow enough for him to feel the sudden, building pressure in his head.

Thankfully, he was looking towards the outer wall when it happened. An optic blast so powerful that it hurt - and how was that possible, when had that ever been possible? - flashed outwards. The wall was there one minute, gone the next, debris flying out and over the lawn, some of it landing hundreds of meters away.

The tap on the link was followed so immediately by the sense of disorientation and pain that Jean started moving even before she heard the crash. And she wasn't the only one racing up to see what had happened but the students knew enough to get out of her way, especially after she skipped the stairs and simply leaped up to the first floor landing, stealing a trick from Nate's book.

Ororo was outside, sitting by the lake in a peaceful, near-meditative state when the explosion happened. She didn't have the benefit of a link to communicate what had just occurred, but a glance was enough to show her the worst of it. The wall is missing. In Scott's office. Oh dear goddess...

She arrived in the room nearly at the same moment as Jean, entering through the gaping hole in the exterior wall of the mansion. Heedless of the potential dangers that may still be lurking there, she threw her gaze around the room, looking desperately for her friend. "Scott! Where are you?"

Scott was lying by his desk, half-curled on the floor, and didn't answer. His whole body was spasming in a visible seizure, and uncomprehending pain and panic poured down the link with Jean. His hands were clasped to his face, as if in the midst of all of this he'd forgotten that he had only one eye and thought he needed to cover both.

Spying the twitching figure by the desk Ororo rushed over, kneeling beside him amidst the few scattered pieces of debris that remained inside the room. Knowing that the students would be anxious to find out what happened but unwilling to let them see the state Scott was in she shut the door with a gust of hastily-directed wind. "Jean! He is here!" All Ororo could tell was that he wasn't bleeding and he wasn't unconscious - divining what exactly had occurred would be much more difficult to do.

Jean was at Scott and Ororo's side in less than a second, kneeling beside her husband. "Scott!" Useless to ask if he could hear her, because it didn't feel like he could focus well enough to answer. Something about the sourceless pain felt familiar, but Jean couldn't let it distract her, clamping down on the link to keep it from overwhelming her. "Ororo, need a pillow - his couch." Rather than move Scott, Jean simply shoved his desk farther away from him so he wouldn't bang into it as she rolled him onto his blind side. "Scott, damn it, Scott! That eye's safe. Move your hand, love." She tugged, carefully, at his left hand, needing to see if he'd bitten his tongue and prevent choking.

Lostcontrollostcontrollostcontrol- The panicked mantra was running over and over through Scott's mind, and he fought Jean for a moment as she tried to pull his hand away - but only a moment, as he tried futilely to push her away. Notsafegetaway- The muscles in his arm were still spasming, however, and he couldn't make it obey the commands from his brain. The other hand stayed right where it was, locked over his good eye by instincts deeper than conscious thought.

The weatherworker had made it over to the couch - which had luckily survived the explosion, somehow - and retrieved one of the end pillows, sprinting back to Scott and Jean. "Was it his powers?" she murmured worriedly.

"That destroyed the wall, yes. The caused the seizure... I don't know." Jean angled Scott's head up so Ororo could fit the pillow under it. "Normally, no - loss of powers control is usually a symptom, not the problem, but he's never had seizures before. If this isn't atypical it should pass soon and we can do a battery of tests. If it is..." If it is, they were going to have some serious trouble finding somewhere safe to run the tests that would be needed.

Even as she did, the seizure was starting to ease. Scott's breathing was still coming in gasps, but the pain was starting to recede a little. He could hear Jean talking, feel her presence there on the link. He kept his hand over his eye, though. "Jean... hurts," he managed.

"I know, love." Reaching over, she brushed his hair away from his face, taking the opportunity to gauge his temperature. Possibly a slight fever. "Lie still for a bit. Can you tell me what happened?"

"Felt sick." He couldn't seem to breathe properly. "Muscles hurt. Like in the summer. Then the blast.... it hurt."

Like in the summer... Ororo's brow furrowed, though she tried not to hover too close, as Jean needed space to continue her monitoring. "How sudden was it?" she asked, though perhaps Scott wasn't in the best state of mind to be answering questions. They needed to know, though - as bad as it sounded, they couldn't be caught unprepared if it was to suddenly happen again.

"Lost control." Saying it aloud just made it worse, and Scott tried to pull away from Jean's cool hands, turn his head away from them. He wasn't safe to be around.

"Heard that," Jean said, gripping the wrist of the hand covering his eye. He couldn't pull away without removing his hand, and she knew he wouldn't do that. "We've dealt with things like this before, Scott, and if worse comes to worse I can block your blasts. Come on, we're going down to the medlab. If you can walk, you can walk, and if you can't I'm carrying you."

--

It was a good thing he'd kept them. A sign of his innate pessimism, maybe, but knowing that one of his spare pairs was safely tucked away in a drawer upstairs had simplified things today. His hands shaking, Scott slipped on the ruby quartz glasses - and opened his eye.

The glasses stayed on. The headache didn't go away, or abate in the slightest, but the glasses stayed out. "Well," he said, his voice rough, "that's something."

Jean was sitting across from him, looking pale. When it had become clear that his control was entirely gone, they'd sent Amelia to get the glasses - she couldn't have left him when she was the only one who could stop his blasts if his eyes opened. "Scott," she said, biting her lip, "we'll figure it out, I swear." There was a touch of fear in her voice - seizures, persistent headaches and powers problems all pointed to a fairly small number of severe brain diseases that she knew of, but Moira and Hank might have other ideas. There had to be something.

Scott rubbed at the back of his neck. He felt sore everywhere, still shaky even if the seizure had fully passed. "This doesn't make any sense." His voice was still too ragged. "I've been... a little under the weather the last couple of days, but..." He should have mentioned it to her earlier. But he had just gotten so used to ignoring physical discomfort, through the late sumer and fall.

Normally she'd scold him, but not today. "What were the first symptoms, and when did you notice them?"

"I woke up sore the morning after the mission. I thought it was just from getting thrown around like I did." He'd thought he'd been awfully lucky to get by with just bruises.

"And you didn't hit your head during the mission? You're not seeing flashes of light or dark spots?" Jean frowned, considering. If it had started with aches, it could be viral. The blood had already been drawn and Amelia was running the tests, but they didn't know what they were looking for. "You were sore, but were there excessive bruises?"

"Not really. Forge's new uniforms help, when you get into the whole unexpected hand-to-hand thing." It was very weak banter, as banter went. His hands were still shaking. He'd blown out the wall of his office, and it was just chance, just freak chance, that he'd been looking in a direction that meant he hadn't left a path of destruction through the heart of the mansion. "I don't think I hit my head. Was grappling with one of the ones that got away..." The image of that thin dark face, contorted in rage and inches from his own, flashed through his mind.

The man meant nothing to Scott except that he was a Preserver, someone who he'd fought with, someone who'd gotten away, but to Jean...

Jean recognized the face moments as it flashed into Scott's mind and her eyes widened with horror. "Oh, Scott, no..." It was little more than a whisper out loud, but in her mind she was raging. She had to be wrong. It made sense but she couldn't let it be true. The man Scott had fought with was the one she'd seen in Traore's mind; the one who had turned him into a walking bomb.

"Wait... wait." Scott was already pale, and at Jean's reaction, he paled even further. "That wasn't... oh, shit." He'd seen the sketch, of course. But in the chaos of the fight in Silves, in the dark, he hadn't made the connection.

In less than a heartbeat, Jean was at his side. "Scott, we didn't have enough time before, but now we have all the information from... from Traore, and much more time - this has only just happened. We'll find a way to reverse it. To stop it. I'll call Moira, now, she and Hank... we will find an answer." The words poured out of Jean - it would be babbling if her mind wasn't working so hard to provide them, to find any solution. But, unbidden, the memory of Val Cooper's voice rose in her mind.

They made him believe this was the way to prove himself... something about his mutation being weak, making him unfit. This is a weak mutation?

Scott, his face white and set, turned his head towards her. The glasses made his expression all but unreadable again, but the link was wide open, meaning that he was anything but. "I need to be out of here. While you work." His words were flat, clipped, but there was a screaming tension beneath the surface of his voice. "Not risking the school. Get Charles to call Cooper? If they had the kid who... if they had the other one in a safehouse somewhere, in containment, they can put me there too."

"I..." Jean took a deep breath, forcing herself to try and think calmly. "Yes. Yes, that's... we'll go somewhere where I can focus and work. You'll have to stay inside at all times - lack of sunlight dampens your mutation and might slow the effect. Cooper will have some place, preferably somewhere... unpopulated."

It felt like there was a vice around his chest. Scott forced himself to breathe, as deeply as he could, before he answered. Out of the sunlight didn't mean in the dark. "Well. I'll stay here. You should go talk to Charles. The sooner I'm out of the school, the better. If I'm already losing control over my powers." Matter-of-fact. Keep it matter-of-fact, because really, it was.

Jean nodded - a particularly jerky, uncertain nod - then suddenly buried her face in her hands. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. There was no sound for a second, and then she looked up. Her eyes were dry, if somewhat brighter than usual, and the look on her face was absolutely focused. "Charles knows. He's calling Cooper. I'm going to my office to call Muir. Would you like to rest on my couch or out here?" She didn't want to let him out of her sight, but he might need time to process, or to brood, or whatever. And she would give it to him. She would give him whatever he needed. And then she would stop this from happening. And then she would find the man who did it and kill him.

The thought of sitting in here, where Amelia or one of the helpers could come by, was suddenly and overwhelmingly abhorrent. "Office, definitely," Scott said, sliding down off the bed - and nearly falling as his knees tried to buckle. He caught himself on the edge of the bed at the same time that Jean reached out to support him. "I'm a little dizzy," he said, with as much composure as he could manage.

"It's all right," Jean said, her voice level. "I've got you. We'll take it slow, and get you settled and comfortable."

He slid an arm around her shoulders, leaning a bit more than he'd intended. "Can't wait to hear Moira's thoughts on this," he said, his voice rough again. "It always entertains me when she breaks out the Scottish curses."

"This one may well get her swearing in Gaelic."