Log: Jean and Terry

[x-jeangrey.livejournal.com]

Backdated like woah. A few days after the events of the Shadow King Jean, sane again at last, stops by to speak with Terry and they actually talk.



Jean was possessed of an absurd desire to fidget and stall. She really wanted to put it down to having spent the past week as an twelve year old, at least in her head, but the truth was that really, she was just that unsettled by the door she was standing in front of. She knew Terry was in, and had come down here specifically to talk to the younger woman, but that didn't make any of this any easier.

Mentally berating herself for the stalling Jean reached out and knocked, forebaring to call out.

Terry tugged the earbuds down, music blaring loudly into the otherwise quiet room, and set aside her text book. She thought it a little odd that whoever was out there hadn't said something--it wasn't like even with the headphones she wouldn't have heard them. More than once she'd thought about adding something like the soundproofing her father had had in his suite but in the end, she preferred to stay connected. "Come in?"

Jean steeled herself, then sliped in and shut the door behind her, leaning against it. "Hi, Terry," she said simply.

Terry's normally mobile face went blank for a moment. "Dr. Grey..." she said, as uncomfortable as she looked. Looking down at her notetaking, she spent a few seconds fussing with the pages to organize them and give her time to figure out how to approach this. "Can I help you with something? I'm studying for a test."

Jean nodded and refrained from toeing at the carpet. "Yes, I'm sorry to interrupt. I won't be long. I just... I wanted to thank you, Terry. For what you did last week. You... You really helped, you know."

Terry shrugged, looking back up but focusing more on the collar of Jean's shirt than anything. "It's nothing. I just remembered being in that position myself. Wasn't any trouble of mine to help." And the child-Jean was hardly responsible for the sins of the older one, whatever body she'd been in.

"No, I guess not," Jean said, glancing aside for a moment. "Still. I'm sorry you got put in that position. And... I really do mean it. Thank you." A small smile edged on to her lips. "Flying... I think if I'd known that someday I'd be able to fly when I really was that young... it would have been easier."

"You think so?" Terry glanced at her face, curious now. "I can't think of anything that would have made up for getting sent here. Though, for me, it wasn't so much the mutation that was the problem, I suppose." Everything had been so loud then, so overwhelming. Just noise that meant nothing without her uncle there to make sense of it.

"By the time I came here..." Jean stopped for a moment. "My telepathy manifested first. I thought I was going crazy. And then it turned out I wasn't crazy, and that was almost worse. My mother... has never coped well with the idea. When I first came here there was absolutely nothing good about my mutation, for me. I had to leave home and, more, my mother wanted me to go away. She might not say it, but I was an untrained telepath - I knew. And I had to come here and it was just me, and Charles and Eric rattling around in this massive monolith. The two of them may have been the best powers trainers I could have had but... not so terribly good at dealing with teenaged girls. Having anything positive about my powers, about any of it... would have changed a lot of things."

Terry pulled her legs up onto the couch, folding them into a lotus position. Jean knew her story, had been part of it, after all. But the reverse had never been true. Even as nosy as Terry was, she hadn't known this part. "When did it get better?"

It definitely wasn't something Jean talked about a hell of a lot - too personal in parts, and too many people would get sidetracked by the whole 'trained by Magneto' thing. "With my powers," Jean said, considering, "certainly not until after I could reliably shield - I didn't leave the mansion for almost two months, simply because I couldn't keep the inside and outside of my skull apart. Even then I wasn't really comfortable about any aspect of my powers until I started to get a hang of the telekinesis." There was a wistful sort of smile on her face as she said, "I saw Star Wars... spent a week going around waving my hand and summoning pens to me and pretending to be a jedi." But the smile faded. "I don't know that things ever did get better with my mother - our relationship got better after Alkalai, I guess, but..." Maybe things would be different now, Jean thought. Her mother had gotten a second chance at dealing with her manifestation. Maybe it didn't bother her as much as it had. Maybe.

Terry waited and the silence stretched out, broken only by the music from her headphones, perfectly clear to her but probably nothing more than tinny noise to Jean. She reached over to her iPod and paused it, cutting Alison off in mid-word. She didn't have the problem that some people did, unable to imagine their teachers as people or even as children but she was having trouble getting over the rest of it, her own experience with Jean.

Jean looked up at that, only finally noticing the noise by it's cessation, and offered Terry a tiny smile. "Sorry," she said. "I'm still... processing the fact that my mother came this last week." Came because Jean had asked for her, because Jean had needed her. "I really just wanted to thank you. You didn't have to do any of that for me. I wouldn't have blamed you if you'd taken one look at me, out of my mind yet again, and run screaming for the hills, as it were." Or if she'd taken their history out on Jean, although she couldn't really imagine Terry ever doing so.

Another couple seconds passed then Terry tilted her head, "This time was rather less harmful than the last. I didn't mind so much." It could have been an accusation but Terry tried to modulate her tone away from that. It felt too soon to go back to that bitterness. Terry could hold a grudge. Could cherish a grudge, really. But she did have some sense of proportion.

Jean nodded. "I may end up spending a lot of time trying to figure out what that means about the state of my mind, but for now I'm just glad I didn't get to be the one attacking students this time." She paused, then looked up to meet Terry's eyes squarely. "I've never apologized, have I? To you, I mean. I came back and I didn't know how to deal with any of it and then, by the time I could cope with my own head, I didn't know how to... to talk to you any more. And that hurts, you know. That I screwed up so entirely that I destroyed one of the best things about my life from before Alkalai. But I am sorry, Terry. I can't make it right, but for what it's worth, I am so, so sorry."

Terry had to look down and away, eyes stinging with unexpected tears. She blinked them away, taking a couple steadying breaths. "A lot of things went wrong that year. Sure and you can't be held responsible for all of them. There's a fair amount that Bobby and I did to ourselves." It helped to have the apology, however late it was. It wasn't going to mend anything over or change what had been but...well, at least she had the acknowledgment.

Jean nodded slightly. "You and Bobby got through it, though. And when you manage to get through a year like that you get the feeling you can get through anything." She sighed and straightened up. "I should go, though. I just came by... well, you know."

They had--through pure stubbornness in some cases--and Terry didn't know what to think about that, if there was anything to think other than that they had. "Thank you for saying so. I appreciate it," she replied, quietly and just a bit formally. "And...it wasn't a problem, taking you out flying. I had fun."

"So did I," Jean said, just as quietly. "So did I."