Log: Jean & Cammie

[x-scorpion.livejournal.com]

Jean helps Cammie with her pain and they discuss options Cammie hasn't had in years...

The private medlab rooms were nice, certainly nicer than wherever Cammie had been staying lately, but Jean, despite the amount of time she spent down here in her medical capacities, never really thought they felt homey. Which was actually a point, seeing as they'd had patients before who more or less attempted to move into the medlab - at least if the rooms were sterile and a bit dull it discouraged them a bit. But, given that Cammie would likely be down here for a bit while the cut healed, Jean thought she'd at least look into getting some flowers from Ororo to brighten the room.


Knocking lightly on the open frame of the door Jean stepped inside, smiling at the green-haired girl. "Hello. Sorry about the delay, but how are you doing?"

Cammie had been poking at her side. It didn't itch (she never had that problem with cuts) but it did hurt, and she was more than a bit interested to check out the stitches and what was likely to be one hell of a scar. The room was also nicer than any place she had been, so that was also a bonus there.

She looked up when the door and shrugged, "It hurts, but I'll live," she said with a shrug that pulled on the wound a bit. Which was obvious by the sudden grimace on her face before it smoothed out, "Let me amend that, it REALLY hurts; but I think I'll pull through." Pain she could deal with. It was the bleeding that had been Very Bad.


Jean hesitated a moment, then mentally shrugged to herself. "I can help with the pain, if you would like."

Cammie gave her a look and asked, "Yeah, how?" Pain killers didn't work, she knew that much. Hell, she could eat a bottle of just about anything and not even come out with a stomach ache. And it still wouldn't do anything for the pain. She'd take what she could get though, if something DID work.


Jean stepped into the room, pulling one of the visitor chairs closer to the bed and settling into it. The blood work had been conclusive (and fascinating, in a "none of the medlab volunteers are getting anywhere near bandage changing for this girl" kind of way) and Jean had no doubt believing that medicine would be useless. However... "I'm a mutant, like yourself. Actually, most of the Institute's residents are. One of my mutations is called telepathy. Do you know what that is?"

Cammie nodded, "I'm going to go out on a limb here and say mind reading," she said, albeit a little dryly. She did know the term, but never in a very favorable light, "It's what a lot of the old mentalists used to say they had but really didn't - those people on TV who would act like they could read your mind and things like that. 'Cept you really can?" she asked the last. All things considered it wouldn't be that far out there.

"I really can," Jean agreed, nodding, face serious. "It's not the most comfortable of skills, for me or for other people when they know about it, for a number of reasons. One of which is that, in addition to reading thoughts, I can influence them." She paused, watching Cammie's face closely. "In this instance I can keep you from feeling the pain, make you believe it's not there. If you want."

Cammie considered that for a moment, and her first thought was about keeping everything she didn't like people knowing about out of her head, which of course brought some of it to mind. After a second spent trying to push some of her more painful ones to the side she nodded, "Just don't make me walk off a cliff and I'm okay with that. I like not hurting."

That got her one of Jean's more reassuring 'I'm a doctor, you can trust me' smiles. "Don't worry about that - no cliffs. I'm generally not in favor of causing harm to my patients." She closed her eyes, more to give Cammie a bit of warning than for any other reason, and reached out telepathically, implanting the suggestion into the girl's mind that really, it just didn't hurt. "Just remember to be careful," she said when she opened her eyes again. "It may not hurt any more, but you're still healing. Don't pull your stitches out or we'll have words."

Cammie opened her own eyes, she hadn't known she had closed them. It had stopped hurting. She could live with that, "Wow, thanks," she said, and meant it. She looked down at her side again, she did have the temptation to poke at it. "It's a better stitching job than I could've done," she said. She had tried. It just hadn't worked very well and she just ended up bandaging it instead. "That was... pretty bad."

Jean arched an eyebrow and did not point out that, what with being a licensed doctor and all, she'd have been worried if her stitches weren't up to par with Cammie's. Instead she said, "Yes, it was. Luckily, your x-rays look good, if... odd. They didn't hit anything vital at any rate, and it should heal cleanly with minimum scarring."

"Odd like how?" she asked, no longer poking at the wound. All she really knew about what she was and what she did was she made people sick and didn't get sick herself. Or poisoned. Or infected. But apparently she functioned just fine as a pin cushion.

"While getting the chest images to check your lungs I saw something strange," Jean explained. "I can show you on the light board later, if you want. One of the lymph nodes in your arm," she nodded towards the still greenish limb, "is massively mutated - it looks oddly like the venom sacs that many poisonous creatures have."

Cammie looked at her left arm, "Somehow, I'm really not surprised," she said blandly. "Funny, normally when shit goes sour, it's my arm. Of course, I haven't been stuck like a pig before either," she mused, looking down at her left hand, darker green down at the finger tips.

Jean laughed slightly at that, shaking her head. "No, and I think avoiding repeats of that would be best for everybody."

"I didn't plan on it happening in the first place," Cammie pointed out. Not that it was the first time anyone had tried, but it was easily the worst injury she had gotten. And it wouldn't even have been that bad if it hadn't been raining. "So, what is this place, exactly?"

Leaning back in her chair, Jean waved her hands outward. "Welcome to the Xavier Institute, 'a foundation dedicated to supporting initiatives that advance genetic integration within society at large.'" She grinned. "That's the official, selling it to the donors line. We're a group deeply concerned with the well being of mutants, and of mutant/human relations."

"Uh...huh," Cammie started, "That's great. But what about the people who can't fit in," like me, she added silently. "Because, you know, it sounds nice and all. But nice ideas don't always work."

"There's always someplace you can fit in. Even if that place is primarily here. Kurt told me he mentioned that we have dealt with a few other, hmm, inimical mutations. One of our goals is to find or make a way for mutants such as yourself with extremely dangerous mutations to have as close to a 'normal' life as possible."

"Yeah, I think I remember that," Cammie said. It was hard for her to picture a life that could be normal, given what the last few years had been. Oh, she remembered life before running away, and more and more often now those memories didn't instantly slam her with the one thing she didn't want to see over and over again.

And it was tempting to have that back, even in some way. And if it did backfire (she wasn't very optimistic but try anything once), she could vanish and no one would be the wiser about it. She grinned, a half smile that had a hint of her sarcasm in it, "So how do you do that - get them normal lives?" Even before everything had started going wrong, she really wasn't normal. But that hadn't been so... bad.

"Because, you might not believe this, but I think I've had enough of the whole homeless, living on the streets thing."

Jean smiled faintly at that. "Yes, I can imagine. And the first step here is almost always education of some sort - our days as simply Xavier's School for Gifted Children left their mark. We can provide a place to live here at the mansion, given you've been living on the streets I'm assuming your financial situation counts as 'dire' and so a grant can undoubtedly be drummed up. And the grant would also cover your 'schooling', whatever that might be. We do everything from directly teaching elementary, middle and high school classes through fostering, funding and assisting with post-graduate work in mutant-related fields. All with a side order of power control training with people who have, really, decades of experience working with mutations of various types. All aimed at furthering knowledge of mutations, in both the general and the specific, both here at the Institute and among the general public."

Cammie took that all in and let it process for a moment. Though she was nineteen now, she technically didn't have anything more than a tenth grade education. And her finical straights were dire in the grand scheme of things. You generally didn't get very far on sixty bucks. But it didn't help her last pawn shop run that the guy who owned the store had totally ripped her off, citing the economy.

"A grant would be great and all, but I never finished high school," not that she hadn't wanted to. It all seemed a moot point now, "And... that's pretty..." impressive? Spiffy? Neat? "...awesome," she admitted. "What you guys do, I mean."

The list of adjectives floating through Cammie's mind got a grin from Jean. Spiffy. Well, that was good, right? "Ah, I wasn't sure," she said. "A scholarship, then, to finish your GED, at least?" she offered. "As for what we do in the more specific sense, the list is pretty large and varies a lot by person. We've got people working on mutant rights in regards to sports, genetic research into assorted mutations, applied practicalities of the use of mutations in criminal investigation. I, obviously, do a lot of work on medical aspects of mutations; I wrote a paper recently on proper treatment of physical mutations in ER situations. And we also do a lot of one-on-one grass roots integration work. Most of the younger students here also take a class or two at the normal high school in town, working on socialization, both for them and for their human classmates."

Well, that was good for them. You couldn't get Cammie to set foot in a high school again if her life depended on it. But she didn't bring that up, "Yeah..." she said as to the GED, "If I last that long... that'd be... good." A GED opened up other options that she wasn't going to waste her brain power on right now. She took in the rest, though some of it went over her head. She didn't care much about medical stuff (though her Dad would've eaten it up) the criminal stuff might be interesting and she felt sorry for the kids who had to go sit through classes at a 'normal' high school. Maybe it was just her own experiences, but too many things could go wrong for her to say that was a good idea in any sense of the word.

Jean knew that it was all a bit much to take in at first. And, too, she was less than surprised that trust was not an easy response for Cammie, so for now, she thought, it was best if they left it at that. "Well, there's time for all of that later," she said. "For now, you need rest to get better. There's a call button on the side of the bed if you need me or Dr. Voigt for anything at all. Are you hungry?"

Cammie thought about that for a moment, "Sure. Just.. whatever you bring up, bring Tabasco or something spicy with it," she said. Otherwise, the food itself didn't matter. It wasn't like she could taste it and the first thing she asked for was NOT going to be anti-freeze or drain cleaner. Even if the looks that got her were always amusing she really wasn't in the mood for it right now. After all, at the moment she had a bed, she still had her bag and something to eat would be good in that way just having what you needed was. She'd figure everything else out later.

Cammie had a bit to think about. Like if this would even work out at all, or was just a dumb-shit idea. That she could do over food, even if the food itself tasted like nothing.