Cammie, Jean-Paul, and Jean

[x-cynosure.livejournal.com]

Jean-Paul attempts to speak to Cammie about her past. It goes about as poorly as it possibly could.



Jean-Paul stood in front of Cammie's door, still not entirely sure how to approach the topic of her past, let alone her parents. Surely this was more Haller's department, wasn't it? But too late now; he had put himself squarely into this and Xavier had given him the information he needed to proceed. He knocked firmly at the girl's door.

"Cammie? It is Jean-Paul. I need to speak with you."

She had procured a pair of headphones the other night out with Lil. Cammie had those on when she heard the knocking on the door. It did remind her a lot of a parent’s knock. She pulled them up and sat up on the bed. Sleep hadn’t been coming very well the past few days and even though she could feel it pulling at her eyes, she didn’t want to.

Maybe she could convince Lil to take her to another bar. Leaning against the wall, she didn’t bother to open the door but instead just said, “It’s open. You can stop trying to break it down.”

Jean-Paul opened the door and stepped inside before closing it softly behind him. It wasn't difficult to see that Cammie was already expecting nothing good -- back to the wall, arms folded over her chest, headphones still on. It would have been difficult for her to be any more closed off.

"Cammie, there's been a matter from your past brought before the school. The incident with the Johnston boy." No use skirting around the matter. "You are not in any trouble, but it would be of some help if we had the entire story and not just second-hand accounts."

She closed her eyes and muttered something that might have been about skinning Callie. The fact she hadn’t yet meant she really wouldn’t. She opened her eyes and they were like a wall in and of themselves. “Yeah, well, you know all about it you have to then. Though Callie has this amusing story about me beating someone to death with a shoe.”

Jean-Paul raised an eyebrow, but didn't pursue the distraction. "It is not so simple. There is no warrant out for your arrest, not even for questioning as a witness. No clearly determined cause of death stated in the autopsy report, with a Timothy Black acting as coroner. There might, perhaps, be reason to doubt his findings." Jean-Paul settled on the edge of Cammie's bed, regarding the girl across the room. "For now, it is quiet, but all it takes is for someone to succussfully challenge the report, and this could become a mess again. I am not making a threat, understand, but it is a possibility. We only want to help you in this and it is that much more difficult if we do not know what happened that night."

She let out a soft ‘heh.’ Dad did the autopsy. That figured. Of course he wouldn’t finger her for anything like that, but it didn’t change facts nothing did. “What, you don’t believe I beat someone to death with a shoe and was running people down in the parking lot?” she snarked.

"I suspect that the truth is less dramatic and more painful." He still was not rising to the bait.

“Yeah, you’re right. It was an SUV and flats. Oh, and I totally strangled someone with one of my necklaces. I hate heels, you can’t run in heels,” Cammie said. She knew that from experience. Running home that night, she shook her head. “Look, it doesn’t fucking matter. It happened. It’s over and done with. End of story.”

"Not nearly. It still affects you, not to mention those who are left behind to deal with their losses. Running from these things does not make them disappear." Jean-Paul knew that all to well, even if he'd never managed to take the lesson to heart. "Besides, if it did not matter, it would not be so hard to talk about it."

“It doesn’t matter. You can dress it up and call it anything you want and say I have any sort of complex you want, but it doesn’t change a fucking thing. No one is contacting my parents and I am not even going there. You want to know what happened? Call any member of my high school class,” she snapped.

"You are legally an adult and your relationship with your parents is your concern." Jean-Paul rose to his feet. "And there is no need to dress anything up -- you killed someone, and it is difficult to talk about. Hardly surprising. But you can keep telling yourself it doesn't matter, if you think that will make you feel less keenly. It works sometimes."

Her head dropped. She had one image playing over and over in her mind. Her boyfriend falling to the gym floor, followed with everyone screaming and then just total chaos. It didn’t matter. Because if it did, she’d have to think about it. She’d have to start running.

She heard Jean-Paul come in closer. And closer was the last thing she wanted right now. Her left hand balled up, she measured the dose automatically and swung, hard. The mid-level shot was enough to floor a three hundred pound biker. The French-Canadian man was thin, it would work well on him.

Jean-Paul was starting to lean in toward her when she swung and the punch connected high on his left cheekbone. The reaction was immediate -- his eyes rolled back in his head even as he fell stiffly to the floor. The skin where Cammie's punch had landed was already discoloring, looking like nothing more than a bad rash, save for the sickly green and brown border outlining the shape of her fist. The room was utterly quiet for several long seconds before Jean-Paul's chest started to heave and he struggled for air, his skin paling and his lips beginning to darken. It didn't take long for his breathing to stop, perhaps only another ten seconds, then the room was quiet again.

Cammie's eyes widened and she was off the bed in a second. She didn't mean to hit him that hard, "Hey! Cut it out! That's not fucking funny!" she said, and when he didn't seem to be getting better she didn't mean to - of course, you never met to...

"Damnit!" she swore and picked him up the best she could, but it was more like dragging him by the shoulders. She had to get him to the med lab before...

...She knew this had all been a big mistake.


----

Jean gets her shock of the night in Medlab.



Jean was working late in the medlab - she'd been focusing on getting all of her classes midterms finished and back before spring break and had let some of the lab paperwork build up. Not a dire situation, and definitely not something she was much interested in owing Amelia for, so she'd told Scott she'd be up late and buried her nose in forms and records after dinner. The sound of the door to the main room slamming open startled her, though, and once she widened her focus to the world at large again she was out from behind her desk like a shot.

Cammie had made it through the halls without anyone seeing her and Jean-Paul. This was both good and bad. The bad being it took her a couple of minutes to drag him through the halls. The good being she didn’t have to explain why. Making it back to the medlab she didn’t even drop him, letting the door slam.

“Dr. Grey!” she shouted, “We need some help here!” she was so close to tears at the moment she was surprised her voice even worked.

"I'm here," Jean said as she hurried into the main room of the medlab. "I'm... good God, Cammie. What happened?" Already she was shifting Jean-Paul's weight out of Cammie's hands, floating him over to the exam bed.

“I… he… I hit him,” she finished simply, and wasn’t proud of that fact at all. “He was asking questions about… something that happened before I got here and wouldn’t back off and… I didn’t think I hit him so hard…” now she was crying. Which she would’ve laughed at had she had a chance to think about it. Her, the big tough street girl. Crying.

There were a number of things in that statement which would probably need to be dealt with in very, very different ways, but right now Jean couldn't focus on most of them because Jean-Paul was not breathing, his lips taking on a bluish tinge that contrasted very worryingly with the off-color mark on his cheek. He had a very erratic heartbeat, but it was there - his system was trying to fight off whatever toxins had been dumped into it, but she needed to get oxygen into him, now.