Scott and Jean, Saturday morning

[x-cyclops.livejournal.com]

Scott helps Jean out on nursery duty. Yes, really.


The baby was staring at him. It was a little eerie, really, Scott thought, reaching out and taking one plump, warm little hand in his, stroking the back of it gently. Blue eyes met his steadily, almost unblinkingly. "Don't you guys sleep?" Scott murmured, then smiled as the comment got a yawn. "I guess that's a yes."

Jean was much, much too busy to be doing what she wanted. Which was, simply, to curl up in their make-shift nursery ward with one of their visitors and just have some quiet baby time. It would be calming and grounding and, ok, maybe a more than a little heart wrenching on basically every level there was, but it would be worth it. But Jean did not have the time. Which was why she was honest to God bustling as she came into the nursery to do a quick check up. Which plan was totally derailed by the sight of her husband, with what had to be the sweetest smile she'd ever seen, making time with a baby. It was entirely possible her heart had just attempted to vacate her chest by way of her throat.

Wife. Wife looking at him looking at baby, with a wonderful and rather frightening expression. Instead of panicking and backing away from the baby, however, Scott found himself giving her a sheepish smile. "He was, uh, sitting and looking around. There were these little eyes peering over the edge of the crib when I looked in."

Jean came over to stand next to Scott, smiling down at the baby at least partly to avoid terrifying her husband with the grin she couldn't quite smother. But her voice was low when she said, "They're all much more alert than they ought to be, by rights. Don't know how much you remember about Rachel when she was this small..." The hand which reached out to brush a wisp of hair away from the little boy's face was gentle.

"I don't think I even want to think about what might have been," Scott said after a moment. The little boy was still gazing at them, watchfully. "But I can't help wondering about how they'll grow up, after all this... what'll happen when they start asking questions about who their parents were, that sort of thing."

"Well, some of those answers we have, or will have, and some we won't, but I they'll have the opportunity to know more about their history than most orphaned infants. Whether they'll want to know what we know is a different question." She turned her head at a slight noise from one of the other cribs - not a cry, they didn't still hadn't heard any of them cry - and moved over to check on the little girl who had woken up. She needed changing, so Jean picked her up and moved to their 'changing station'.

Scott eyed the way Jean so calmly plucked the little girl out of the crib. Clearly they did not need special care in handling... he glanced back down at the little boy, almost furtively. The baby gazed up at him, then waved one of those tiny hands. Oh, what the hell. Scott scooped him up - carefully.

Jean did not drop the baby, did not toss her up into the air in glee, did not even giggle maniacally as she saw Scott pick up the little boy out of the corner of her eye. Instead she calmly continued what she was doing, got the little girl swaddled back up as she drifted off again and made a few quick notes on the chart next to her crib. Then she turned to her husband and offered the bottle which had floated in to the room. "He's hungry and you've totally just volunteered to help," she informed Scott.

"... you're enjoying this," Scott murmured, but there was a smile playing on his lips as he took the bottle. This wasn't something he'd done before, really... ever. But he'd seen it done, and there was a particular technique, he'd noticed...

This time she didn't even try to hide the grin. "You're very astute," she said, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek before going back to checking on the other babies. A few others were on the awake-ish side of things and needed tending too, but none of them seemed impatient or fussy - they simply waited until she came by. It was deeply unnerving, but Jean had to admit that she didn't think, after the month they'd have, that she could have taken a medlab filled with crying infants.

"They're going to Muir, I'm guessing?" Scott said quietly, looking around and then sitting down, the baby calmly sucking on the bottle. He kept glancing up at Scott, however, and Scott couldn't help another smile.

"Yeah," Jean said, and there was definitely a hint of wistfulness to her tone, though her hands didn't falter as she continued checking over the baby in front of her. "Moira's going to take them back with her - she's already got Hank and Maddie working on setting up a proper facility."

"I suppose, until she figures out what they did to their genes, it's the best place..." Scott felt a pang at the thought of the little scrap of humanity in his arms suffering any more, from any of this. "It's a good place," he said, to the baby. "Not at all a hardship to spend some time there..."

It was completely impossible. She was trying really, really hard not to go all swoony at the sight of her husband cuddling a baby and then he had to go and talk to the baby, in that reassuring 'I may think I would be bad at this but secretly I am really really good at it' voice. It was only the vague sense of hunger from one of the other babies which broker her reverie watching him.

"The red-haired woman with the funny accent has a heart of pure marshmallow," Scott murmured. "And she'd probably shoot people for you. You'll find that's really reassuring." The baby sucked away at the bottle, watching him almost thoughtfully.

Jean collected the second bottle which floated into the room and picked up the baby, settling her into her arms and letting her suckle. "So," she said after a second in which her better nature totally failed to win the fight going on in her head. "Do I get to use the lack of running and screaming from the baby as ammunition in that talk we keep Significantly Not Having or should I ignore you having a bonding moment with the little guy?"

Scott looked up at her, the smile coming back, with a hint of sheepishness to it. "I've been thinking about it a lot," he admitted after a moment, his voice soft. "These kids - not just these kids, but, well... they're kind of living examples of why this can be such a godawful world for mutant kids, aren't they?" But he went on before Jean could respond to his apparent pessimism. "Except I was realizing... horrible circumstances of conception or not, they're still here. And now they have a chance for something better. Especially these little guys." He looked back down at the baby, adjusting the bottle before it could slip. "I suppose I"m just starting to wonder, if children cooked up in a laboratory can have a shot at a good life, a real life... maybe this isn't such a godawful world for them after all."

Jean's smile was soft as she ducked her head to look down at the little girl in her arms. "No, maybe not so godawful," she agreed, tilting the bottle up slightly. "I think they have a pretty good chance of being happy in the end."

"To be honest, Jean... I still don't know." He still worried. About their lifestyles and about exposing a child to this life, about Jean herself, about whether or not he could manage to give any child the life they really deserved. It wasn't as if he had any particularly good paternal models. "But... does any parent, I guess?"

"None I've ever met," Jean said simply, looking back up, and then she wrinkled her nose at her husband. "And if you let that little guy get down to the air in the bottle you get to learn how to burp him," she warned.

"Dang, he was hungry," Scott said, detaching baby from bottle as gently as he could. The little boy stared - no, glared at him, and Scott let out a soft, startled laugh. "What a face. I promise there's more where that comes from."

"Hmmm. He's mostly faking it," she decided after a moment of considering his mental and emotional state. "Definitely doesn't need any more."

"She cheats, doesn't she?" Scott asked the baby, who grimaced very slightly as Scott shifted him to an upright position. "You get used to it. She's completely unscrupulous."

"It's true," Jean told the little girl in her arms, "but trust me, you don't have to be a telepath to pull it off. I'm sure you'll be a heartbreaker someday, sweetie."

Scott regarded his wife and the baby in her arms with a very straight face. "We could have two," he said suddenly. "A boy and a girl. And pit them against each other in, uh, gladiatorial-style games..."

That earned a surprised laugh from Jean which, in turn, got a startled look from the baby in her arms. "No gladiatorial-style games," she said when she got her breathing back under control. "I'm just going to say that from the get go. Not adverse to the other idea, though..."

The boy gave a very quiet little burp, and Scott patted his back gently. "Jean," he said, ignoring the little quiver of nervousness in the pit of his stomach. "I, uh... I do want to talk about this. Okay?" Not 'I think we should talk'. He hoped she'd sense the distinction.

From the smile on her face it was a good bet that she got it. "I want to, too. So... We'll talk about it," she agreed. "For real, this time."