Crystal and Jean - Old is New

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Crystal and Jean go out for lunch and discuss classes... and Logan. Backdated



It was good to have Jean back at the mansion, Crystal reflected as the two women stood waiting to be seated at a cafe. The restaurant wasn't fancy, but it was a popular spot for lunch and the food was good. Jean was one of the very few people in New York who had always made sense to Crystal, and even though she probably hadn't realized what she was doing at the time, Jean had been the one to set Crystal on the path that had now led to becoming a paramedic and being part of the X-Men. Jean and so many others had left the mansion, and it seemed that those Crystal was on friendly terms with seemed to leave a lot, but now Jean was back. Crystal could still count on one hand the number of mansion residents she would think of as a friend, and it was nice to have another one back.

Jean glanced around, slipping off her sunglasses and putting them into her purse before looking over at Crystal with a smile. She'd grown quite a bit since she'd first met her. It seemed a bit trite to say she had blossomed, but it was the truth.

"I hear their turkey club with avocado mayo is very good," she said.

Granted, a doctor advocating mayo could be considered hypocrisy but Jean figured you had to live a little. Besides, according to one scientific study or another, pretty much everything killed you. So unless you stopped eating (which would kill you), why not enjoy some things in moderation?

"Is that what you will order?" Crystal asked. "Perhaps I will try it as well and we can see for ourselves if it is as good as people say it is." She hadn't always been so open to try new food that didn't have a fancy-sounding name, but avocado mayonnaise didn't sound too bad. It did sound like something that had the potential to be used as a beauty product, though.

Jean nodded. "Think so," she said as they crept a bit further up in the line.

"And if it isn't good, then we can spread the word," she said, grinning. As they finally reached the precipice, the hostess directed them toward a booth and provided them with two menus before wandering off back toward the front.

"How're things?" Jean said. She'd found herself asking the question a lot lately with various people but in addition to being polite, more often than not getting people to talk about their feelings was somewhat akin to trying to give a cat a bath.

"Things are... OK, I think," Crystal said. Morgan/Vanessa had met Haven and still had her powers, which was good. Haven was still free to alter mutants whenever she chose, which was not good, although perhaps she wouldn't be so eager to remove mutations now that more than one person had come asking questions. Maybe X-Factor's investigation would turn up something that would give a reason for her to be removed from the streets and locked up somewhere, but as far as Crystal knew, all that was known at this time was that she had changed mutants into baseline humans, and there wasn't a law against that.

"I will be continuing my paramedic classes at a regular pace now that classes are about to resume," Crystal said. "I might actually take a bit of a vacation before classes begin again, although I suppose this past weekend was a mini-vacation. With such a small number of students this year, classes will resemble personal tutoring sessions, I believe. Students might not look forward to the start of a school year, but I always do."

Jean glanced up from her menu. "But it could be better," she said, tilting her head.

OK was a generally loaded response. 'I'm OK, which means I'm still breathing but I don't want to come off as needy or whiny so I'm just going to be really vague.'

"You know my door's always open." Sometimes they took her on it. Sometimes they tried to speed off like the Flash and jump through a window when problems arose .

Jean nodded a little, smiling again. "I always look forward to the new school year as well," she said. She had been drawn to teaching when she discovered she was good at it. At first she thought of it as just a job, something the Professor had asked her to do, but she'd grown to love it.

She turned the page on the menu. "I appreciate you taking over my classes while I was away. And I don't want you to feel like I'm deposing you. With the...higher amount of guests in the medlab as of late, I've found myself practically living there. I need some time to get reacquainted with things. If you wanted to teach one of my classes I wouldn't mind."

Oh. Well. Crystal supposed that it was to be expected, at least a little bit, than Jean would want to teach again. Still, it was a bit disconcerting to discover than Jean viewed the classes she had taught as still belonging to her even though she had left the mansion on her own accord. Crystal had taught entirely different classes during her two years as a teacher at the mansion; the classes she had taught the first time around had been taught by other teachers in her absence, and she hadn't expected them back. Of course, Jean had been a long-time teacher at the school before she went to the West Coast the previous October whereas Crystal had only taught classes at the school for one year before she left.

"There will be very few students this year," Crystal said. "Science classes are always needed, of course, as are languages, which I can teach as well. Kurt teaches German if any students wish to take it, and I will be teaching French and Spanish with Jean-Phillipe acting as a TA." He'd been the TA when Jean-Paul left, and it hadn't seemed right to remove him from the class. Still, he hadn't been eager to take on the entire responsibility for the class, and since he knew some Spanish Crystal had thought it made sense to have him help with both classes. "I also teach Speech, and although that is an elective I know that there are students who are planning to take it during the upcoming year. I can also take on other classes if needed."

Jean glanced back down, silent for a few moments. The disappointment in the girl's voice was quite apparent.

"Actually, nevermind. The science classes...they are your classes. They became yours when I left," she said, smiling as she turned the page on the menu.

"Might be fun to try something else."

Crystal looked at Jean. "What else would you teach?" she asked, surprised. "You have a doctorate, and you did teach these classes for a longer period of time than I did. I seem to teach different classes each year that I am a teacher at Xavier's; perhaps I should not break the cycle now. Of course, the first time I was a teacher at the school I stayed for only one year and now this year will be my third year as a teacher at Xavier's and the first time I will teach two years in a row. I think Chemistry is available as well, unless you are also interested in teaching that."

Continuing to flip through the menu, despite already finding what she wanted, Jean shook her head. "I didn't mean to come in and think the world should just change on my whim the moment I return. You had to accommodate the vacuum I left and change things around in your own life to fill that void and I thank you for assuming that responsibility," she said, then glanced up.

"I suppose I wanted some shred of what I had before. Other than the usual patch up, ship out in the medlab and well...Logan... everything else is different." Though some of the same people were there, the entire feel of the place felt slightly off-kilter. "Whatever you want to teach I will be okay with. I shouldn't have expected you to change your life again because of me."

"'Logan'?" Crystal asked, her eyebrows lifting slightly. Logan wasn't exactly her favorite person in the world. He'd had it out for her for no reasonable explanation as far as Crystal was concerned, and while their fight years earlier hadn't helped matters any, he hadn't liked her even before then. All she'd wanted was to learn from him, and he had singled her out and been rude to her sister the very first time they met.

Jean shook her head, smiling softly. "Everything changes over time. He doesn't," she said, leaning back in her chair. She cared about Logan more than she would allow herself to admit. It went down deeper than friendship. And though Scott was in her heart, she had to reconcile the fact that Logan was too.

It had been thought that Logan would likely never age and die, that he'd probably lived for hundreds of years and might live hundreds more. She wondered if he had stayed the same in mind as he did in body, the world shifting around him. People living, growing old, dying, him forever looking the same. It was an existence she could not envy.

"This is a good thing?" Crystal asked. "The not changing, I mean. Usually people change as time passes, at least somewhat; even if they remain the same person, something about them has changed." Crystal knew she'd certainly changed over the past several years. No longer was she the 16-year-old girl who'd tried to prove she was capable of defending herself by taking air away from the self-defense teacher and then hitting him with a bolt of lightning.

"In the mind's case, yes, but deep down certain constant truths will always remain. You know what to expect from some people in some regard," Jean said. In his truest from he was something primal, basic...pure and undiluted in his manner.

Jean grinned. "He will never lie about how he feels about you."

"There is a difference between being honest and being rude," Crystal pointed out, pausing her thoughts on Logan when their waiter came by. After the two woman had ordered their lunches and the waiter had left, Crystal looked back at Jean. "I would never wish to lie to someone and tell them I felt a certain way when that was not the truth. However, I would never go out of my way to make sure someone knew of my negative feelings."

Jean nodded, laughing a little once the waiter had left. "Oh yeah, definitely not going to deny that he has a huge problem with being stubborn as hell, unfortunately. Someone looks at him the wrong way and they're suddenly his enemy for life," she said.

"The last time we spoke I wound up hitting him. Granted there was a lot of alcohol involved but his civility meter appears to be broken sometimes so he knows how to say just the wrong thing," she said.

"He has a big problem with Scott too. I know why on that one. But as for you...could be all in his head. Like I said, the stubbornness keeps him from seeing only what he wants to see. He might've misunderstood something and just ran with it maybe." It was hard to tell. She couldn't really speak for him. He was one of the few that were extremely hard to read without concentrated effort.

"You hit him?" Crystal was shocked. It wasn't that she'd never used violence; she'd defended herself and attacked others, usually with her powers but she'd also kicked, scratched, and punched on occasion. She also didn't think that Jean had never physically hurt anyone; both Crystal and Jean were X-Men after all, and X-Men did tend to find themselves fighting others, but the idea of Jean hitting Logan in the middle of a conversation and not appearing to be ashamed of it at all was surprising. "What did he say that caused you do this?"

Jean shrugged a little. "It was more of a pool ball than with my fist. He caught it. I knew it wouldn't hurt him."

Crystal seemed to have this idealized notion of her. Jean didn't particularly like someone thinking of her that way. She was human. She loved, hated, laughed, cried, and made mistakes. She didn't want someone to have some idea that she could do no wrong. It made things harder when it did happen. It made her feel like it crushed them.

"He told me I was getting a little 'soft,' and by soft he meant less than fit. I was drunk...so inhibition went out the window and things got out of hand."

She regretted some of the things she said, but not all of them.

"Do you think that you are 'less than fit'?" Crystal asked the redhead. "You have still been training, yes? I can see that you consider him a friend, and I do not wish to say anything against him. I was not there, so I am not sure if what was said was intended to be taken as a serious statement or if it was meant to be a joke between friends." Jean's newer statements were changing the situation in Crystal's mind from the way she had viewed it when Jean had simply said she had 'hit' Logan. Crystal might not particularly like the man, but it was becoming clear that Jean did.

Jean rubbed the back of her neck, shaking her head. "Yeah, I've been training a lot. I don't think he meant it. Part of me knew he was kidding. I guess I was subconsciously looking for a fight," she said. She knew how he felt, she knew how she felt. She knew things were not simple, far from it. She loved Scott, plain and simple. But she also cared for Logan.

And on top of that she felt more confrontational than usual lately. She didn't know why. He just wound up being at the wrong place at the right time with the wrong words.

Taking a drink, she glanced around. "Anyway," she said, needing a fresh change of subject. Thinking about Logan to herself was enough, saying it aloud to someone felt awkward.

"Classes?" Crystal suggested the previous topic, the one that had inadvertently led to a surprise discussion about Logan. "You are planning to remain at the school for the length of the 2010-2011 school year, yes? If you do wish to teach the classes you taught before going to the West Coast Annex, I think that you should teach them. As I said before, there are plenty of other classes available that are not at all a problem for me to teach." She smiled a bit. "Perhaps I am meant to teach different classes different years. You have had a lot of changes, and you are right, it would be good for you to have some of what you had before so that not everything is different for you."

Jean shook her head. "Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the plan was for the return to be permanent," she said, then fell silent for a few moments. This was her focusing on the minute details. She wished she could shut her mind off sometimes.

"I would like to teach them but again, I didn't mean to kick you out," she said, then rubbed her forehead with a tired but bright smile.

"Okay, so I'm going to stop dwelling and just say...thanks," she said.

Crystal raised her glass. "A toast to the upcoming school year and classes new and old?" she suggested.

Grinning softly, Jean picked up her glass. "Yes. And may the year run smoothly, with nothing being blown up," she said.