Jean and Adrienne

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

 Jean and Adrienne bond over feeling guilty for people getting hurt.



The Sox had a considerable lead going into the seventh inning stretch, so Adrienne slid off her stool at Harry's and stepped outside for a cigarette. The experience didn't leave her feeling as relaxed as usual, however, due to the fact that she coughed from her first inhale to the last, and was still coughing when she returned to the barstool. This had been happening since the chemical fire and even though the cough eventually went away until her next cigarette, Adrienne was beginning to feel quite annoyed. She enjoyed breathing and wasn't pleased when she couldn't do it properly, damnit. "Christ!" she managed to curse in between hacks, seemingly unable to stop coughing.

Jean had finally started to venture out of the mansion. Little trips at first: the grocery store, CoffeeQuake, Harry's. It was good for her, she decided, but she never figured on how good it was until she was sitting on a bar stool sipping on a bottle of Stella Atrois while watching a couple of men flail about trying to play pool. It really was a woman's game. So what if she cheated?

But a round of coughing set off her 'doctor sense' and she glanced over, subconsciously matching the exasperation that blared out from the person's thoughts to the person (it was easier to just look for the person coughing up a lung, but it'd become almost reflexive at times to 'sense' things about a person before actually seeing them). Recognizing the face, she took another long drink of her beer, then stood up and headed over.

She smiled. "Adrienne, right?" she said. Emma's sister. Vanessa's friend. She could probably play the Kevin Bacon game with how many people were connected to everyone else.

Adrienne gave a quick glance at the other woman but put her head back down, not wanting to cough all over her. Luckily Briar came to her rescue with a glass of water, which she downed quickly, taking long, gasping breaths as the coughing fit subsided. She then returned her gaze to the pretty woman next to her. "That's right; sorry about that," she said with a wry smile, meaning the coughing. "Doctor Grey-Summers, I presume?" Jean had been living at the mansion when Adrienne had arrived three years ago, and had only departed a few months before Adrienne herself, but they'd rarely spoken to each other before. Adrienne wasn't entirely sure why that was. "I don't think I've ever seen you here before," she murmured genially.

Jean chuckled. "Just Jean," she said. "It's only Doctor Grey-Summers in the medlab, on Capitol Hill, or if you're really bad and need detention."

She could appreciate formality, but she wasn't an entirely formal creature. It had its moments of proper necessity but this wasn't one of those moments. It wasn't the place for hair buns, pin stripes, and briefcases.

"I come mostly on the occasional weeknight when its quieter and less likely to break out into a beer-induced bar fight," she said, absently tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

"Figured I'd come tonight since I hadn't been in awhile."

"Medlab been taking up a lot of your time recently?" Adrienne questioned conversationally, sipping at the beer Briar had brought her without any prompting. Then suddenly her eyes widened. "Oh hey, medlab! Can I ask you a question? I was told yesterday that one of my friend's closest friends was in a coma recently... I don't suppose you can tell me who? I've been... out of touch recently, but my friend's friends tend to be my friends and I'm a little worried, y'know? Is that why you haven't been here in a while, cuz someone's been in a coma and you've been looking after them?"

Jean stiffened, and she reflexively put down her beer. It caught her off guard. She didn't know why. It was an innocent thing, and something one might generally assume. She was a doctor. This was her job. It took her a moment to put herself in someone else's perspective, someone who wasn't there, who hadn't been involved, even in the sense of a close call by choosing to go out of town for vacation rather than stay. It took her a moment to realize other things happened in the world rather than hers crumbling down for those three weeks.

"Actually, I...was the the one in the coma," she said softly as she grabbed a peanut and popped open the shell.

Adrienne's eyes were still plate-wide with no indication of that changing anytime soon. "...You? Shit! Christ, I'm sorry." And wait, Jean was one of Vanessa's closest friends? When had that happened? Well, you left, she told herself wryly, what did you think Vanessa was going to do? You thought just because Garrison didn't replace you, Vanessa wouldn't either? Oh, get over yourself, she didn't replace you, you're not a shirt. Stop being a child. Or maybe she did but that's not Jean's fault, and I'm sure Jean's every bit as great as Jean-Paul and Vanessa's other closest friends. Oh shit, isn't Jean a telepath? Shit shit shit! Adrienne put her mental shields up rather after the fact, then stared at the bar guiltily. Even with them up, and while they were much stronger than they once were, she knew they would seem laughably pathetic to someone like Jean. But they were better than nothing. "Sooooo, you're out of the coma now though, huh? That must be... good? Christ, sorry, I'm such crap at this. How are you?"

Jean tilted her head, faintly quirking her eyebrows as she rested her chin in her hand and watched Adrienne's face go through about five different expressions with each thought. She and Vanessa seemed to share the whole loud thoughts thing (even when she usually tried not to listen), but at least she had a rudimentary shield. Everyone needed one, in her opinion. Well, everyone good.

"Yeah...I'm out of the coma," she said with a soft smile, then sat up and nodded. She had to think about it. It was a good question. How was she?

"Things are...slow but steady. I've finally started going outside the mansion. It's nice. I kind of forgot the sun existed," she mused.

"Good for you," Adrienne smiled, toasting Jean with her beer. "The sun is pretty great. Am I being a nosy bitch if I ask how long you were in a coma for? I mean, I am being a nosy bitch, but I'm always a nosy bitch, so I suppose I just say that as a way of letting you know that you don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

Jean couldn't help but idly wonder if Adrienne had been a cop in a past life. Resting her elbow against the bar, Jean glanced toward some guy teaching his girlfriend how to throw darts.

It was good to talk about, right? She'd always held things in, and that usually turned out bad for her. If she really wanted to know, and she was a friend of Vanessa's, Garrison's....(girl)friend?, and a few other things then she felt like she could trust her.

"Almost a month. I pissed off the right person and he got revenge on me by attacking the people I care about. I took care of him...." she said, taking on a distant look.

"Just not the right way."

Adrienne drank silently for a while, wry look on her face. "Wow," she said eventually, "do I ever know how you're feeling. Well, not the coma part, though hiding in my apartment afraid to leave might not be all that different other than the fact that I was conscious the whole time. I managed to piss off a person who threatened to attack the people I care about, and I took care of him the wrong way too. That's why Garrison was nearly killed recently." She sipped at her beer absentmindedly. "Did everyone you care about make it through the attack?" she asked quietly.

Jean stared back down at her beer.

"No," said, then plucked it off the table. She took a long drink, nearly draining the bottle.

"Must be a rite of passage. If you love them, they get screwed one day, and not the way that's fun, because you had to play with the big kids and made one of them angry." Sometimes some of Logan's analogies rubbed off on her and she caught herself using them.

Adrienne went pale and she had a hard time following the rest of what Jean was saying past 'no.' "Christ. Was... was it... was it... Scott?" She'd always been fond of the X-Men leader, even after he'd thrown her good silver flask into the East River.

Jean shook her head. "One of the mansion's residents. And one of the other doctors, but she was only dematerialized. Amelia. The Professor and I found her and put her back together. The other girl..she and her sisters tried to fight back and he killed them out of retaliation."

Though she and Amelia usually were on mostly professional terms she still thought of her as a good person. The students she tended to be more protective of, the wide eyed, the initiated to the full ways of the world.

"Voight? Christ. Well, it's good that you put her back together." Adrienne often referred to Voight as evil, but the woman had patched Adrienne up more than once, and dealt with her repeated vomiting when she'd been concussed that one time, and that earned her a lot of respect in Adrienne's books. "Put her back together. God, the mansion is fucking weird. I'd almost forgotten how weird." She thought on that for a moment, then continued. "Sisters? The Stepfords?" She couldn't think of any other sisters at the mansion, but she had been gone for fifteen months, so maybe there were some she didn't know.

Jean nodded a little. "Sophie. She's the one who died," she said.

"The others got put in a coma too from the backlash. They're awake now but...." How do you get over the loss of a part of you?

She then lifted her bottle in a bit in acknowledgment and smiled wryly.

"And 'the mansion is weird' is the best way I've heard to describe the place yet." It had its ups, and its downs, its horrors, and its triumphs, but at the end of the day it was entirely weird.

Adrienne huffed out a wearied breath at Jean's news about Sophie Stepford and her unfinished comment. But you feel responsible, she thought to herself, for causing them pain, and for someone's death. It eats away at you, kills something in you. Maybe I did do the right thing by staying away. As guilty as I feel about the fire, at least I'm not going through what Jean must be right now. Poor Jean.

"It was described to me when I first arrived as a 'madhouse'," she said with a smile, since she didn't know how to respond to anything else Jean had said. "I've always thought that was an appropriate term. Still, even though it's awful sometimes, I'd rather be at the mansion than anywhere else." And wasn't that a change from when she'd first arrived? "All because of the gym facilities, of course," she smirked.

Jean glanced at her a moment, then couldn't help but grin a bit, laughing.

"We do have the best gym."

In all truth she preferred not to really talk about it anymore since dwelling over it only made her feel more like crap, but she knew she meant well want just wanted to know what was going on.

"So how's Garrison? I was planning to stop by and give him hell for being hurt, again, but I heard he was out of town....again," she said with an idle smile as she traced her finger along the rim of her bottle. The guy never took a break.

Adrienne laughed when Jean did, happy to put the unpleasant topics away, but the redhead's comment about Garrison had Adrienne sobering up quickly. "I'm not really sure." She stared at the bar again. "Since it was my fault he got hurt, I've been avoiding him, and then yeah, he took off. But I don't mind putting it off, because I think he's going to yell at me an awful lot and be really, really angry with me, and while I deserve it and I want to give him all the time in the world to feel what he needs to feel, I just don't really think I'm ready yet to handle it the way I should, y'know?" With Vanessa's disappearance Adrienne was now feeling extra vulnerable and she wasn't sure how much more sadness she could take right now.

Jean finished off her beer, setting it down on the bar. "I guess its hard to tell what he'll think until you talk to him. Because when its someone you love...the words sting a lot more. I'm still wrestling with it myself, not wanting to talk to people because of the pain I caused them, afraid to hear what they say...or don't say."

She let out a breath. "But I know I can't run forever. If I do, things won't get any better."

"I don't... okay, fine. No point in lying to a telepath," Adrienne muttered. "Yeah. When it's someone you love it stings like hell. But you're right. Things won't get any better if you keep running. And I dunno about you, but I definitely want things to get better," she added with a smile. "We make quite the pair, don't we?" A pair of what, Adrienne didn't know. But it was... well, it made her feel a little better knowing that Jean was going through something similar to what she was, because now she didn't feel quite so alone. "Wanna go play pool?"

Jean smiled. "Now you're reading my mind," she said, nodding to the guys behind her who were still having quite the trouble playing.

"I'd been thinking all night of showing these two how its done."

She knew that pool was all math, so even though Adrienne had never tried it before she was sure she would be passable... or at least better than the two guys who were currently flailing about trying to play. "Should we team up to take them down together? Ooo, can we put money on it?"

Glancing over her shoulder at the guys, she grinned a bit as she looked back at Adrienne. "Sounds like a capital idea," she said.

It'd been awhile since she'd had some fun, so she was all for it.