Adrienne, Haller and Scott

[x-cyclops.livejournal.com]

Adrienne and Haller talk about the students they're worried about until Scott walks in on them and awkwardness ensues.

Trigger warning: potential references to loss of child.

"Hey," Adrienne greeted Haller as she sat down at a table in the staff common area after pouring herself a fresh cup of coffee. "So thanks for keeping an eye on Tandy while I was gone," she smiled as she sipped. "I'm feeling a lot better about things now. Funny how being shipwrecked and held as a captive of Magneto's makes your problems with teenagers seem less overwhelming, eh?" she mused.



"Reality's good about providing the odd priority check," Jim replied from his spot by the wall, "though in this case it might have gone a little overboard." The telepath took a drag and carefully exhaled the smoke out the lounge window before turning back to her. It was drafty and technically prohibited, but the alternative was going outside. "How's she holding up, by the way? In general, I mean."



Adrienne was strongly considering asking for a cigarette- it had been one of those weeks- but forced herself to recall how proud she was that she was currently going on more than a year as a non-smoker, and contented herself with the scent of the secondhand smoke. "I think she's doing better now. It's difficult to gauge though, since I have nothing to compare her experience to. I think the other students have been rallying her around pretty admirably, though. I know Clint in particular has been trying hard to cheer her up."



"That's good. Plus she might be more inclined to talk to her peers than us. Hopefully they'll let us know if something happens again." He knew Maddie was watching, at least. She'd taken the incident with Topaz seriously. The telepath scratched his head. "Actually now that I think about it, it's kind of weird to have that as a possibility. I think we only had five or six students my first year here. I wonder if the birth-rate is going up."



"I guess it is in general, right?" Adrienne posited, "so it makes sense that the birth-rate of mutants is rising as well? And maybe there's something to be said for improvements in social networks in the sense that we have more resources to find mutants all over the world?" she shrugged and took another sip of her coffee. "Kids today," she joked, "have it so much easier than we did. Mutant peers, must be nice at their age." Adrienne hadn't met a fellow mutant until she'd come to the mansion. "Did you know they even got a collection together to send flowers to the funeral home for Tandy?" she asked Haller. "I think Hope organized it. For all that she's weird, she is polite, I'll give her that. Have you noticed her being any more weird than usual lately, by the way?"



Jim tilted his head. "Hope? Not really. Or . . . not anything she's been telling me about, anyway. I haven't really spoken to her in-depth since the professor got her mother to back off. She doesn't like to impose." He frowned. "She hasn't been ghosting out in class again, has she?"



"Not in class, no. Not that I'm aware of, anyway," Adrienne murmured. "But she came to me the other day about some sort of encounter she had with Jean. She told me she practices 'ghosting out' at night in the hallways, and I guess Jean saw her and got freaked. You'd think Hope would be used to that by now, but I guess it weirded her out enough that she wanted to tell me about it," she shrugged. "I wasn't sure if she was just kind of... offended that Jean was freaked out, or something? Because of her high priority on 'proper gender-specific behaviour' or whatever bullshit her mother's brainwashed her into believing." The psychometrist waved a hand dismissively. "But I took it seriously enough to check it out for myself." She waggled her fingers at him to imply she'd used her powers to do so, then continued on in a serious tone. "After getting around some really weird images of people making out in the hallways in clothes that looked like they came off the runways of Milan, I found what Hope was talking about. She sure as hell freaked Jean out, lemme tell you. She wasn't wrong there." There was no note of playfulness or teasing in her voice now- just the faintest hint of concern.



"<I>Jean?</I>" Jim's frown deepened. "<I>Jean</I> was freaked out?"



Adrienne nodded, eyebrows raised. "That was pretty much my reaction when Hope initially told me, yeah. I just figured the kid was overreacting, because I mean, come on. It's Jean. She's seen some serious shit over the years, y'know? But this was a serious wiggins. I get why Hope told me now. Her reaction was really uncharacteristic from what I know of Jean."



"Especially given her specialty." Jim leaned out the window to take another drag, troubled -- a sensation he found Adrienne's own seriousness was actually exacerbating.



Scott pushed open the partially closed door and walked slowly into the room. He'd been marking papers in his office when his coffee had run out, rather than risk facing the remaining pile of homework without any coffee he had decided to take a quick break to the staff room to get a refill. He'd heard the voices in the corridor but hadn't recognized the speaker, it was the words Jean and Hope that had caught his attention. Seeing Adrienne sitting near the window he smiled and nodded at his friend before walking over to the coffee machine to pour himself another cup before returning to his office. He didn't really think too much about who she had been talking to until he turned around and stopped as his eye caught sight of Haller standing half out of the window smoking.



"I don't get it," Jim continued. "She was one of the first people I talked to about Hope's mutation -- the fainting, and especially the emotional component, because that almost seems to go into psycho-somatic territory with her. She's so much better at the physiological stuff, I thought . . . I don't know. Hope never said anything, but I assumed Jean was helping her, at least in terms of assessment. The ghosting's harmless. I see how she could be startled, but to have such a serious negative reaction . . . I don't understand." He pushed away from the window to look at Adrienne. "I thought she'd at least have--"



Then he noticed Scott. The telepath flushed, acutely aware of the cigarette in his hand. He felt like a student caught smoking in the bathroom, and hated himself for the absurdity of it.



Scott stared at Haller for a moment, his eyes flicked over to the cigarette and back to the telepath's eyes before he shook his head and turned away slowly, walking back out the door without saying a single word.



Jim followed the man's retreating back with his eyes, his face still red. Then, belatedly, he cleared his throat and stubbed out the cigarette on the empty soda can he'd been using as an ash-tray.



"What's up with him?" Adrienne questioned curiously. She wasn't sure how much Scott had heard of their conversation, but it wasn't as if they had been badmouthing his wife, right? They were just expressing concern.



"Nothing," Jim said into the soda can. "We're just -- sort of in the middle of something. Don't worry about it."



Scott took a pensive sip from his mug as he headed back to his office. He had been avoiding Haller recently, and seeing him again had brought up the memories of that incident. At least he no longer wanted to blast the telepath through the wall, Scott realized as he played over the snippet of the conversation he'd heard.



Abruptly he changed direction heading down towards the medbay. It sounded like the whole situation hand shaken up Jean and he wanted to check on her and make sure she was alright.