Adrienne and Jean -

[x-jeangrey.livejournal.com]

Adrienne goes to find Jean after what transpired in California. The two discuss what happened, Jean's powers, and Adrienne's relationship with Garrison.

Mature Themes



Adrienne knew Jean had left the Box and had been doing the whole 'patiently waiting' thing for a while now, figuring Jean knew where she was and expecting Jean to come visit and take her up on the offer of drinks in her own time. The situation kind of reminded her of when Vanessa had gone through her ordeal with New Son. And as had happened with Vanessa, it didn't take too long before Adrienne had finally run out of the little patience she possessed in the first place.

Maybe it was the influence that her sense of responsibility towards Tandy was having on her, but Adrienne was no longer quite as big a fan of 'don't get involved unless you're asked to be' as she used to be. Not that she was going to force Jean to talk to her, or anything like that. Adrienne knew Jean wasn't very much like Emma, but when she thought of getting on Jean's bad side, she envisioned Jean performing the threats she'd heard Emma make to various people on her. So she wouldn't piss Jean off or anything. But she was concerned about her friend, so she'd become determined to involve herself in the situation and seek Jean out, just to hear for herself that everything was alright.

Her powers told her that Jean had left the mansion via the doors closest to the woods. Since she didn't want to look like she was worried and seeking Jean out, she grabbed a pair of sneakers and set off on a run. Not knowing which trail Jean had taken, however, she had to stop several times to Read pieces of garbage and fallen trees to guide her. On the way she passed the empty archery range and stopped to confirm that Jean had passed it. A strung bow and three arrows were set up at a station, but since Adrienne didn't think Jean practiced archery, she used her powers to confirm that they'd been left there by someone else. She took them with her and continued tracking Jean, letting out a loud whoop when she finally spotted the redhead up ahead. "Found you!" she called out, sounding relieved.

Jean leaned against a large boulder. She was finally starting to heal but she still had to take it slow. It probably hadn't been the wisest idea to take a walk but it'd been her first time out of the Box in a bit so she was enjoying the air. She smiled at Adrienne's attempt.

There was a large boulder that Jean used to play on when she was a kid. It was still there, and still looked the same. She imagined it'd still be there long after everyone was gone.

She ran her fingers along the surface, reaching down to pick up a cardinal's feather. She held it up to the sun.

The mansion still whispered but it was quieter now. She had fortified the old walls. Her astral armor was still gone, but she was working on that. For the time being she was made of flame and her own feathers on the astral plane. She didn't venture there lately. Perhaps she was afraid.

She sensed Adrienne coming. She sensed most of them coming unless she was particularly distracted, but she focused on her feather, letting it float away on the wind.

"Hey," she said, smiling.

"You were looking?"

Adrienne was momentarily distracted by the feather on the wind, which happened to be blowing towards her, and ducked away from it with a startled noise. Just like... almost anything that wasn't clothing or people, birds freaked her out, and feathers without birds were just weird. But once the feather had passed her, she focused on the reason she'd come out here. "I was indeed," she grinned. Except maybe Jean would take that the wrong way. Whoops. "Uhh, I mean... just in passing, y'know? I saw with my powers you were out here, and I thought, 'oh hey, I'm out here too, I should go see what my good buddy Jean's up to.' But it's not like I was... hunting you down or anything." For emphasis, she put the bow and arrows she'd picked up on the ground. "I don't want to be Whiny, Needy Friend who gets all bent out of shape because her friend doesn't come see her the minute she gets... out of the sensory deprivation Box-thing." Crap, this probably wasn't going well so far, was it?

"Even if you were looking purposefully, that's okay," she said. She shook her head.

"Sorry, I've just been kind of...hermit crab like after I got back. What happened in DC....surprised me. I wasn't expecting it. So I guess I needed time to process."

"It happens to everyone," Adrienne shrugged, smiling sympathetically. "Did you make a blanket fort? That's usually what I do when I'm hermit-crabbing to process... surprising events." She still wasn't sure what exactly had happened, but she figured she'd work her way up to asking.

Jean laughed. "I should've," she said. "It's been a long time since I've done one of those."

Jean looked pretty awful, so Adrienne wasn't sure she was ready to know the grisly details just yet of what had led to the hermiting. "Time heals... some stuff sometimes, though," she pointed out, deliberately misquoting the 'all wounds' part. "I mean, physically, at least, time's probably helped? Hopefully?" she questioned, wincing at the bandaged hand and the bruises around her friend's neck. She tried to focus a lot of attention on keeping her mental walls strong, to avoid broadcasting old memories and feelings of fear and pain seeing the injuries caused, trying to push them down before they threatened to steal her attention away.

Peering down at her hand, still in its cast, Jean flexed it slightly, feeling the familiar stabs of pain. She could also feel Adrienne's wall, and appreciated the effort. She'd been taking painkillers for the various broken bones, which also helped the headaches that had cropped up after leaving the Box. It wasn't going to be a miraculous switch that could be flipped, it took exposure and reintegration. She knew that. Things were slowly getting back to normal again.

"Yeah," she said. "It is." She stared up at the trees.

"I used to come here as a kid. I don't get out here much anymore."

Her eyes flickered down toward the bow and arrow, a smile returning.

"Planning on hunting deer?"

Adrienne made a face. "Not as such. I can't even eat the suckers when their meat's in nice clean supermarket packages because the very idea of how it got there grosses me out. And I have enough things that have scarred me for life already. I don't need taking down a deer with a bow and arrow added to the list. I just found it abandoned at the archery range and thought I'd rescue it. But, since I'm wearing green, so I liked the Robin Hood aesthetic," she grinned, picking the bow and arrows up and striking a pose for Jean.

"I still can't believe you've lived here since you were a kid," she added thoughtfully, gazing at the rock. "Do you think... do you think you'd be doing what you do... getting into shit like whatever happened in DC, or Genosha, or... any of it, if you hadn't come here when you were a kid, and stayed here so long?" Emma was always implying that living at the mansion trained people to be Xavier's private army, and sometimes Adrienne had to wonder if her sister had a point, which was why she was curious about what Jean thought on the topic.

"I came when I was 13. I was the only one for awhile...two old men trying to take care of a preteen?" Jean said, her eyes sparkling at the memory.

"Now there's a good story. Hank came next, then Scott."

She fell silent at her question. "I probably would've been dead if Charles hadn't come along," she admitted.

"He helped bring me back after my powers manifested. I watched my best friend die. I was with her when she passed and it left me...devastated, disconnected from the world. I felt every moment. I felt so helpless...It made me aware of just how fragile and fleeting life is. I wanted to help sustain life as much as I could, to help anyway I could. Charles helped me to be a better person and do more with the life I had. To heal not just the body, but the heart."

She looked down. "Because if you stand there and you do nothing you let hate continue. Saying no and taking a stand is the first step toward change. It's not easy. But nothing worth doing is."

"I'm sorry about your friend." She'd tried to put herself in a thirteen year-old's shoes before she said it so she could understand what Jean had gone through, but that hadn't really worked, since her experiences as a thirteen year-old certainly didn't lend themselves to being sympathetic about Jean watching her best friend die. So instead she just thought of how she'd feel now if she watched Jean die, and hoped those feelings were somewhat similar to Jean's as a teenager. "It's good the Professor brought you back from that."

"That's a good way to put it," the brunette nodded, referring to Jean's last comments. "And if you substitute 'hate' for some other words, those lines can be said about a lot of things," she mused, still trying to stamp down memories of her own past. "I guess we have to tell ourselves these inspirational messages to justify doing shit that most people find crazy, huh?" she smiled. "Like... whatever happened in DC. Which, by the way, if you want to talk about... y'know... feel free?"

"I was fortunate," Jean said. She gingerly folded her arms, then laughed.

"It's still sometimes crazy, but you do what you have to do sometimes," she said. She shifted positions, better able to hide her grimace than she had been days ago.

"It was a demon. It'd been feeding on a man who lived at the hotel, a low level psi for awhile. Not many other mutants had checked in until I did. Then it found a better meal. It took me, since it wasn't sure when it'd get its next one. When I disappeared Marie Ange got a vision and they put together a team to find me," she said. It sounded clinical, like a report she were reading off. She'd tried to distance herself after her talk with Scott. Her feelings ebbed and flowed, set off by a memory.

"It feeds on emotions, so it tried to get me angry by tapping into my memories, making me think Matthews was there...To get revenge..."

"Eew," was Adrienne's first response, remembering how she'd felt when DemonGhostSteven had been feeding on her. At least he'd just wanted to kill her and not tap into her memories. "That's awful! Remind me to buy Marie-Ange a bottle of wine for having that vision. Wait- who's Matthews?" Had she missed a piece of the story? Were her powers overloading again and making her miss what was going on in front of her?

Jean tilted her head, then realized she probably had been referring to him as his 'nickname.'

"Nightmare. The man who used me to take over the mansion and killed Sophie Cuckoo. His real name is Parker Matthews. He also goes by Mesmero. He was a member of the Hellfire Club," she said quietly.

"The demon made me think he'd taken over the body of the psi who he had been feeding on before....and...then he killed everyone in the hotel. Except for a little girl who he--" Her voice caught, she looked away.

"It wasn't real."

Adrienne leaned against the rock and reached out for Jean's uninjured hand so she could squeeze it. "Right. It wasn't real." She was glad Jean's voice had caught so she'd been spared the elaboration. "None of it was real. And it's all okay now." Until the next time, at least. But she didn't say that to Jean. "And I'm assuming you kicked demon ass?" she smirked, trying to lighten the mood. "I mean, when you get into a fight, you're always the one the 'you should see the other guy' line applies to, right?"

"It was a team effort," Jean said. It was far too big for any one person to take care of, as much as she wanted to.

"I had a hand in its elimination." She picked a leaf out of her hair, then smiled faintly.

"And it further confirms that the mystical and I don't quite get along."

Adrienne gave her friend a bemused look. "I think I'd like you less if you got along with the mystical, since it freaks me the hell out. Funny how being nearly choked to death by a demon manifestation of the ghost of your dead, abusive husband can sour you on mysticism. Which is why the astral plane is never my favourite place to be. Even though I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to be able to learn how to change my image while I'm there, the way you do. But I'm assuming you want to take a break from the astral plane for a while?" Or maybe what had happened in DC had nothing to do with the astral plane. Adrienne was just assuming that Jean's stint in the Box was telepathy-related, which was usually tied to the astral plane, if she understood correctly?

There was a considerable bit of hesitation there, as Jean nodded. "It may have to be for a long time...I'm sorry. I damaged my astral form trying to eliminate the demon, among other things," she said, absently rubbing her arms. That was the best explanation she could give without getting into complications.

"I want to get some practice in before I get back to the astral plane."

She didn't want to take someone along and have something bad happen because of her.

"Christ! Really?" Adrienne's eyes were wide. "You damaged it?! That sounds really bad! Don't be sorry," she assured her friend, waving it off. "I've been doing a lot better. I can touch things and choose whether I Read them or not, now. 'Could never do that before. And the Repository is really starting to look quite organized. So don't bother yourself about me at all. But... is your astral form going to be alright? I mean... how do you fix a damaged... form? Particularly when you're not actually in the astral plane?"

"It's more my armor that was damaged. It's just...gone. The demon cracked it and...then I burned it away and then it was just as if I...became the Phoenix," Jean said. She didn't quite know how to explain it.

"I need to rebuild it. But that leaves my astral defenses vulnerable for the time being." It wasn't as bad as Haller's experience. She was glad to hear from Charles that he was doing better. She still needed to visit.

She shook her head, then smiled. "It sounds like you're coming along in leaps and bounds, though. That's wonderful. Pretty soon you could give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money."

"Well, I've had some pretty great teachers," Adrienne smirked. "So... what's with the Phoenix?" She felt kind of bad for asking, like it was something she should already know; but despite the fact that she'd been living at the mansion for several years, Adrienne hadn't really gotten to know Jean until she'd returned from Boston. She knew it was Jean's X-Men code name, but had no idea what the significance of it- or her becoming a phoenix on the astral plane- actually was.

Jean laughed. "And my ego grew two sizes that day, thanks," she said. She folded her arms again thoughtfully.

"As telepaths many of us learn to build astral armor to protect ourselves should we encounter another telepath or other obstacles on the astral plane. After I died, I took on the codename Phoenix mostly out of irony due to my resurrection. I'd always been linked to fire as my astral armor somehow, subconsciously I guess... but...over time, after I got back from California, it'd started to change, consciously and unconsciously until the fire formed the shape of a phoenix on the astral plane as well," she said, her thoughts and attention turning to the shadow of the mansion in the distance.

"I'd died saving the ones I love....and somehow I got a second chance. One I didn't want to waste." She still didn't really have a firm explanation for why she was still alive when, for all accounts her body should've been obliterated under the wave of all that water.

"So I became the Phoenix, not just in name but in myself. I wanted to own that title, to wear it like a badge of honor. Because it is. It gave me a second chance to help protect those I care about."

A bit embarrassed, she glanced away with a laugh. "And, well, that was a bit too philosophical. Sorry."

"I don't know if there's such a thing as too philosophical," Adrienne mused with an encouraging smile. "I think that all makes a lot of sense. And, again, that's super badass," she chuckled. Now she wanted to be able to change her own image on the astral plane even more, to see what her subconscious gave her to wear, even though she knew it probably wouldn't be nearly as cool as fire and a freaking phoenix! "So... is it a bad thing that the armour burned away and you became the Phoenix, then? I mean, it sounds sort of like it just makes sense, what with you thinking of yourself as a phoenix. But you seem kinda... uneasy about it?" Or maybe she just wasn't reading Jean correctly. Adrienne was normally pretty good at reading people, but Jean had always been pretty inscrutable to her. Maybe she was happy about the whole becoming-the-Phoenix thing. "Although my Sherlock Holmes skills are still pretty lacking," she added with a smirk.

Jean shook her head. "I don't....know how I feel about it," she admitted.

"I had to do it, to stop the demon. He would've killed me; he almost did. It was the only way I knew to do what I had to do. I...I don't know. It's something new, something different. All I know is that it hurt. And I'm afraid it might create consequences." Or maybe it wouldn't. She didn't know.

"Well, if it hurt, you probably shouldn't do it again, right?" It seemed fairly simple to Adrienne, even without the part about the consequences. But then again, she didn't really understand a lot of this psi stuff. And she probably didn't really understand this hero stuff, either. Sure, she was actually starting to get the hang of this 'do something that might hurt yourself for the sake of what's right/the greater good' thing, but it wasn't second nature to Adrienne the way it seemed to be for Jean. Adrienne still had to work sometimes at being a good person. Jean never did.

Jean smiled. "No, probably not. But I guess it goes back to doing crazy stuff most people wouldn't normally do," she said, shaking her head. They put themselves in the line of fire constantly to save others.

"I guess that's why you X-Men get paid the big bucks, eh?" Adrienne teased. "Oh, shit. Did I just say 'eh'?" She tried her best to look horrified. "Damn Garrison!"

"He'll make a Canadian out of you yet," Jean said with a laugh. "How's he doing, by the way?"

Piecing him back together again felt like a long time ago but it really hadn't been.

"The only good part about that statement is, if it's really true, he wouldn't be able to call me a Masshole anymore," Adrienne quipped, rolling her eyes. "He's... I don't think he's doing very well, to tell you the truth. He's covering up a lot with work and Danger Room stuff, but I can tell. He's not seeing friends as often, and the Trenchcoats haven't seen him over at the Brownstone in months, apparently. He's not even going to Harry's as much anymore.

"And since getting back together, there's been an abnormal amount of sex," she added, frowning pensively. "Like... a ton of sex. Any time we're in the same bed it seems like we're having sex. Nights, mornings. He even wakes me up in the middle of the night for it. And he always wants to have quickies during the day when he's not at work. Like, multiple times. We talked in the spring about how he's been questioning who he is, including sexually, so maybe this is just him trying to, I dunno, figure himself out, but it's kind of... I don't know." She wasn't really sure if this was just really inappropriate territory she was going into with Jean right now, but she really wasn't sure who else to ask, so she forged ahead. "Is this normal? I mean, I've only been in one other real relationship before, and that was with an abusive asshole, so I really don't know what normal is, you know? I just know... he wasn't like this before Minnesota. And now he is. And I don't know why. And I don't know if that means he needs help, and whose help he needs if he does need help." She finally trailed off like a train that had finally run out of steam.

Jean paused thoughtfully. "He's been through a lot. Everyone responds to trauma differently. Have you spoken with him about it?" she said. She hadn't expected that kind of answer but in a way she did, or at least, that kind of description. Being a doctor meant people tended to confess things a bit more readily, at least about bodily functions anyway, perhaps subconsciously, due to her being in the realm of confidentiality. You were supposed to tell the doctor everything.

Adrienne toed at the dirt guiltily. "Do you really need to ask if I've talked to him about it?" she muttered. "It's me. Of course I haven't. But yeah. I guess I should. You really think this is a response to the trauma, rather than just him... I dunno, trying to impress me, or thinking this is what I want? I just... I guess I just worry that I'm causing this, instead of the trauma."

"You'll never know until you speak to him," Jean said, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder. "I'm just making a guess, based off what you said. When I make a conclusion its usually based off a number of factors, including discussion. Instead of surmising, its always best to go to the source."

In response to the shoulder squeeze, Adrienne rested her head on Jean's shoulder for a brief moment before pulling away guiltily, huffing out a breath. "Right. Okay. Yeah. Good advice. As usual." After staring skyward for a moment, she pushed herself off the rock and picked up the bow and arrow. "Thanks. So, I think I'll get out of your hair and leave you to your processing," she smiled. "I'm... really glad you're gonna be alright."

"Thanks," Jean said with a smile. She paused a moment, then smiled with a note of sheepishness.

"Actually....could you help me back? I may have over-exerted myself getting here a wee bit." Her chest was burning anyway, and stumbling over boulders and branches hadn't helped her foot any. Still, she had needed the walk to clear her head.

Chuckling, Adrienne sprang into action, offering her hands to her favourite redhead. "Absolutely. My heroic deed for the year," she smirked. "See what a good influence you are? And when we get back, I can show you how to make a blanket fort, if you'd like."

Jean took one of her hands, then laughed. "You've done plenty more good things than just this one," she said.

"And a blanket fort sounds lovely. However I probably shouldn't be doing much bending and crouching with the broken rib so...raincheck?"

"Absolutely," Adrienne grinned. "And hey, don't let that get out, about me doing plenty of good things. It'll ruin my reputation."

"For doing bad things?" Jean was skeptical. "Such as?"

"I... well, I... umm..." Crap! Busted. "Baby eating?" she suggested with a raised eyebrow and an innocent expression. "Okay, I guess I haven't really done anything bad in a while now, probably not since Vee and I went joyriding in a car we stole way back when. I have gone so soft since coming here," she mock-grumbled. "But that's exactly why you can't let this get out! I need my badass reputation!"

Jean burst out laughing. "You know..." she said with a wry eyebrow. "You can still do nice things and be a badass. It's happened. I can assure you."

"I suppose since the living proof of this is right in front of me, I will wholeheartedly agree with this," Adrienne grinned. "You've given me something new to aspire to!"

"I--" Jean said, tilting her head with an amused pause. "Wasn't referring to me but I'm flattered."

"Good. That means my plan to seduce you is working!" the brunette teased as she helped her friend navigate the trail back towards the mansion.