Psi War: Obscura - Finale
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xp_logs After the battle with the Shadow King using her body, Jean wakes up in a hospital bed. Haller is there to greet her.
The monitor marked Jean's heartbeats as she lay in the hospital bed, a splash of red hair and black and blue, swallowed by a sea of white and chrome. She dreamed of floating in a pin pricked void. There was no hate, no love there, just oblivion.
A voice, dark and throaty, oozed in, trying to put down roots as the stars were consumed by shadow.
~Oh Jean. Oh... that-~ The voice paused. ~hurt. Oh that hurt... it hurt like nothing else. Did it make you happy? Did it scratch that itch? Quench that thirst?~
Everything soon began to burn, ignited by rage.
In the real world, the beeping of monitor started to become more and more rapid, like a warning alarm. Everything in the room began to shudder, and shake as Jean turned her head, clenching her eyes tightly.
"No," she breathed.
"Jean?"
The voice was slightly rasping but soft. Jim was seated on the chair in easy view of the foot of her bed, a laptop balanced on his knees and a mug of lukewarm coffee on the rolling table. The only hint that he was on his guard was the paleness of his right eye: Jack was close to the surface.
In the dream, the fire was beaten back, extinguished, as the shadow turned from a slow, creeping thread to a tsunami.
~No, it didn't. Because you want more...~
This time the voice didn't fade away. She stared down over the earth, watching the darkness as the tsunami spread across the world. Men and women started to kill each other and even their own children as some were driven mad by the shadows, ripping each other limb from limb. Others became mindless and hollow.
The shadows began to laugh.
~And I, dear Jean... am more.~
In the real world, the shuddering turned violent, and the air around her began to shimmer and smoke as Jean suddenly shot up in the bed, letting out shrieks of terror.
Her breathing verged on hyperventilation as she tried to catch her breath, her eyes darting around, wild and disoriented.
Almost Jim flinched out to restrain her with telekinesis, but reined in his instincts at the last second. Instead he darted forward in his chair and put a hand on the closest part of her: the shin. He pushed his presence through the physical contact and into her mind, reassuring and familiar.
"Jean," he said, face warm with the heat of her power, "it's all right."
Jean's eyes met Haller's, and the shuddering and shaking in the room suddenly stopped. Her eyes widened as relief washed over her face and her body crumpled in on itself, still heaving breaths that wracked her tall frame.
"Oh my God, you're alive," she said with a gasp of astonishment, covering her mouth with a shaky hand.
"I thought---I thought I---" She glimpsed the angry purple bruise around his neck and a tear slipped down her cheek. She kept shaking her head like a bobblehead doll.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry..."
Although the angle was making muscles twinge Jim didn't lift his hand from her leg. "Don't worry about it," he said, carefully removing his laptop to the bedside table. "I've been there, too, you know. The worst I have to deal with is a sore back."
Which was more than he could say for Jean. She looked terrible; her nose had been reset, but the bruises from Emma's beating showed livid against her pale skin. Sweat had made her hair unusually dark, making her seem even paler; the nightmare must have been intense. But she was conscious, coherent, and, most of all, herself.
Jean finally settled back against the bed and her breathing slowed to a more normal pace. It was only around now as the rush of adrenaline started to wear off that she really felt those injuries.
"Did I hurt anyone else?" she said quietly, as another stab of fear overtook her. She covered her head with her hands. It hurt to move, to breathe.
"I don't--He locked me in my mind. I only saw you hanging there...and...and Emma as I was--" She furrowed her brows with confusion, hesitation and fear.
"As I burned him away."
"No, it was just the three of us. Some property damage, but nothing unfixable." The clenching in his back finally forced him to sit back. He didn't want to risk the loss of control that came with stronger painkillers, but when he saw Jean wince he thought about calling Cecilia. He also thought about how that would just be delaying the inevitable.
Despite the injuries, he knew Jean was more interested in answers than painkillers. He would have been.
"What do you remember about that thing?" Jim asked.
The question made Jean's relieved face fall. She looked away from him, her eyes turning distant as she lowered her head.
"He felt like he was...made of shadow," she said softly.
"I've never felt power like it. I was taking care of Parker and he coded and...I tried to get him to the main lab but he...The thing.ambushed me. He put me in..." She swallowed.
"He put me somewhere, in the dark part of my mind. And I didn't know what was real. But then he....kept trying to get in, trying to take over my mind by force. He tried to convince me that he was a part of me," she clenched her jaw.
"That he'd always been there, that he was my darkness that I just had to let him in."
Jim nodded slowly, considering his next words.
"It's a chameleon," he said at last. He felt strange referring to it as a "he"; it seemed too far beyond that. Jim cleared his throat. "Well, a psychic parasite. It gets inside, and once it has full access it uses that to break you open further. It uses what it learns to break you down." Or it tries, he thought, remembering the flash of flame and the thin, charred feel of the astral plane afterwards.
Jean blinked up at him. "You've dealt with it before?" she said. She shook her head.
"It....referred to itself as the Shadow King so I thought...It felt like it was male...once. Like a psychic echo driven mad. It felt like it used to be human." She looked down, silent for a few moments before glancing back up to him.
"How did you deal with it? Before? How did you....defeat it?"
The short, raspy laugh hurt his throat, but it did buy him time to sort through his thoughts. He went with the truth, or what there was of it he could share.
"I don't know if it's the same entity," he told her, truthfully, "but a few years ago the professor and I ran into something a lot like it. A patient presented a lot like Parker. He was a psi, too. It turned out part of his mind had -- warped in, or broken off. So a little like me, too, I guess." He rubbed the back of his head. "It was a personal condition for him, a side-effect of trauma, so I didn't even think about Parker . . . anyway. This thing, splinter or parasite or whatever it was, was self-aware. And it was using itself up. It jumped into another body, a stronger one, and when Charles and I entered the astral plane to investigate . . ." His eyes flicked away. "Well, you did better than we did."
Jean flinched. She shook her head, rubbing the back of her neck. "I--don't know what the fire really is yet," she said.
"It only happens when I'm really angry. Or afraid."
She stared past him, the anger creeping up again as she clenched her fists.
"He wanted me. My body. My power. When I burned him, he liked it. He--got off on it. He was never afraid. He wanted more. I dreamed he--"
She caught herself a moment before she felt her eyes welling up with tears.
"I dreamed that he came back. And I couldn't stop him. And he used me to take over the world."
She swiped them away, trying to compose herself.
"It seems to be gone. We've swept the astral plane and done diagnostics of you and Parker. The way it eats through bodies makes me think it needs a host. Last time it was reclaimed by the original patient." Somewhere in the back of his mind he still felt talons rake his face and chest, could smell charred flesh and burning hair . . . but that was compartmentalized, playing side by side like a split-screen as his mouth held a different conversation. Like it had happened to someone else.
Had, for her.
"Either way, it didn't seem able to handle the fire," he continued. "We perceived it as a cold, black void. Wanting . . . more. But since astral physics work symbolically, maybe it didn't pick the best avatar to face you down."
Jean looked up. "Parker lived?" she said, blinking. She sank down, guilt washing over her face.
"I didn't think...when he coded...And after everything that happened I just---That's great."
There were too many things for her to focus on, between psychic parasites and narrow deaths and feeling like death herself, it had been a very long day.
"Parker's unconscious, but there doesn't seem to be any permanent damage. Emma found what we thought was old trauma in there when we did the first diagnostic. We think the Shadow King used his own powers to create a pocket for itself so no one would detect it as a passenger. Basically, it turned Parker into a carrier." He hesitated, aware of Jean's misery and the vague memory the two of them had been involved in some capacity. "We don't think he was conscious of what was happening -- we definitely didn't see any evidence of it. The Shadow King probably manipulated his memories while parasitizing him."
Jean shook her head.
"I--what are you saying? That it tried to get close to me using him?"
Jim spread his hands and sat back in his chair quickly enough to anger his abused spine. "I -- no," he said hurriedly. "I mean, not that Parker was aware of . . ."
Shit. He regretted the words the moment he said them.
Staring at him for a long while, Jean looked like she was trying to stay calm. She clenched her jaw.
"That doesn't make it better, Jim," she said.
Jim started to open his mouth, then closed it.
"I'm sorry," he said instead. "I can't put words in Parker's mouth, and I shouldn't have tried. All I know is what I saw. Everything else is between you two."
Jean broke her gaze. She wanted to feel anger, to feel anything than the doubt, and the fear, and the pain she was feeling right now. The Shadow King's words about Parker tore into her memory.
~Of course. The only man that has been interested in you in ages has some kind of mental issue. Is that coincidence... or wish fulfillment?"~ Waves of darkness skipped over her. ~Or maybe that can be made easier?~
Her chest heaved as she covered her face with her hands. Her edges were still raw. The weight of everything had started to press in, the words repeating in her mind over and over.
~I'm the part of you that thought you should have been hit by the car. I'm the part of you that let him inside you despite knowing he was with others. I'm the part of you that hates your boring, micro-managing parents and their love of your uncomplicated sister. I'm all the reasons you look at certain people and then convince yourself that going to your cold bed alone is right and yet desperate.~
She choked back a sob, as the remaining picture on the wall that hadn't fallen started to tremble slightly. She didn't know what to say, because the doubt was there. It had only been a few weeks but the relationship had blossomed quickly, almost too quickly. Quicker than she usually took things. He had a certain unbiased logic. She just didn't want to believe it.
Jim sat there, watching Jean's shoulders shake, and did feel anger: at the Shadow King, for putting her and Parker into this position, and at himself, for being so little comfort.
"The Shadow King leaves you . . . unstable," he continued, lying down in the hole he'd dug for himself and resigning himself to stare into the sky. "The ways it twists your mind, even if you're only in its proximity. It exacerbates what's already there. It gets better, but if you need to talk -- to me, or to anyone . . ."
Jean was silent for a few moments. She really wanted to be angry at Jim, but she knew it wasn't his fault that he really had no idea how to talk to people sometimes without making them want to punch him. Perhaps it was just her.
"I feel...powerless," she admitted finally, pulling her hands away.
"Like I should've been able to stop it. I've got....all these abilities and he just...sucker punched me." She shook her head, her attention lingering on his neck bruises again.
"I nearly killed you. What if--what if you and Emma hadn't been able to stop me?" She let out a shuddered breath, eyes widening.
"God, the children."
Jim shook his head. "It caught us all off-guard. When Emma and I checked Parker we missed it." He stared at his hands for a moment, his own guilt temporarily superseding his awareness of Jean's. The situation was simultaneously the fault of no one and everyone.
Then an idea struck him.
"Hey." He looked up into Jean's bruised face. "Do you think you might want to do some training when you get out of here?"
Jean studied him a moment, surprised by the offer. She knew he hadn't really done much of it in awhile.
"I---yeah, actually," she said, tilting her head. She glanced down, shaking her head.
"Can't promise I'll be at my best, though. Doing---what I did. I feel...drained."
Jim gave her a crooked smile. "You shouldn't push yourself until you're better -- psychically and physically. Besides, we need to check the astral plane first. The Shadow King might have created distortions. Even scoured I don't trust it to be wholly stable."
The name made Jean's own faint smile disappear. She was silent for a little awhile, carefully considering her words before finally speaking.
"So...I don't know how to say this. I have this feeling. I keep thinking it. And it won't go away. I keep trying to tell myself maybe I'm wrong."
Jim tilted his head. "What is it?"
Jean glanced up. "I don't think he's dead," she said faintly. It felt like a pressure release to say, but one that also brought forth its own sense of dread, especially now that the words had left her mind and were actually spoken.
"I think I just surprised him. Why would he be so happy that I immolated him? Why wouldn't he be angry? Or desperate?"
That brought Jim up short. The astral plane around his manifestation had essentially been napalmed. It was so acrid and scorched he'd had to pull back. The effect was lessening now, but it was hard to imagine anything could have survived.
But then, he couldn't remember the last time anything had been easy.
"I don't think it can exist without a host," he said slowly, "and we didn't find any traces. I'm not even sure regular human responses can be ascribed to it anymore. But . . . it's possible." He gave her a crooked smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Better to be paranoid than under-prepared."
Jean looked down. She laughed bitterly, and immediately regretted it when her ribs gave a sharp reply and she grabbed her side. "I'd rather be wrong," she said.
"But thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt. And not dying." She smiled.
"And kicking my ass. Even if Cindy did singe my hair. Bitch."
The counselor smiled. "Talk to me when she's home-pierced your ears with safety pins. But don't worry about it. Hopefully we'll be wrong together." He glanced at her paled face and hunched posture, grimacing. "I'd better get Dr. Reyes -- she'll want to check you out and get you something for the pain."
Jean gently tried to settle back against the bed. Her entire body had been screaming but she had been trying to ignore it.
"That'd be great, on both accounts," she smiled faintly.
"Still isn't going to stop me from worrying, though."
The monitor marked Jean's heartbeats as she lay in the hospital bed, a splash of red hair and black and blue, swallowed by a sea of white and chrome. She dreamed of floating in a pin pricked void. There was no hate, no love there, just oblivion.
A voice, dark and throaty, oozed in, trying to put down roots as the stars were consumed by shadow.
~Oh Jean. Oh... that-~ The voice paused. ~hurt. Oh that hurt... it hurt like nothing else. Did it make you happy? Did it scratch that itch? Quench that thirst?~
Everything soon began to burn, ignited by rage.
In the real world, the beeping of monitor started to become more and more rapid, like a warning alarm. Everything in the room began to shudder, and shake as Jean turned her head, clenching her eyes tightly.
"No," she breathed.
"Jean?"
The voice was slightly rasping but soft. Jim was seated on the chair in easy view of the foot of her bed, a laptop balanced on his knees and a mug of lukewarm coffee on the rolling table. The only hint that he was on his guard was the paleness of his right eye: Jack was close to the surface.
In the dream, the fire was beaten back, extinguished, as the shadow turned from a slow, creeping thread to a tsunami.
~No, it didn't. Because you want more...~
This time the voice didn't fade away. She stared down over the earth, watching the darkness as the tsunami spread across the world. Men and women started to kill each other and even their own children as some were driven mad by the shadows, ripping each other limb from limb. Others became mindless and hollow.
The shadows began to laugh.
~And I, dear Jean... am more.~
In the real world, the shuddering turned violent, and the air around her began to shimmer and smoke as Jean suddenly shot up in the bed, letting out shrieks of terror.
Her breathing verged on hyperventilation as she tried to catch her breath, her eyes darting around, wild and disoriented.
Almost Jim flinched out to restrain her with telekinesis, but reined in his instincts at the last second. Instead he darted forward in his chair and put a hand on the closest part of her: the shin. He pushed his presence through the physical contact and into her mind, reassuring and familiar.
"Jean," he said, face warm with the heat of her power, "it's all right."
Jean's eyes met Haller's, and the shuddering and shaking in the room suddenly stopped. Her eyes widened as relief washed over her face and her body crumpled in on itself, still heaving breaths that wracked her tall frame.
"Oh my God, you're alive," she said with a gasp of astonishment, covering her mouth with a shaky hand.
"I thought---I thought I---" She glimpsed the angry purple bruise around his neck and a tear slipped down her cheek. She kept shaking her head like a bobblehead doll.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry..."
Although the angle was making muscles twinge Jim didn't lift his hand from her leg. "Don't worry about it," he said, carefully removing his laptop to the bedside table. "I've been there, too, you know. The worst I have to deal with is a sore back."
Which was more than he could say for Jean. She looked terrible; her nose had been reset, but the bruises from Emma's beating showed livid against her pale skin. Sweat had made her hair unusually dark, making her seem even paler; the nightmare must have been intense. But she was conscious, coherent, and, most of all, herself.
Jean finally settled back against the bed and her breathing slowed to a more normal pace. It was only around now as the rush of adrenaline started to wear off that she really felt those injuries.
"Did I hurt anyone else?" she said quietly, as another stab of fear overtook her. She covered her head with her hands. It hurt to move, to breathe.
"I don't--He locked me in my mind. I only saw you hanging there...and...and Emma as I was--" She furrowed her brows with confusion, hesitation and fear.
"As I burned him away."
"No, it was just the three of us. Some property damage, but nothing unfixable." The clenching in his back finally forced him to sit back. He didn't want to risk the loss of control that came with stronger painkillers, but when he saw Jean wince he thought about calling Cecilia. He also thought about how that would just be delaying the inevitable.
Despite the injuries, he knew Jean was more interested in answers than painkillers. He would have been.
"What do you remember about that thing?" Jim asked.
The question made Jean's relieved face fall. She looked away from him, her eyes turning distant as she lowered her head.
"He felt like he was...made of shadow," she said softly.
"I've never felt power like it. I was taking care of Parker and he coded and...I tried to get him to the main lab but he...The thing.ambushed me. He put me in..." She swallowed.
"He put me somewhere, in the dark part of my mind. And I didn't know what was real. But then he....kept trying to get in, trying to take over my mind by force. He tried to convince me that he was a part of me," she clenched her jaw.
"That he'd always been there, that he was my darkness that I just had to let him in."
Jim nodded slowly, considering his next words.
"It's a chameleon," he said at last. He felt strange referring to it as a "he"; it seemed too far beyond that. Jim cleared his throat. "Well, a psychic parasite. It gets inside, and once it has full access it uses that to break you open further. It uses what it learns to break you down." Or it tries, he thought, remembering the flash of flame and the thin, charred feel of the astral plane afterwards.
Jean blinked up at him. "You've dealt with it before?" she said. She shook her head.
"It....referred to itself as the Shadow King so I thought...It felt like it was male...once. Like a psychic echo driven mad. It felt like it used to be human." She looked down, silent for a few moments before glancing back up to him.
"How did you deal with it? Before? How did you....defeat it?"
The short, raspy laugh hurt his throat, but it did buy him time to sort through his thoughts. He went with the truth, or what there was of it he could share.
"I don't know if it's the same entity," he told her, truthfully, "but a few years ago the professor and I ran into something a lot like it. A patient presented a lot like Parker. He was a psi, too. It turned out part of his mind had -- warped in, or broken off. So a little like me, too, I guess." He rubbed the back of his head. "It was a personal condition for him, a side-effect of trauma, so I didn't even think about Parker . . . anyway. This thing, splinter or parasite or whatever it was, was self-aware. And it was using itself up. It jumped into another body, a stronger one, and when Charles and I entered the astral plane to investigate . . ." His eyes flicked away. "Well, you did better than we did."
Jean flinched. She shook her head, rubbing the back of her neck. "I--don't know what the fire really is yet," she said.
"It only happens when I'm really angry. Or afraid."
She stared past him, the anger creeping up again as she clenched her fists.
"He wanted me. My body. My power. When I burned him, he liked it. He--got off on it. He was never afraid. He wanted more. I dreamed he--"
She caught herself a moment before she felt her eyes welling up with tears.
"I dreamed that he came back. And I couldn't stop him. And he used me to take over the world."
She swiped them away, trying to compose herself.
"It seems to be gone. We've swept the astral plane and done diagnostics of you and Parker. The way it eats through bodies makes me think it needs a host. Last time it was reclaimed by the original patient." Somewhere in the back of his mind he still felt talons rake his face and chest, could smell charred flesh and burning hair . . . but that was compartmentalized, playing side by side like a split-screen as his mouth held a different conversation. Like it had happened to someone else.
Had, for her.
"Either way, it didn't seem able to handle the fire," he continued. "We perceived it as a cold, black void. Wanting . . . more. But since astral physics work symbolically, maybe it didn't pick the best avatar to face you down."
Jean looked up. "Parker lived?" she said, blinking. She sank down, guilt washing over her face.
"I didn't think...when he coded...And after everything that happened I just---That's great."
There were too many things for her to focus on, between psychic parasites and narrow deaths and feeling like death herself, it had been a very long day.
"Parker's unconscious, but there doesn't seem to be any permanent damage. Emma found what we thought was old trauma in there when we did the first diagnostic. We think the Shadow King used his own powers to create a pocket for itself so no one would detect it as a passenger. Basically, it turned Parker into a carrier." He hesitated, aware of Jean's misery and the vague memory the two of them had been involved in some capacity. "We don't think he was conscious of what was happening -- we definitely didn't see any evidence of it. The Shadow King probably manipulated his memories while parasitizing him."
Jean shook her head.
"I--what are you saying? That it tried to get close to me using him?"
Jim spread his hands and sat back in his chair quickly enough to anger his abused spine. "I -- no," he said hurriedly. "I mean, not that Parker was aware of . . ."
Shit. He regretted the words the moment he said them.
Staring at him for a long while, Jean looked like she was trying to stay calm. She clenched her jaw.
"That doesn't make it better, Jim," she said.
Jim started to open his mouth, then closed it.
"I'm sorry," he said instead. "I can't put words in Parker's mouth, and I shouldn't have tried. All I know is what I saw. Everything else is between you two."
Jean broke her gaze. She wanted to feel anger, to feel anything than the doubt, and the fear, and the pain she was feeling right now. The Shadow King's words about Parker tore into her memory.
~Of course. The only man that has been interested in you in ages has some kind of mental issue. Is that coincidence... or wish fulfillment?"~ Waves of darkness skipped over her. ~Or maybe that can be made easier?~
Her chest heaved as she covered her face with her hands. Her edges were still raw. The weight of everything had started to press in, the words repeating in her mind over and over.
~I'm the part of you that thought you should have been hit by the car. I'm the part of you that let him inside you despite knowing he was with others. I'm the part of you that hates your boring, micro-managing parents and their love of your uncomplicated sister. I'm all the reasons you look at certain people and then convince yourself that going to your cold bed alone is right and yet desperate.~
She choked back a sob, as the remaining picture on the wall that hadn't fallen started to tremble slightly. She didn't know what to say, because the doubt was there. It had only been a few weeks but the relationship had blossomed quickly, almost too quickly. Quicker than she usually took things. He had a certain unbiased logic. She just didn't want to believe it.
Jim sat there, watching Jean's shoulders shake, and did feel anger: at the Shadow King, for putting her and Parker into this position, and at himself, for being so little comfort.
"The Shadow King leaves you . . . unstable," he continued, lying down in the hole he'd dug for himself and resigning himself to stare into the sky. "The ways it twists your mind, even if you're only in its proximity. It exacerbates what's already there. It gets better, but if you need to talk -- to me, or to anyone . . ."
Jean was silent for a few moments. She really wanted to be angry at Jim, but she knew it wasn't his fault that he really had no idea how to talk to people sometimes without making them want to punch him. Perhaps it was just her.
"I feel...powerless," she admitted finally, pulling her hands away.
"Like I should've been able to stop it. I've got....all these abilities and he just...sucker punched me." She shook her head, her attention lingering on his neck bruises again.
"I nearly killed you. What if--what if you and Emma hadn't been able to stop me?" She let out a shuddered breath, eyes widening.
"God, the children."
Jim shook his head. "It caught us all off-guard. When Emma and I checked Parker we missed it." He stared at his hands for a moment, his own guilt temporarily superseding his awareness of Jean's. The situation was simultaneously the fault of no one and everyone.
Then an idea struck him.
"Hey." He looked up into Jean's bruised face. "Do you think you might want to do some training when you get out of here?"
Jean studied him a moment, surprised by the offer. She knew he hadn't really done much of it in awhile.
"I---yeah, actually," she said, tilting her head. She glanced down, shaking her head.
"Can't promise I'll be at my best, though. Doing---what I did. I feel...drained."
Jim gave her a crooked smile. "You shouldn't push yourself until you're better -- psychically and physically. Besides, we need to check the astral plane first. The Shadow King might have created distortions. Even scoured I don't trust it to be wholly stable."
The name made Jean's own faint smile disappear. She was silent for a little awhile, carefully considering her words before finally speaking.
"So...I don't know how to say this. I have this feeling. I keep thinking it. And it won't go away. I keep trying to tell myself maybe I'm wrong."
Jim tilted his head. "What is it?"
Jean glanced up. "I don't think he's dead," she said faintly. It felt like a pressure release to say, but one that also brought forth its own sense of dread, especially now that the words had left her mind and were actually spoken.
"I think I just surprised him. Why would he be so happy that I immolated him? Why wouldn't he be angry? Or desperate?"
That brought Jim up short. The astral plane around his manifestation had essentially been napalmed. It was so acrid and scorched he'd had to pull back. The effect was lessening now, but it was hard to imagine anything could have survived.
But then, he couldn't remember the last time anything had been easy.
"I don't think it can exist without a host," he said slowly, "and we didn't find any traces. I'm not even sure regular human responses can be ascribed to it anymore. But . . . it's possible." He gave her a crooked smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Better to be paranoid than under-prepared."
Jean looked down. She laughed bitterly, and immediately regretted it when her ribs gave a sharp reply and she grabbed her side. "I'd rather be wrong," she said.
"But thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt. And not dying." She smiled.
"And kicking my ass. Even if Cindy did singe my hair. Bitch."
The counselor smiled. "Talk to me when she's home-pierced your ears with safety pins. But don't worry about it. Hopefully we'll be wrong together." He glanced at her paled face and hunched posture, grimacing. "I'd better get Dr. Reyes -- she'll want to check you out and get you something for the pain."
Jean gently tried to settle back against the bed. Her entire body had been screaming but she had been trying to ignore it.
"That'd be great, on both accounts," she smiled faintly.
"Still isn't going to stop me from worrying, though."
