Doctor/Patient Spy Games
There were certain events and certain duties in the life of any WASPish woman that were entirely inescapable.
Surveying a grocery store spread out before her, shopping list in hand, Jean Grey attempted to feel a part of the great colossal Oneness that was the sisterhood of dignified women with a taste for elabourate hats and sickbed visitations.
It was her turn to take an evening with Detective Rossi.
Navigating her squeaka-squeaka-squeaking shopping cart around a spherical five year old girl having a flailing meltdown in the middle of the pudding snack aisle, Jean turned a corner to the poultry counter, and came face to face with unavoidable destiny.
There was nothing for it. There was no hope of escape.
Chicken salad had to be made.
Half an hour later, nursing a sore and bruised set of shins from a close encounter with a harried mother trying to beat her to the last package of water-cooled chicken breasts, Jean was in her car again, a paper bag nestled demurely in the passenger seat, and unaware of the trouble it had caused her to get it. Mayonnaise, tarragon grapes, and... "Who the hell," a rather frazzled Jean wondered to her steering wheel, "Ever threated to sue someone over chicken?"
Fortunately, the drive back to the mansion was uneventful. Even more fortunately, Scott hadn't borrowed her car lately, so her CD changer was undefiled by N'Sync, and still contained U2.
Home again, snuck in through the underground garage rather than fend off student hordes scenting food, Jean considered, then dismissed brief notion of preparing the chicken salad down in one of the spare science labs, surrounded by familiar, comforting equipment like scalpels and bunsen burners. It would, alas, take too long to make sure there were no chemical spills to worry about. And so she advanced on the kitchen, expression saturnine as the Xavier's head cook, an elderly woman of Hungarian extraction, shook her head sadly and muttered something in her native tongue.
She was Dr. Jean Elaine Grey, M.D. and Ph.D., activist, public speaker and X-Woman. In the face of chicken salad, she would prevail. After all, she'd gotten her mother's recipe, and if she could create a transgenic mutant mouse, surely chicken salad couldn't be that difficult, right? Now, to cook the chicken first:
One hour later, surveying the fruits of her labours, she had to admit that Elaine Grey's chicken salad never looked quite so herbal. And there were chunks she couldn't quite identify, either. Something had gone really wrong with the grapes, too. Perhaps she shouldn't have added them while the chicken was still piping hot? Nothing for it, though.
"Nate..." Jean called out to her young son, happily settled in with a trio of overturned tupperware bowls, and wooden spoons to hit them with. (The improvement in the noise level from when he'd started out with metal pots was remarkable.) "Come try what mommy made." Temptingly, a spoonful was extended. Curiously, the lad of nearly 3 advanced.
Shortly after, irate childish yelling resounded all across the mansion, aloud and psychic alike.
Shortly after -that-, the chicken salad found a surreptitiously subterranean new home beneath one of the hydrangea bushes. And Jean was on the phone to her mother.
The chicken salad laughed.
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Old Brownstone Apts #210 - Rossi(#1863RC)
An ancient, faded elegance sketches the boundaries of this apartment, hinted at in crown molding and worn, faded floors. High walls span to high ceilings, pale yellow with the barest of white trim; at one end, three high windows gape to let in day's light or night's dark with equal indifference. A small kitchen pocks a hollow in one wall, a doorless entry that offers glimpses of an metal-framed refrigerator and a cabinet-hung microwave. On the other side of the small living room, a short hallway offers entrances to bathroom and bedroom, both doors battered with the wear and tear of age.
In the living room are the basic accoutrements of comfort: sofas, chairs, table, television. Spartan accessories, betraying little of the owner; that task is left for the walls, hung with pictures of family and friends. Through them all runs the thread of blue, NYPD's uniform tailored to pride and vigor.
[Exits : [O]ut ]
[Players : Rossi ]
This was supposed to be just a quick visit. Arrive with chicken salad and a medical bag, assess progress, an hour's time from beginning to end, all in a tidy package. Because Fate has a sense of humour, however, this fine spring afternoon features Dr. Jean Grey emerging from the stairwell lugging an entire wheeled airport caddy behind her, thunked up the stairs one step at a time. One of the wheels is squeaking and sticking as she trundles down the hallway towards apartment #210, shattering any ideas of a stealthy approach, had she had any in mind. Knock, knock. "Detective? It's Dr. Grey. Up for company and some Percocet?"
There is water pooling under the side table, where Rossi is engaged in watering a potted plant. The purple bow looks withered and tired; the plant, perversely, remains malevolently pleased with life. "Yeah," baritone calls over the hum of the wheelchair's motor. "Hold on. I'll be there in a--" Noises crescendo, culminating in a click as the door is unlocked and thrust open. "--sec. Hey." Tired and unshaven Chris, but wholesome, god wot: side-slit blue sweats and one of the inevitable NYPD T-shirts attest to modesty.
Jean is caught somewhere between casual and formal herself, jeans and a shirt with a circled X logo on it coupled with hair still in an updo and a pair of pearl earrings. She wheels the squeaking airport bag in behind her, and gives Chris an assessing look that concludes with a nod. "You're looking a bit better than last time, even with the face fur in place," she pronounces, delivered with a quick of a smile and a businesslike bustle over to the side table, which looks like it can hold things other than plants. The puddle of water on the floor recieves a cliearly bemused look, before she jumps back to the medical as the rolly bag is unzupped and she starts pulling food out of it." How are the legs and the arm doing? No tingling in your fingers and toes?"
The reply is distracted; the mind (and the eyes) are better occupied with watching the unloading of food in a mixture of bewilderment and alarm. "My legs always feel asleep, but I figure it's just because the damn chair's making me lose feeling in my ass. What the hell. Are you moving in?" Unremarkable chagrin at the thought trails in Rossi's wake -- from door to plant and the determined overwatering once again -- but it lacks the hostile terror of earlier encounters, at least. "If you are, you're sleeping on the couch."
"Yes," Jean pronounces cheerfully, removing a tupperware container loaded to the brim with Elaine Grey's chocolate chip cookies. She puts the box on Rossi's lap. "I've decided to change my tastes from century-old Canadians with healing factors to snarky cops who could really use one. Hope you don't snore. Anyways, I meant to bring chicken salad, and then my mother happened." It's Jean's turn for mild chagrin. She returns to eyeing the plant curiously.
It gurgles at Jean with contented malice. Everything fine here, folks. Nothing to see. Move along. Rossi dumps more water into the pot, juggling grim determination with curiosity. "Century-old? He looks good for his age. Hairy," he allows, putting down the emptied pitcher to run a rueful hand across his own stubbled cheek. "Can't shave myself. Julia keeps promising to bring me an electric one, but she's got the attention span of a newborn. --Your mom's expecting me to eat all that?"
"Did someone kill Magneto and imprison his soul in that plant?" Jean finally wonders, as a splash from the plant threatens a plate of tea sandwiches courtesy of the Presbyterian ladies' aid. The plate is whisked deftly out of the way, and carried off to the kitchen along with the rest of the prizes. "Casserole, cake, a jar of home-made applesauce... there's something involving raspberries and alchohol, too. That one might leave with me. And I think she doesn't trust the younger generation to feed you. If you get set up on the couch, I can get the exam out of the way."
"It was a gift," Rossi says in a flat voice that discourages further questions. Less prickly, he adds a resigned: "Forge brought me a casserole the other day. Left most of it out on the hall carpet on the way in, though. The guy's nuts. Tell your mom thanks for me," he finishes with more formal courtesy, steering himself towards the couch with reluctance curling around the mind: an adult version of a child's distaste for the dentist.
Interesting way to treat a gift, Jean's eyebrows suggest with an arched rise. She does not allow herself to actually -say- this, and the fact that she's in the kitchen, briskly invading Rossi's fridge and cupboard-space, rather renders the expression moot anyways. "You may have her turning up in person," she warns. "Since she and Dad are in Westchester now. Maybe you could tell her that Forge hangs around -- he freaks her out a little."
Rossi shows his teeth at the dead television monitor, any answer lost in the struggle from chair to sofa. One-armed gymnastics. Dull pain jags at Jean from his mute transfer. "Great," he manages at last, sprawled breathless across pillows. "I'll remember that. I'm not kidding about him being a fruitcake."
"Most geniuses are. We keep him at the school as much for his own safety as the world's. He's a bit like a puppy," Jean admits, emerging from the kitchen and dusting her hands when Rossi's presence indicates he's tended to the awkward, undignified task of moving himself to the couch, and her presence won't threaten his manhood. "A puppy that's friendly, eager to please, loves people, and could probably design a fusion bomb out of a teacup, a bobby pin and half of a cucumber, if someone asked him. But let's see about those toes."
"Fusion bomb," Rossi echoes blankly, dragging his cast-weighted legs onto the sofa with him. "Fanfuckingtastic. I'll have to remind myself not to ask him to make me anything. Except that helmet gizmo thing, if he gets around to it. --You never told me that purple condom Lensherr wears on his head is to keep you guys out, not to keep the little guys in."
"You never asked," Jean points out, producing a push pin from some bit of her doctor's bag, and poking experimentally at the tip of Rossi's right big toe with it. "But yes, it's made of a particular alloy of metals that costs an arm and a leg to refine, and somehow eats brain waves. I'm a doctor, not a biophysicist, so that's about as detailed as -I- can go." She pokes at another toe.
Toes flinch back from the pin, accompanied by distracted spikes of vexation from Rossi. "Figures he'd get his hands on something like that. Sounds useful. If Forge ever gets his model working--" The hook of a grin briefly warms Chris's face, lightening the disreputable countenance. "I have no problems looking like an idiot if it'll keep E-- telepaths out of my head."
Two down, eight to go. Jean and her pin continue to work. Poke. Poke. Poke. "Emma's probably the main one to worry about," says Jean, with a flash of displeasure large across her face. "She's the only powerful one I know that somehow completely missed basic ethics like 'don't drive the powerful telepath insane', or 'don't try and rearrange someone's brain because you feel like it'." Poke. "Easy enough to make that helmet. The basic design, in large scale, is one we've got at the school. The Cerebro chamber's a psychic clean room. Good place to hide."
"What?" says Rossi. "Ow," says Rossi. And then, more baffled still, "Cerebro what? --Chuckie Cheese tell you everything?" There, at last, the absent hostility: self-defensive, embarrassed hedgehog prickles overriding a deeper hiss of humiliation and less acceptable terror. He levers himself up against the sofa's far arm, shoulders squaring wide and set. "Knock it off. My toes are fine."
"Just what I'd need to know, since I happen to be a powerful female telepath," Jean replies, onehand flashing out to arrest any retreating feet. Poke. "Transferrence, and all. Anyways, you're not the first person she's messed with. I swear, we need some sort of laws dealing with psionic crimes, instead of just hoping a list of names will make people behave." Poke. "And I need to check each toe. One paralysed can become two, if the cast's pinching off blood flow to nerves, and you need to be able to run -away- from Magneto."
Rossi subsides, if unwillingly; the hard-angled shoulders become a hunch, and humiliation scrambles high with a sickening, breath-stealing flash of that night in the hotel -- << Want a sample? >> -- before he clamps down with peevish assertion of manhood. "I don't run from Magneto." Testosterone flurries, pulling in riptides before intelligence asserts itself with a tired, "Never have time. Anyway, it's not like I want him at my back."
There's a flash of pain across Jean's features, nauseating and dizzying, at that mental flash. Eyes widened and skin paled, she throws her mental walls higher and turns back to her task with thinned lips and a grim expression. She says nothing of what she overheard, instead focusing on banter, light and dark all at once. "Well, with all the pins I had to stick in you to put you back together again, you're not going to be running if he doesn't want you to anyways." She pokes the final two toes, and then sits back on her haunches. "No apparent nerve damage. If you're OK with it, I'd like to see how the bones are knitting. I can use TK instead of an X-ray and feel what's going on, but only if you're comfy with the notion."
Discomfort creases Rossi's expression; a harassed glance speeds towards Jean before he bumps one of the couch pillows down to cover his lap, broken arm maneuvered to rest on its support. Nothing to see here. Really. "Whichever works," he says a bit hoarsely, pausing mid-word to clear his throat. "Magneto already did some diddling on the damn things. Could've been worse, I guess. I can take it. --When you're done doing things that can make me bleed, I got a question for you."
"Ask it while I work -- and you're not going to bleed, Chris. Honestly." The sniff of disapproval that follows is pure Annandale on Hudson, with a small dash of medical pride. "But it'll feel wierd, like something's tickling your bones, so distracting yourself is good." With that, she rolls out of her crouch to settle properly cross-legged, and allows her eyes to disfocus as she rests a hand above the break in his right leg. Telekinesis gathers, pared down to the simplest, lightest of touches, and drifts through layers of skin and fat and muscle, down to scarred, abused bone.
"Okay." The word is tight. Manly, Rossi is. Brave, Rossi is. Like a lion. Rawr. "What'd Travis Reed give you?"
"The fact that you're asking," Jean murmurs, tone absent and nearly inaudible as she settles the bulk of her thoughts in amongst bumps and structures that her powers report to her, and medical training provides an understanding of, "means there's no use playing dumb. He was doing a job for me." Osteoblasts and osteoclasts, spicules of bone growing out to bridge a gap policed by the metal rods and pins inserted... she can feel the pulse of what must be multiplying marrow. She smiles slightly at the notion. "I had him investigate what looked like Emma picking out a private army and hiding it inside a fraternity -- the woman's -got- to have watched too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer," she muses, tangential personal humour.
Her patient's toes flex, responsive (uncomfortable) to that moving presence sinking through bones. "The Hellions," Rossi supplies, gaze morbidly fascinated on the opaque shield of casts. "Stupid. Can I have it? The stuff he found?"
"Oh, is that what she called them?" Jean wonders, in a flicker of mild interest. "The Hellions of SIN. Cute. Satisfied with the first leg, the presence evaporates, only to repeat the process in the second, somewhat more badly shattered and with interesting bone chips to curl around and over. "And sure. Although I think a lot of those kids got in way over their heads, and by the time they realized, Mama Shark Frost had them. I mean, one of my own former students ended up there."
"Oh, is that what she called them?" Jean wonders, in a flicker of mild interest. "The Hellions of SIN. Cute." Satisfied with the first leg, the presence evaporates, only to repeat the process in the second, somewhat more badly shattered and with interesting bone chips to curl around and over. "And sure. Although I think a lot of those kids got in way over their heads, and by the time they realized, Mama Shark Frost had them. I mean, one of my own former students ended up there."
"Baker Street Irregulars from the dark side," Rossi mumbles, though with satisfaction vivid in the forebrain. His attention shifts away from the leg, turning instead to a brow-furled study of Jean herself. "Hey. Was I a shit to you?"
"Maybe," Jean replies, pulling herself away from an examination threatening to go long just because she's found something really -cool- to poke at, and settling back on the bones of her seat again. "I was busy being depressed and isolated, so I probably either didn't notice or figured I deserved it."
The cop's brows dig deeper, darkening the expression to a scowl -- directed inward rather than outward, breath puffed out in an exhalation that stirs errant and overlong hair. "Oh," he says lamely. And in the same note, tacks on, "Sorry."
"They never actually did find any evidence," Jean muses, taking the fractured, bullet-shattered arm next, and resting her fingers across the cast. "I ended up with a very nice psychiatrist liasing with Victim Services trying to assess my sanity, though. Don't worry about it."
He does not, less from obedience than from the seduction of other puzzles lingering in the background of his thoughts. "Even all-powerful mutants need a little therapy now and then," Rossi says behind a cheek-rasping scratch. "You should go get some sometime. Neutral third party, whatever. How're the legs? Am I on the track to full health again? Or do I have a life of gimphood ahead of me?"
Jean snorts, and runs a quick scan of that last broken limb, before patting Rossi on the shoulder and rising to find herself an actual chair to sit on. "I pity the poor bastard who has to listen to -me- sitting on a couch and pouring out my life's story." she pronounces, spinning a dining chair around and straddling it, arms folded across the back. "You're healing. There are a couple bone fragments that aren't knitting, so we'll keep an eye on them and see if they need removal later. June second or so, I can get you into walking casts if you promise not to be an ass and overdo it. The arm'll take the longest."
"Getting pretty good with my left hand anyway," Rossi says with philosophical resignation, an eye glancing swiftly towards the nearby calendar -- and brightening somewhat at its tally of days. "Not like I'm gonna be needing the arm to shoot with anytime soon. Thanks, Doc." The cushion is shoved aside (all safe now) so heavy legs can lower, gingerly, to the floor's support.
"Make a joke about things you're getting good at with your left hand," Jean warns. "And I'm eating the chicken salad myself. Speaking of which..." she waves a hand towards the kitchen. "I can't cook all that well if it doesn't involve a box and instructions, but I can heat things up like a pro. You want anything, while you've got an extra set of hands and feet?"
"Writing things," Rossi says with a return to awful dignity. "And opening crap up. Just /things/. --You know how to use a straight razor?" The chair is just out of reach. He folds over the sofa's arm, groping for its control pad with a mumbled obscenity for encouragement.
"Tried once. My college boyfriend thought he was edgy and retro," Jean allows, over in the kitchen again and snitching one of her mother's cookies. She's left shaking her head as images of twenty-something arts student activist collide with scruffy jaded cop. "If you're not joking, and you'll trust me that close to your throat with an unsafe blade, we can give it a go. Or I could buy you a tube of Neet. Your wish is my command, or something."
The downed cop chuffs exasperation, even as the wheelchair condescends to roll into his reach. "/Retro/," he objects, wrestling himself into the seat. "It's a Rossi -- never mind. Julia'll be around later today. She'll do it. At least with her, I'll know exactly why I end up bleeding."
"You don't wear a beret and get stoned while proclaiming about the wonders of Marx's ideas," Jean assures, returning with the cookies in hand, and well through her first one, despite each being approximately the diameter of a grapefruit. "Also, you're working for The Man. I think you're safe from being retro. Cookie?"
"You realize you emasculate me just by asking that question, right?"
"Should I ask if you want a -fucking- cookie?" Jean's tone is serene, her expression impish.
"Thank you," Rossi says. "I fucking will."
"Fuck you, and the cookie you rode in on," Jean suggests cheerfully. And offers over the cookies.
Irritating Rossi. "Language," he reproves, and accepts Mrs. Grey's hard work on his behalf. The wheelchair bumps its way out from the wedge of sofa and coffee table, steering towards freedom in the more open spaces of the apartment. "I borrowed your guy Jareth to help hack me into something, and I think Forge played me -- at least long enough to figure out what I was working on. Keep an eye out for them, will you? At least for the pecan with the tin foil arm. He's not playing with all six sides. Wouldn't put it past him to go tromping up to Frost to ask her what's up."
Jean wrinkles her nose at the reproof, and settles down to nibble industriously at her cookie. "Mom never makes me cookies this size. I think she likes you," she suggests, licking a smear of chocolate chunk off of one pinky. "But I'll keep an eye on him. I've currently got him building an all-terrain wheelchair for one of the Safehouse kids who needs one to get around, but wants to get down to the lake. That should keep him occupied and distracted. And if it doesn't, I'll make the ultimate sacrifice and tell Jareth to go build something with him. Last time, we ended up with a Giger Kitty."
"Seen it," Rossi informs on a full mouth. He swallows. "Ugly piece of work. You want something for him to work on, the supply officer at the precinct lost her arm in the Gulf. Maybe he can make one for her. They keep sending her the wrong color."
"It keeps trying to sleep in my underwear drawer. Pervy robot." Jean sums up, before slanting Rossi an interested look. "He could do that, you know," she points out. "The arm's metal because he's got an affinity for it, but if she's game, he'd be able to make something bioelectric and lifelike."
The cop hunches his shoulders over the cookies, jaw slowing as he considers it, curiosity not unmixed with skepticism. "Seriously? How much would it cost? She's off the active roster. Medical's pretty good -- most cops don't go through the shit I do -- but I doubt they're shelling out for anything luxury."
"He'd likely do it for free."
Still, Rossi pauses in thought, hesitation blank on his face. "It won't blow crap up, will it?"
"Only if she wants it to." Jean replies, finishing off the last of her cookie and licking more chocolate from her fingers. "If she -did- go and get herself a Forge prosthesis, I'd be sticking myself in the middle of things to keep him on track, and make sure things were working medically. Alone, he'd be the type to just go ahead and build her a new shoulder if the first prototype burnt out the nerves."
"Jesus /Christ/." The cookie drops back into the container. Rossi straightens in his chair. "You're shitting me. I'm not going to Tanya with /that/."
"Like I said," Jean replies, with a rueful tone and her eyes rolled to the ceiling. "Puppy that could make a fusion bomb."
Rossi slouches a little again, eyes hooding over quiet thought. "I'll think about it," he promises, only amend a half-second later, "I'll tell her about it, and let her decide. She can call you or something, I guess. She could use a break. She's had a rough couple of years. --Long as you're here, can I ask you to do me a favor? Might be nothing, but--"
"Ask away," Jean waves a hand from her seat, head tipping to one side in alert, border-collie fashion.
The unshaven chin jerks, lifting towards the ceiling and some unseen target on the other side. "Upstairs," Rossi supplies. "There's this new chick moved into Leah's old apartment. 300. She seems nice, but the thing is, a buddy of hers was involved in that last Magneto thing down in Harlem, I think it was. And he had a list in his pocket of my family members."
"Interesting," says Jean, tone neutral. She motions with a circling pair of fingers. Go on.
"Ignoring the fact that I'm not thrilled by anybody having a complete list of my family," Rossi says with a touch of grimness, "I'm especially not thrilled by the fact this chick sicced him on to it. Or the fact that she's moved into the apartment of a woman who got offed by the Friends, a few weeks before I got hit by them. She might be just the concerned neighbor she says she is, but if she's not--"
"Does the woman upstairs have a name?" Jean wonders next, paring the explanations down and extracting the point like an avocado pit from the middle of the conversational fruit.
Eyes go blank; behind them, Chris flips through the rolodex of memory. "Bridget." There. His gaze clears. "Bridget McCree."
"I'll see what I can find out." Cool and calm, Jean gets to her feet, and begins packing her medical kit back into the rolly bag. She pauses to set out a trio of pill bottles on the side table, leaving little wet rings as they encounter the flooded plant and are then moved further away. "I'm going to start weeding you off the Percocet, so these are stepped-down doses. Follow the instructions, and if Magneto tries to steal them, tell him I'll be finding him and asking for them back."
Under the more focused concentration of the detective's train of thought, a small caboose breaks free and jumps the tracks. Rossi's mouth twists on a sound of remembered annoyance. Fzzt. "Asshole," he says with bitter emphasis. "Steals medication from a cripple. He never stops."
"Well," Jean muses solemnly, heading to the door. "He -is- the bad guy." Hand on the knob, she turns and offers a "Get well soon -- I'll need to see you at the school to get your casts done." before she turns it, and lets herself out. The sticky caster on the luggage squeaks all the way down the hall.