6/17/07 - Jean
The gentleman is amused, insofar as it is possible for him to be. The right hand of the law sprawls on one of the cracked vinyl chairs set out for the overflow outside a certain office, ticking off the seconds with his watch and an arrhythmic tapping of one prudently shod foot. "Late," he says. "Figures," he says. And: "We could just come back. This is a fucking waste of time."
His companion, older, pouchier, gloomier, regards him with sorrowful eyes. One broad, spatulate hand reaches behind him, and emerges with the shiny glint of handcuffs. "We're waiting," he says. Firmly. "For an MA guy, you're sort of a chickenshit."
Chris Rossi slouches into his chair, and counts the holes in the ceiling tiles.
Doctors are never late. Like wizards, they arrive precisely when they mean to. This particular doctor means to arrive some time after the dinner hour to give the results, if his schedule and several emergency referrals are to have a say in things. How fortunate that one Dr. Grey is at the hospital! Around the corner of the hall she turns, white coat flapping loose over a neat and attractive suit of charcoal grey and tiny pinstripes. Consultations are the order of the day, apparently. "Rossi, Beston. Hi!" she greets. "Is it a boy or a girl?"
"/Jesus/," curses the former. "Of all the--"
"Hey, doc," greets the latter, with a slightly theatrical show of surprise. He rises, shoving his handcuffs back into his belt, and ambles forward to thrust a hand at Jean in amiable greeting. "Fasten seeing you here. How's it going? Been ages since I've seen you. What's it been, three, four weeks?"
"Something like that," Jean allows, coming to a stop and a comfortable lean beside one of the ubiquitous institutional bulletin boards that advertises a mixture of government programs and supplications for donations to this charity or that devoted to battling diseases and conditions that are tragic rather than embarassing. "I see you opted not to sell the tale of our steamy rendezvous to the tabloids... but how's things?"
"Great," says Rossi, without noticeable enthusiasm. He peels himself from his chair, belatedly, and jerks his thumb towards the door. The lie already forming in his mind ribbons its way to his mouth. "We were just--"
Beston is a good friend. "Chris has a brain tumor," he volunteers, and grins private thanks at Jean, his face turned away from Rossi's view. He does not need to look to see the other cop's sharp, hard glance; even a flatscan could read that bubble of irritation. The older cop shrugs, looks rueful, and heads off down the corridor. "Gotta see a man about a dog. Be right back, you two."
"...what?" Jean looks startled at this, widening her eyes and giving Beston an absent nod as he slips past. She takes his seat, and watches Rossi closely. "I'd heard about the singing," she admits, quietly, "But... they actually found one? I'm so sorry."
"I do /not/ have a brain tu-- who told you about the singing?" Indignation interruptus. Chris sits down hard on the seat he started from, his heavy brows flattening over the glitter of eyes. Honesty makes him amend, "That I'm aware of. They put me in one of those--" A forefinger extends and twirls around. Round and round. "--things. Supposed to talk to some doctor about the results today. It's nothing."
Jean looks innocent and does not reveal her source. The source is safely off down the hall, after all. "Well, if it's not a tumour, it sounds like -something-... I mean, not that Ororo would -mind- the occasional serenade or anything."
Chris looks more saturnine than uncomfortable, though guilt -- a tiny, token wisp of it -- wrangles with discomfort in his mind and skids out through his painstaking defenses. Ororo does not know. "So many assholes messing with my mind, who the hell knows anymore?" he asks, diverting away from the absent weather witch. "Maybe I'm finally cracking up. Again."
Delicately, Jean files this information away in a mental Do Not Share bin, and allows a crooked half-smile out for a rueful airing. "Believe it or not, I can sympathize," she admits, although without specification as to what part. "But... that sort of weirdness, with the singing, it makes me think of a couple new students of ours."
"It's mostly going away," Chris mumbles, still on the subject of the indignity itself. The assertion is more hopeful than convinced, a train of thought abruptly derailed with a swift kick of a glance up and a startled, "Students? What kind? Rogers and Hammerstein clones? Why? Do they sing for their supper?"
"Psionic influence does that," Jean confirms, knitting her fingers together and resting them on her lap. "While brain tumours don't usually just get better. But these girls -- sisters, empath and telepath -- were unconsciously using their powers while they were dreaming. They'd lay down an influence on people, unawares."
Chris pauses. Incredulity hikes his baritone up a few notches. "To make me /sing Broadway/? What the /fuck/?"
"Dreams," Jean notes, calm and with another crooked smile, "Don't usually make -sense-. But it's easy enough to undo, if you want me to take a look, and you don't want to just wait it out a couple more months."
Chris twitches back. Eyes show a thin band of white. Body language says whoa. Mind says a different sort of four-letter word. "It /could/ be a brain tumor," he says, the pulse in his throat leaping.
"It could be," Jean agrees, stilling her hands and body and watching him with a carefully-even, carefully tranquil look. "But if it's not... give it another couple months, and you won't be the Phantom of the Precinct anyways."
Given an out, Chris -- perhaps typically -- promptly begins to argue the other side. "They have me on a desk," he says, and the testosterone-driven outrage of it is laced unwittingly with a touch of pathos. He is not a man meant for a desk. "If it /is/ a telepathic thing-- I sang Wicked songs. At /Magneto/."
Serious (No, really, it is.) as the matter is, Jean is momentarily derailed. "-You've- seen Wicked?" she wonders, just a bit too loud, and enough to cause a stray head or two to turn their way as she goggles at him.
"Pa-- shut up. What's so funny?" Chris regards Jean with the heavy patience of a man who has complete control of his temper. Mostly. He slouches back in his chair, a glance skipping towards his watch again before swinging back. "My brother subs for some of the orchestras. He gets us tickets, and Ma loves the damn things. The old man won't go, so." His brows twitch together. "I'm not gay."
"It's just that I have this -image-," Jean shares. "Chris Rossi, battered old leather jacket and all, slouching into the theatre and snarking all the way... and what with the whole sleeping with my best friend thing, I kind've figured that you liked women," she concludes, settling back in her seat and lacing her fingers together over her tum. Considering them both suitably past telepathic uncomfortableness, she thus returns to the topic again. "So, desk job?"
Chris slides fingertips through the hair at his temple, white hairs (more than there were) gleaming amidst short strands of black. "I have a suit," he says through distraction's fog, and frowns. "Desk job. I can't be on the field if I can't predict when I'm gonna start singing for no reason. I can't even interrogate perps. Something happens and I can't stop singing Springtime for Hitler--" He trails off, and glowers at Jean. Aggravation and guilt spike. "I can't watch John's back."
Matt has no spoken answer to that, but the look on her face is steady and wry, and full of a certain understanding. Poodles, too, can know this thing. She nods once, slowly, and reiterates that "Left alone, this thing will run its course in another couple months."
"Fuck that," is Chris's opinion. He stiffens in his chair, the rigid set of his body eloquent of distaste; inside the harrowed mind, the domino effect of latent frustration is tipped by characteristic recklessness -- enough to pitch him towards decision, if not towards active participation. His mind's shields slam up. His consent, verbal, bites out through clenched teeth. "Do it."
"All right." Acceptance is a quiet thing, as Jean glances down the hall to assure herself that, yes, there is a vending machine full of sugary snacks close to hand. Her own shields lower, are overwhelmed by the rush of emotion and pure primal energy that is a hospital, and are thrown back up to the skies again. Hrm. Another glance is taken up and down the hall, and her next move is to offer him her hands, palm up. "I need contact," she explains.
Ack. Bile curdles the detective's forebrain, but he is proud enough in outward show to cover Jean's hands with his own without visible hesitation. Green eyes glance askance. "If anyone asks," he begins, interrupts himself with a strangled, "Shit," and finishes: "'--Had to get your Prince / has to get your cow / have to get your wish / doesn't matter how / Anyway, it doesn't matter now--'"
"You might have a brain tumour and you're dating my best friend," Jean supplies smoothly. "Sometimes, hands get hel--" There's a visible start at the singing, green eyes flying open once again from their meditative closing. Light and dry, her fingers close over his, and with a sigh and a catch of her lower lip between her teeth, she begins. "I want you to think back to the first time this happened..."
Emma. And the same song, in fact. The memory blazes in the forefront of his mind, caught in crystal behind clear green eyes. She skates across a marble floor, her face startled and framed in a glorious swirl of gold hair. Memory, unasked, supplies the knowledge of how it smells, how it glows across the fingers, the tug of some complicated, hurtful need that urges Chris to bury his face in it and breathe-- << Nngh, >> says his mind. Or something like.
Feeling, as always, more a voyeur in the heady somatic whirl of Rossi's mind than many others, Jean's presence is kept minimal, a vague sense along the fringes of green eyes behind glasses, of a crook-mouthed grimace as Emma looms large in memory... to business! A mental template is pulled from some hidden pocket of memory, the influence-signature of first one sister, and then the other. << Think of the next time, please, Chris. >> Almost, but not quite, desperation and distractin seek to escape her mind and run free.
The squad room, a scant half hour later. Springtime for Hitler is the culprit; a wash of remembered embarrassment feeds old anger, which in turn feeds song -- and around they go again, the one chasing the other in a whirlygig of horror. Baffled cops laugh, then look concerned as the concert continues; the Captain, face hard, drags him into her office to wait it out.
More palatable, this memory, if far more painful to watch. An echo of embarassed sympathy from the watcher, the sort of wince usually reserved for soccer players whose groins have stood in for the ball. << And the next? >> Jean prompts, slowly and methodically trying to rekindle a mental cold case, to find what traces of influence remain.
Rossi's mind is obedient, if unhappy. Traffic, first, and then Magneto at the end of the line. "So...you are experiencing an inexplicable series of Broadway revivals," says the old voice in memory's ear. It is followed by a chuckle. In the present day, the cop flushes with a fresh spurt of humiliation. << Shithead thought I was-- >> "I am sorry," says Erik. "I thought you were coming on to me."
Aloud, Chris asks through stiff lips, "How much longer is this going to take?"
"I need to isolate..." It's not a full answer, or even a proper partial one. Jean cannot spare the brainpower for spoken word, it seems. But one hand squeezes lightly, offering reassurance. She subsumes herself in the memories, deeper and more tangibly now, in an effort to chase after... "There." The murmur is a satisfied one, as her mind finally finds a shred of a pattern, and pulls it up for study. Rotated like some 3D figure on a computer screen, she tilts and turns it, mapping out just what messages it carries, what form it takes, in a prelude to banishment.
Theater, in white tie and black tails. The uplifting influence of song, and its soothing effect on the savage breast: the fantasy of love everlasting in glorious technicolor. Lifted for inspection, a wriggling tail of the imprint flicks coyly towards Jean -- love me! love me! -- while underneath, patterns worn in by a lifetime's experiences slowly sink back towards their accustomed paths. More or less. "Done?" Chris asks, cracking open an eye to regard Jean doubtfully. "I don't feel anything."
Jean makes an indistinct noise. Not yet! She turns to the imagery and the imprint, gives a mental head-cock, like an inquisitive setter handed a hollow ball with a biscuit inside. Unlike a glossy hunting dog, Jean's a touch more imaginative in her solution. The music reaches crescendo, the actors end on a high note... but when the audiance's applause are through, a little mental tweak sets the curtains to dropping, the lights to lifting, and the crowd back out into the night. Into the world. The mental probe retreats. Jean sinks back into her seat. "I think so," she murmurs.
"/Think/ so--" Chris begins, his baritone rising -- but not towards song. He pauses, blinks, and experiments. "Think so. Well, dammit. It's not predictable anyway," he announces, stingy with the gratitude, and lets his hands slide away from Jean's so he, too, can slouch into his chair. He regards her, expression curiously forlorn. "What did you find? Anything? Was it your students?" Oh. "You okay?"
Jean busies herself as Rossi experiments with reaching into a pocket of her lab coat and fishing out a package of Mentos. One minty-flavoured sugar vehicle later, snugly tucked between cheek and gum, she offers a wan smile and a better explanation. "It was old, and faint, which is why I might not have cleared it all. But it was definitely the girls... something to do with the theatre."
Chris simply looks baffled. "I figured that," he says, notwithstanding. "But--" Never mind. His hand gestures dismissively; a glance up checks the hall for the figure of Beston, still conspicuously absent. The cop's mouth twists. "He's the one who told you, wasn't he?"
"He worries about you." The simple solemnity of the statement is marred by the clicking noise of a mentos against teeth, but Jean's slight half-smile attempts to compensate.
The detective's shoulders hunch into a shrug, as dismissive as it is embarrassed. Just like a woman, his accusing squint says. What he actually says is, "Yeah, well." Another shrug. Chris pulls himself out of his chair to stand, hands shoved in his pockets. "He's my partner. Big-mouthed son of a bitch. Thanks, Doc." He rolls his neck. Something crackles. "I appreciate the look-see."
"Any time," Jean promises, although the slightly puckish addendum of "...Just don't make that any time soon," swiftly follows. Up she rises, to stand and wobble a bit until the bloodflow to her head catches up with her height. "And if you need any sort of official statement before they let you back out of the office to play, just let me know."
A hand lifts in hasty demurral: the recommendation of an outed telepath, even if she is Jean Grey-- "I'll be okay," Chris says, managing this once to sound more grateful than tactlessly dismayed. He leavens any trace of the latter (in case there should be traces) with the beginnings of a crooked smile. "I'll muddle along just fine. Cap has a way of pushing my buttons anyway. If anyone could find out if I'm still Mandy Patinkin, she'd be the one. One of these days, I swear to God, I'll be the one pulling your onions out of the fire."
For all the crooked smile and the attempt, Jean still retreats behind stillness and serenity of features, nodding once at yet another reminder of that which she'd rather forget. Still, the last image causes her to muster up a smile for him, half-hearted though it may be. "You've done it for my kids often enough," she assures. "I figure that's more than even. Take care." With that, Dr. Grey moves onwards. There is a vending machine, and a Snickers bar that needs her prompt medical intervention to remove it.
[Log ends]