Miracles
She's awake.
Sweet Christ. She's awake.
---
Autumn has arrived with a vengeance, painting the trees that line 3rd street off the full palatte of Nature's colors. Quiet suburbia finds its pocket in the midst of Brooklyn, docile houses pressing intimately against each other, patriotic flags waving from most porches. In their midst, Hargrave Clinic is an oddity, a jarring reminder of the modern world for all its manicured yard and apologetic, subtle architecture. In the lobby, Chris Rossi frets like a greyhound on the lead, driving impatience and unavowed anxiety into tile. Hands thrust in suit pockets, tie a ruddy whip, he times his route around the foyer: one end to the other, five seconds. All around, twenty.
Jean is in a far better position as far as the waiting game goes. -Jean- actually has things to do. And so it is that eventually she finishes them, emerging from a tranquil conference room with a pair of other doctors, the three whote lab coats strolling their way down the hallway towards the lobby, doctors A and B peeling off to their offices and leaving Dr. Grey to approach Rossi on her own. A manila folder of scans and tests and their interpretations tucked neatly under one arm, she notes that "We're good to go. The last of the consent forms are signed, stamped and dated, and we've all reviewed Alison's medical files and have determined that I'm not likely to send her into a seizure by making contact. Dr. Merlin wants it on the record that he doesn't think I'll have an effect at all, and that telepathy is quack science."
The detective's veered approach is more a lope than a walk; the head's lift as eager and houndlike, catching the scent of success. "Dr. Merlin can bite my ass," he informs with automatic hostility, verbal distraction for the mind's blaze of triumph. "If it works, he'll owe me a beer. I could /kiss/ you, Doc. --The aunt coming along?" Corridors reel through Rossi's thoughts, traced from lobby to the girl's room without regard for the body's delay. Hasty, hasty man; he pushes his long-legged stride away, sweeping a nurse up in his wake. ("Detective /Rossi/--")
"You could, but my boyfriend's a bit of a jealous guy," Jean warns, eyes dancing with amusement, and a bit of anticipation of what awaits her. She takes a moment to soothe the nurse with the assurance that she, visiting doctor and therefore a more choice target, will take responsibility for the cop, and then continues her stroll down the hall and headed for an elevator. "But if you don't mind, I'd like you to accompany me while I work. I always prefer to have a spotter when I'm working on something like this, and you've at least had that guided tour of the windmills of the mind. One up on the staff here."
"I make a pretty crappy Don Quixote, but I can do a good Sancho," Chris lobs back, rounding a corner before pausing to wait Jean's more relaxed stride. Fists grind in pockets, twisted at the arms' wracked anticipation; weight bounces on the balls of his feet, and a familiar greeting spins out for a passing medical assistant -- "Hey, Louis. How's that arm?" -- before he prowls back to meet Dr. Grey. "What d'you want me to do? Keep people out? I can do /that/."
"Spend much time here?" Jean wonders of Rossi, hands in the pockets of her lab coat as she strolls along, the easy assured pace of a doctor who knows she's got every right to be where she is. Fortunately, it's an easy pace belonging to a woman of 5'11, and so Rossi's not left waiting too long for her. "Well, I'd prefer it not to be a circus, but mostly I just want you to keep an eye on me, make sure I keep breathing and blinking. I haven't lost control of my autonomic nervous system while my mind was elsewhere for a very long time, but why risk it if you don't have to. If I start showing any dip in my vitals, just shake me out of it and think really loudly to get my attention." she advises, thumbing the elevator and then drumming one hand against her thigh.
The detective rocks back on his heels, leaning for a moment's canted blink against the near wall. "Once or twice, just to see if she could give a statement--" he concedes with professional callousness, discomfort hedging his thoughts in the lie's telltale. Shoulders hunch embarrassment. "You going to hook yourself up to monitors or something? How the hell am I supposed to -- this dangerous?" Belated alarm prickles at the baritone, paired to the squint of accusation.
"There are risks to anything." By now, Rossi should be well aware that good doctors never pad things to make them sound better. Jean sounds confident nonetheless, stepping into the elevator as it chimes and sliding to one side to let the cop follow her in. "But I've been training in this sort of thing for nearly twenty years. I'll clip a monitor on me, but it's mostly a precaution. You wouldn't go into a crime scene without having backup on hand, would you?"
Language Rossi understands. Chris steps after Jean on a light foot, casting one wary glance at the antiseptic elevator's walls before compressing himself into a corner, shoulders slouched for ease. "Yeah. Okay. I can do that. Thinking loudly's my specialty," he says, dry-voiced. "Merlin and Parshall tell you anything interesting? I never understand what the fuck they're talking about. Too bad Ziegler's at that conference. He's a fan of yours."
"Just that she's definitely catatonic, not comatose. She's had a couple of periods where she'd be conscious, but still completely responsive to outside stimuli beyond basic animal functions like pain from a pin being poked." Jean replies, tone absent as she rifles through the file folder to see if there's anything else to cover. "There is activity in her brain, but she's basically walled herself off from the world. And Ziegler, huh?" she wonders, intrigued as anyone at hearing someone likes them. "Might have to look him up at a conference some time. So... which room?"
"318," baritone offers over the elevator's chime and hiss of doors. Chris pauses -- "After you, Doc," -- before shepherding the woman down the hall's gently-lit path, heels clicking against the tile. A smile turns its automatic flirtation towards passing nurses, exchanging greetings ("Hey, Carol. Hey, Lauri.") around explanation. "Jeff Ziegler. He's one of the neurologists. Good guy. Promised to tell him if you were coming, but I wasn't expecting the aunt to cave like that. Figured it'd be at least a few more weeks."
"Well, sometimes family can trigger funny reactions in people," Jean opines, tone neutral-to-relaxed as she watches the familiar interactions happening around her, and jots down a few mental data points as a result. "And it helps that in this case, 'family' is a little girl. If it was someone's drunken and lecherously abusive old uncle in a catatonic state, things would probably be different. 318, 318, 318... ah." Rossi's shepherding proves good, because Jean looks up to find herself at their destination.
The door is open. Rossi presses himself into the wall beside it, craning his neck around the lintel to peer in. It is an anonymous room, as unmarked by personality as the small, still form sitting blank-eyed in a wheelchair. Books stack neatly on the bedside table, proving the passage of some kindly reader, at least; Chris says wryly, "Think Father Andrew just talked a good talk. --Hey, Alison."
"All right, family and men of the cloth," Jean amends her previous statement, before she slips into the anonymous and sterile little room and the levity slips away as well. "Hello, Alison," she greets solemnly, stepping over to the wheelchair to crouch down and look up at that slackly expressionless face. "My name is Jean, and I'd like to talk with you." And then... silence. From the look on Jean's face, she's suddenly been struck by a tsunami of negative nostalgia, where she was expecting nothing more than a rogue wave.
Chris ambles past Jean, an eye for that vulnerable little doll in its seat. Visitor chairs scrape, skidding across the floor: one for the doctor, one for him. Green eyes skew back. Sharpen. "What's up?" he asks, pausing with a hand on each metal-rimmed back. "Getting something?"
In the wheelchair, Alison Beckley stares at phantoms of her own making, blue eyes round and empty. In Alison Beckley, memory careens and jolts in an endless, frenetic chase of horror, guarding a closed door. Keep out. (Keep in.)
Jean draws in a long breath, a touch more uneven than pleases her, but seems to snap back into focus after that. "No, no, not yet, nothing more than just the surface thoughts, the loop she's caught in, that sort of thing. Just... memories, you know?" she explains herself, eyes dark and turned inwards. "Once upon a time, I was her... but if you can get a nurse in here with a heart monitor, we can get started. I don't know how deep I'll have to go."
Concern flicks between Jean and Alison, burrowing a thin crack under determination. Anxiety for the girl, foremost; under it, less articulate, worry for Jean. The two balance for a second's measure, weighted on a scale of need ... and then Rossi is prowling out the door, calling. "Hey, Lauri. You got a--" It takes only a moment or two for him to return, trailing a nurse and monitor after him. Hands in his pockets, worry riding his shoulders, he props himself against the wall and watches as machines are plugged in and arrangements are made.
Jean is soon settled in a chair with some leads sticky-padded to her chest and a pulse oximeter clamped to her finger. The nurses fuss and adjust and tweak, medical jokes are made, but eventually it is back to Jean, Rossi, and the silently staring child. Careful of her medical tethering, Jean rearranges herself that she can take Alison's unresisting hand in her own, giving Rossi a nod an an "I'm going to try and make contact now," before she lets her eyelids fall closed and wills her mental barriers down, down, down, reaching out to lightly rest mental fingers against the fringes of Alison's mind.
Rossi's lips thin, though his murmured thanks to the departing -- fleeing -- nurses are mellow enough. With a sigh of fabric and a creak of leather, he sinks into his seat. Hands clasp loosely between the knee-propped elbows, and the detective attends to both his charges, alert, attentive, deaf and blind in an alien world.
Static. It is the first bite of unpracticed defense. White noise, sparks, the rushing and inchoate chatter of unshielded minds just beyond understanding. The mirth of a joke; the snarl of frustration, jangling together in a prickly hedge for Alison's fairy tale. Where is the monster? Go away.
Beep, beep, beep. Jean's heart rate slows but remains strong, respiration dipping as well as she slides with practised ease into the half-meditation of psychic contact. Tuning her mind to compensate for the static, slipping past it on a different frequency, she hovers just inside that wall of thorns, waiting there to see what the response is and to choose a role for herself. She considers and rejects fairy godmothers, and instead simply settles on herself, Jean Grey, warm and caring teacher and confidante. "Alison?" she calls out on the mental plane. "Are you here?"
Silence answers her, though it is a watchful one, aware with the sense of presence behind it. Dust shifts across the mental landscape, tiny devils fleeing over emptiness-- no, over grass. A purple sky; a toppling picket fence; an obese and lopsided cow. A small girl with red hair and freckles, regarding the visitor with determined hostility. "Go away. Alison doesn't want to come out to play."
"Why not?" Jean answers with a question, settling into a cross-legged seat on the grass and turning her face upwards to regard the small and fierce little guardian of a girl. "It must get awfully lonely never to come out and play. It did when I was hiding."
The girl glances over her shoulder: a house wavers out of hiding, ill-defined, green-gabled. "/We/ play with her," she declares, folding her arms. Bright eyes glare, brilliant. "I don't know you. Who are you? You're not supposed to be here."
"But there's only so much 'scope for the imagination' inside here," Jean points out, the figure twigging memories and quotations as the house wavers into being. She remains sitting on the lawn, idly twirling a blade of grass between her fingers. "What happens when you run out of stories to tell? And I'm nobody special. Just a friend."
"There're more stories," the girl informs, unknitting her arms to plant her hands on underfed hips. She regards Jean with lofty consideration. "There's scope for the imagination, here. And they bring us stories. We listen to them down at the Lake of Shining Waters, Diana and Alison and I." Eagerness leaps into the piquant face as she speaks; under them the green deepens and births tiny daisies, illusion firming into reality.
"But what about actually doing some of those things you only hear about in stories?" Jean wonders, with all the gravity of a child addressing another about something of Great Import. "You couldn't travel to see the Great Pyramids here, only what you think they'd look like. Or ride a pony, just what you think it would feel like. Where's the fun in -only- playing pretend? Don't you want to do things for real some times? To make playing pretend more special?"
The girl clasps her hands together on a caught breath, freckles standing out against the pale skin. "I ride ponies, and I can use my imagination. This is /home/," she says, imbuing the word with fierce, protective passion. "This is where Marilla and Matthew are. We couldn't leave them. They /need/ us. Marilla wanted a boy, you know, to help Matthew on the farm, but he doesn't need the hired boy when we're here."
"What about Allison, though? Aren't there people who need -her-?" Jean wonders. "You're Matthew and Marilla's girl, but she's got family who worry about her since she's gone. Can you imagine how they must be feeling?" Prompting the imaginative Anne to consider this, Jean hangs back and waits. In the physical world, her heart rate begins to slow even further.
She struggles with it, visibly, even as in the real world, Chris Rossi leans to eye the monitor, jaw setting in a harsh, hard line. "Her family's coming for her. They're just not here right now," Anne says, casting another glance over her shoulder at the house before dropping to sit on her heels. Confiding, she adds, "They went on a trip and she couldn't go. She was in the depths of despair before he brought her. Have you ever been in the depths of despair?"
"Yes, Anne, I have." Jean answers, and while she's still taking a Miss Stacey-style role for herself in all this, she'd definitely an adult for all her love of the childlike. Her eyes are entirely serious and grave. "It's not a very good place, the depths of despair. But who brought her?"
Great, speaking eyes widen. "Why, Matthew did," says Anne, accepting without question the older woman's familiarity. She plucks a stalk of grass and threads it between her lips, chewing on its stalk with farm-girl pleasure. "He built Green Gables, you know. It's very romantic, isn't it? There's such /scope/ here. It isn't anything like where Alison used to live with /her/ family. They were--" The thrilled voice falters. Recovers slowly, puzzled. "You're not in the story."
"Nope. I'm from the outside world, not the story world here," Jean confirms, allowing this realization and encouraging it as she wraps her arms around her legs and cocks her head to peer at Anne. "There are a lot of people in the outside world who are worried and scared for Alison. They miss her, and they can't come visit the way that I do. I'm a telepath, you see. You wouldn't know what that is, but Alison might."
Anne rocks back onto her calico-covered seat, her own arms wrapping tightly around green-stained knees. The thin face clouds. "Why can't they come visit? There's plenty of trains that come through Bright River. I don't think she should leave Avonlea until her parents come. Diana thinks it's romantic for a heroine to be wronged and cast out of the bosom of her friends and family, but Marilla says that romance is just being uncomfortable, all dressed up in fine linens."
"Because Alison's hiding away here. They don't even know that she can hear when they read the stories," Jean explains, drumming her fingers against one knee, although her lips twitch inopportunely at the image of Marilla. "I can leave and tell them she's all right, that she's here, but hiding away like this, no-one else from outside can see her except me. The trains don't run to where the rest of us live."
"You could bring them to Green Gables." Anne brightens at the thought, sitting up with inspiration's quick eagerness. "They could see that she's happy here. Matthew loves us, and Marilla--" Brightness dims, marginally; behind the girl, the walls of the house flicker, losing definition for a moment's ugliness: the veil thins, baring caged horrors before solidifying again. "--She /cares/, I think. You could come live with us, if you wanted. It's not full of afflictions and sorrows like the outside world. Green Gables is /home/."
"I can't bring them to Green Gables, Anne," Jean replies with a sad little shake of her head. "To bring too many minds inside someone else's? It could hurt Alison to do that, and I won't do that to her. She'll always have Green Gables with her, Anne, it's a place that never truly leaves you, but if she ever wants to see all the people that miss her and worry about her, she'll have to see the outside world again." And then, ever so quietly, Jean whispers "Is she scared to think about that? I was."
Arms wrap again around knees, making a tight little bundle of Anne, round eyes and solemn, slanted mouth. "Heroines are never scared," she explains. "Heroines are /frightened/, but they fight dragons and die tragically, and their names live on in songs and poems. I imagine I'm a heroine sometimes, but when I'm done, I'm just plain old Anne Shirley of Green Gables. Still, I'd rather be plain old Anne Shirley than--" Her voice quavers again, trailing off; hair, pig-tailed, loses some of its color. Brown, beneath the red. Blue eyes, under the green.
"Hello, Alison," Jean greets quietly, watching the mental shift with quiet fascination. She shifts a litle, arms unwrapping from her legs, repositioned to indicate that she's quite huggable if comfort should be sought. "I used to pretend I was the little girl from Misty of Chincoteague, when I was hiding out. I think I like Green Gables better -- Chincoteague and Assateague have fierce storms, so sometimes I'd scare myself."
The girl scrambles -- away, away -- and stares at Jean with great, startled eyes. "I'm /Anne/," she says, voice fierce (hair ripples, red, brown, red, /red/) while the grass slowly withers beneath them. "Alison's with ... she's making a cake. Diana's coming. We're going to have a party and pretend we're Lady Elsabeth and Lady Gruselda of Norway having the Duchess of Camelot to tea. I like storms. Aren't they lovely? They're like great, angry thoughts that haven't been put to bed yet. I'm /Anne/."
"Who wouldn't want to be Anne of Green Gables?" Jean wonders, tone soothing, smoothing, conciliatory as she backs away from that mis-step. "Living in a lovely world, with people who care about her, where the bad things may shake the world, but it's never broken. I think a lot of people envy you, Anne. It doesn't ever change here, and many people want that."
"Things change," protests Anne over a tiny, choked sob. Grass dies, fading to dull, brittle brown. "The Jersey had a calf yesterday, and Gil-- that /boy/ got his hair cut, and Marilla made me a new dress. I'm wearing it to church tomorrow. It's not /pretty/, but I can pretend it's covered with lace and pearls and has mutton sleeves."
"Little things," Jean counters thoughtfully. "Safe things. It's very safe here, no matter what happens when you try to walk on ridgepoles like Josie Pye."
Anne -- Alison -- regards Jean with frightened resentment. "It should be safe. Matthew said so. It should be safe for little girls."
"And the outside world should be safe too. We failed you, Alison," Jean admits, with old, sad eyes and a little shake of her head. "We failed you in one of the most profound ways it's possible to fail someone. But can't you find it in yourself to give us another chance? To try and show you that the outside world can be good and beautiful too?"
The girl hesitates, catching a strand of hair between her teeth to worry at it, torn. "I'd have to leave Marilla and Matthew, and Green Acres," she says wistfully. "Could I come back?"
(--And in the real world, Chris Rossi buries his face in his hands, muttering imprecations, and stands to stalk to the door. "Hey, Lauri. C'mere a sec, would you? This heart rate normal?")
"Any time you like." Jean assures steadily. We don't increase the pressure, we lower the wall. We don't increase the pressure-- Outside, forgotten, her own body's gone slack, nail beds gone blue but cheeks brightly flushed as her brain emphatically orders more blood, more glucose, more power and control. "This is all in your mind, Alison, no-one can keep you from your own mind, no matter how much we want you to stay. But will you at least give us a chance?"
Anne is torn, visibly, fading around the edges to bare the Alison beneath. She huddles where she sits, folding into the tangle of her limbs -- into clothes changing to modern jeans, into a cheek smudged with blood. Wide, liquid eyes, peering uncertainly at Jean. "Will you be there?"
(Bodies move around Jean, murmuring in clinical, quizzical professionalism; the monitor is inspected, debated, and rechecked. Well? Low, but not /dangerous/. "You sure? This is really starting to frost my cookies.")
In Avonlea, the indistinct rumble of voices threads through the quiet chirping of birds. Female voice. Male voice, inarticulate but unmistakable. Alison's head lifts. "Matthew--?"
"Yes." Jean promises. "I'll be there. In fact, I'm right in the room with you in the outside world. We can wake up together, just say the word." Open, inviting, trustworthy and confident, a hand is extended, friendship and security in one. "Should I ask Matthew's permission?" she wonders.
The thin hand reaches, hesitates, then slides cool and trembling fingers into Jean's. "We should tell him, before I go," Alison says wistfully, shifting up to her knees. Another glance turns back to the house -- ominous, for all its quiet beauty and inviting charm -- before skipping aside to penned meadowland beyond. "He'll worry, if I don't tell him where I'm going. We're kindred spirits, Matthew and I. Our /souls/ speak to each other. We don't need words."
"Then let's go talk to him." Jean decides, letting her hand clasp warmly around those hesitant girl-fingers in return, warm because she wills it to be so, in this domain of thoughts alone. Even if concern for the integrity of Alison Beckley's psyche has her keeping such manifestations solely to herself. The house and its ominous qualities will keep for another day and some future therapy session. "I always did like Matthew. He's got a very gentle soul, it reminds me of my father's."
"Do you know him?" Alison wonders, rising to dust grass off her pants before wrapping her other hand around Jean's, clinging. The small head ducks towards the woman; she is more tentative without Anne, more ethereal and shy without that indomitable character to hide in. "He doesn't talk a lot. Sometimes he goes days without saying a word."
"But when he speaks, it's always exactly the right thing," Jean concludes the sentence, her other hand resting gently between Alison's shoulders, supporting and soothing. "Yes, I know him. Call him over, Alison, and we'll make sure things are looked after. We wouldn't want Mrs. Rachael Lynde to gossip."
Mrs. Lynde. The slim spine stiffens with remembered hostility, then relaxes -- "She /means/ well," Alison confides -- and then they are in the meadow, watching a silver-haired man pitchforking hay. An elderly man, but a formidable one: kindness in the weathered face; power in the shoulders and strong back. A frightened mind's reworking of a character, from advocate to protector. The girl leans into Jean, troubled. "He'll be hurt."
"Yes, but he'll be proud, too," Jean predicts, lifting her hand briefly from Alison's shoulders to give Matthew and his hay a friendly wave. "Remember how Anne goes away to school in the story? And how Matthew and Marilla miss her terribly, but they're also very proud of her for stepping out into the wide world? You'll be like Anne." Half-formed, an idea bubbles up in her mind, but she doesn't speak of it. Rossi and aunts and other doctors, oh my.
Matthew straightens to regard the two, woman and child, and folds his mouth into a solemn line before stumping to meet them, pitchfork for a cane. "Like Anne," sighs Alison, flickering momentarily back into her broken disguise. "Matthew, look. She came to visit, and she wants to take me away with her, to see the real world. Wouldn't that be a splendid adventure, Matthew? You've always said I should leave Green Gables someday. I could go with her, and spread my wings. Do you think I should? I wouldn't want to if you would miss me, though. I couldn't bear /that/." An opening. A hopeful one.
The old man inspects Jean, mute and questioning. (Out in the real world, Rossi drops back onto his seat, folds his hands to fist his chin, and stares blankly at Jean. "Here's the deal. This was probably a bad idea. I'll give it five more minutes, and then I'm thinking about you naked. Got it?")
"I'll watch over her, Matthew," Jean assures, eschewing analysis of just what part of Alison's psyche she's talking to, and simply addressing what she 'sees' before her. That can wait for the inevitable case report. Instead, steady and strong, she dredges up what she can remember of her well-thumbed girlhood L.M. Montgomery. She's about to deliver something neatly metaphorical when outside influences cause her eyes to go blank for a moment. Somewhere in Rossi's head there's a silent raspberry, before she returns to the hayfields and Matthew. And decides to leave her promise at that.
Matthew rocks back on his heels, considering, while Alison waits with white-faced anxiety, visibly yearning to -- stay? To go? "Reckon you can come back if you want," he says at last in a quiet baritone, wistful. "Green Gables'll still be here. If you want."
The girl sighs quietly, and turns her face into Jean's arm.
Gently, reassuringly, Jean strokes at Alison's hair. "Let's go be heroines, then, honey," she suggests. "Take my hand, and we'll wake up together, all right? Just like stepping through a mirror and finding another world."
The hand in Jean's tightens spasmodically; Alison looks up at Jean with wide, terrified eyes. Her voice quivers, small. "Will it hurt? Will I have to see--"
Green Gables looms abruptly, sweeping towards them as thin walls shred. Blood. Gut-wrenching terror. The taste of tears. Matthew curses -- /curses/ -- and is abruptly between them, stoically poking the house into submission with his pitchfork. A ludicrous image, and yet ... not. "Goddammit, Doc. That's not funny." The real world, articulating with his mouth. Alison shrinks. Time to go.
And like someone surfacing from a deep free dive, Jean shifts planes and returns to the realm of the conscious. There's a hug for the fading Alison and a whisper of "I'll meet you on the other side." before heart rate ramps up and breathing increases, the monitors the first signal of returning consciousness. A bare ten seconds later, Jean's eyes blink open and she's staring intently at little Alison Beckley, whose hand is still in hers. "Come on, honey," she murmurs. Poor Rossi is ignored by the doctor focused on her patient.
Poor Rossi exhales with sudden relief, straightening in his chair with an abrupt stretch of spine. "/Doc/. You had me--" The words bite off; the pale gaze narrows and skips to Alison, hope suspended and aching.
In the wheelchair's cage, little Alison Beckley -- seven years old, once upon a time -- blinks. Swallows. Stirs and grips with a weak clench of fingers the hand that rests in hers. /Wakes/.
"Hello, Alison," Jean murmurs, settling back in her chair with a slow smile and a vast sense of contentment mingled with the fatigue of this complicated undertaking. It -worked-. She's -here-. Unfortunately, Dr. Grey in her clean white lab coat is too worn out to be outwardly jubilant, so she settles for the next best thing: "I don't know about you, but I think I want some ice cream."
"Sweet Mary, Jesus and Joseph," breathes Rossi, dampening flaming exultation to sink by the girl's wheelchair. "Doc, I'll get you enough ice cream, you'll be able to /bathe/ in it. --Hey there, Alison." Baritone spins gentle, oh gentle, through the Brooklyn accent. Chris smiles. "Welcome back."
The girl blinks again, dazed behind the slow drift from oblivion to awareness. Confusion tangles with exhaustion, muzzling even the attempt at speech; the blue eyes turn to Rossi, then swing up to Jean in bewildered recognition.
"Told you I'd be here," Jean murmurs to Alison, still with that slow and sleepy smile in place, high on endorphins and success. "This is Christopher Rossi. He's the man who told me about you -- he's the fellow who never gave up hope we'd see you again. So he's pretty excited right now."
An assertion which the detective promptly denies. Maturely. "Am not." Like so. (Liar.) One broad, warm hand folds over Alison's free one, pressing gently; the other, run through black hair to stand it on tip-toes, balances its elbow over a knee so Rossi can crane his glance back at Jean. "Thanks, Doc. You okay? Everything, you know. Okay?" Under the excited glitter of his voice, honest concern moves its shadow: winks at the woman, white-rimmed and worried.
"I just need some ice cream," Jean reiterates, tapping the fingers of her free hand against her temple to indicate -why-. "Energy can neither be created 'nor destroyed, so I need to top up my batteries. -And- we need some ice cream just because. Would you like some, Alison?"
Fingers shift under both their hands, grasping at movement unpracticed after years; Alison blinks at Jean, mouth opening to an ungainly croak. Fright spills into her face at the sound. Not her voice--
"Right," agrees Rossi, unraveling to stand. Movement is /his/ forte, and the prodding that agitates a beehive's workers. With a last grin down for woman and child, he stalks out the door, pursuing the buoyant summons and demand of baritone. "Hey, Lauri. Listen. You got any ice cream? That's the creamy stuff that isn't jello--"
Newly woken Alison stares at Dr. Grey, heartbeat quickening towards remembered terror.
"It will come, Alison. In fact," Jean assures, now holding the frightened child's hand between two of hers and rubbing the back of it soothingly. "The ice cream will probably help. You just haven't said anything for a very long time here, so your throat's a little scratchy and rough. It was like that for me, too, when I first woke up again, and I was scared too."
The contact soothes Alison's fear, dampening it with the reminder of warmth; the hand in Jean's is chilly to the touch, though it, too, warms slowly under her touch. Through the bemusement -- strange place, strange noises, strange smells -- familiarity nudges here and there, pushing into place unrealized fragments of memory to piece together a whole. A question. She clings to it, unvoiced though it may be. 'Scared too.'
"Mmmhm." Jean confirms the unvoiced thought. "When I was just a little bit older than you, I'd gone and hidden away inside my head too, because I kept hearing everyone's thoughts, and they wouldn't go away, no matter how frightening they were or how much I wanted them to. So I hid, because it was safe in my head. But then a very kind old man named Charles Xavier came and convinced me to come back out again. And he helped me, and so now I'm here, so that I can be here to help -you- not be afraid." She pauses, and there's a faint little twinkle in her eyes as she suggests that "It's something that should be in a story, don't you think?"
If there is a reciprocating twinkle, it is lost in the tattering mists of the mind. Alison drifts a solemn, wrinkled look around the room, marking its furniture and its adornments without recognition.
Outside in the hall, Rossi's voice waxes again, traveling with its owner back to the room. "--amount of money Merlin charges to be a dick in the same room with you, he's good for it. Hey. Ice cream." He is an odd Ganymede, but a fruitful one; he comes bearing bowls of ice cream in both hands, spoons wedged deep into chocolate. "Lauri had a tub in her freezer," he informs, as that nurse pops her head into the room with round eyes, only to ejaculate an Oh-My-God and disappear in haste.
Gravely, Jean offers a "Thank you, Chris," before diving into the ice cream with a blissful little smile. Come to me, glucose my love. More gravely still, she holds out a second spoon and its' cargo of chocolately goodness to Alison. "The room's a little bare right now, we'll have to see about some flowers. In the meantime, see what you think of this:" Because Jean has it on fact that psychic chocolate tastes no-where near as good as the real stuff.
The hand that reaches for the spoon is tremorous and unsure, and the delicate fingers clumsy enough to miss on their first try. Ready tears spring to fill Alison's eyes, pooling to trickle a glittering path down pale cheeks. She sniffles.
"Hey there," Jean murmurs softly, brushing the tears away with the backs of two gentle fingers. "You don't think that Sleeping Beauty didn't have a few pins and needles and really messy hair when she woke up, do you? Just give yourself a couple of days, and you'll be up and running and ready to leave here and go some place with nicer rooms and better food. And I'm right here for you, OK?"
So, speaks Chris Rossi's slouched and settled pose, is he. Whatever intent trips from mind to mouth, it is aborted before it is well begun; the hall rattles with the swell of noise: doctors, nurses, the machinery of medicine racing to verify what eyes have already borne witness to. With a crooked grin for Jean, a kinder one for Alison, the detective stands to make way for science.
And Alison Beckley, blinking spiky lashes at Jean, swallows tears ... and smiles.
[Log ends]
Jean visits Alison Beckley, a young, catatonic victim from one of Rossi's cases, and visits Green Gables.
Sweet Christ. She's awake.
---
Autumn has arrived with a vengeance, painting the trees that line 3rd street off the full palatte of Nature's colors. Quiet suburbia finds its pocket in the midst of Brooklyn, docile houses pressing intimately against each other, patriotic flags waving from most porches. In their midst, Hargrave Clinic is an oddity, a jarring reminder of the modern world for all its manicured yard and apologetic, subtle architecture. In the lobby, Chris Rossi frets like a greyhound on the lead, driving impatience and unavowed anxiety into tile. Hands thrust in suit pockets, tie a ruddy whip, he times his route around the foyer: one end to the other, five seconds. All around, twenty.
Jean is in a far better position as far as the waiting game goes. -Jean- actually has things to do. And so it is that eventually she finishes them, emerging from a tranquil conference room with a pair of other doctors, the three whote lab coats strolling their way down the hallway towards the lobby, doctors A and B peeling off to their offices and leaving Dr. Grey to approach Rossi on her own. A manila folder of scans and tests and their interpretations tucked neatly under one arm, she notes that "We're good to go. The last of the consent forms are signed, stamped and dated, and we've all reviewed Alison's medical files and have determined that I'm not likely to send her into a seizure by making contact. Dr. Merlin wants it on the record that he doesn't think I'll have an effect at all, and that telepathy is quack science."
The detective's veered approach is more a lope than a walk; the head's lift as eager and houndlike, catching the scent of success. "Dr. Merlin can bite my ass," he informs with automatic hostility, verbal distraction for the mind's blaze of triumph. "If it works, he'll owe me a beer. I could /kiss/ you, Doc. --The aunt coming along?" Corridors reel through Rossi's thoughts, traced from lobby to the girl's room without regard for the body's delay. Hasty, hasty man; he pushes his long-legged stride away, sweeping a nurse up in his wake. ("Detective /Rossi/--")
"You could, but my boyfriend's a bit of a jealous guy," Jean warns, eyes dancing with amusement, and a bit of anticipation of what awaits her. She takes a moment to soothe the nurse with the assurance that she, visiting doctor and therefore a more choice target, will take responsibility for the cop, and then continues her stroll down the hall and headed for an elevator. "But if you don't mind, I'd like you to accompany me while I work. I always prefer to have a spotter when I'm working on something like this, and you've at least had that guided tour of the windmills of the mind. One up on the staff here."
"I make a pretty crappy Don Quixote, but I can do a good Sancho," Chris lobs back, rounding a corner before pausing to wait Jean's more relaxed stride. Fists grind in pockets, twisted at the arms' wracked anticipation; weight bounces on the balls of his feet, and a familiar greeting spins out for a passing medical assistant -- "Hey, Louis. How's that arm?" -- before he prowls back to meet Dr. Grey. "What d'you want me to do? Keep people out? I can do /that/."
"Spend much time here?" Jean wonders of Rossi, hands in the pockets of her lab coat as she strolls along, the easy assured pace of a doctor who knows she's got every right to be where she is. Fortunately, it's an easy pace belonging to a woman of 5'11, and so Rossi's not left waiting too long for her. "Well, I'd prefer it not to be a circus, but mostly I just want you to keep an eye on me, make sure I keep breathing and blinking. I haven't lost control of my autonomic nervous system while my mind was elsewhere for a very long time, but why risk it if you don't have to. If I start showing any dip in my vitals, just shake me out of it and think really loudly to get my attention." she advises, thumbing the elevator and then drumming one hand against her thigh.
The detective rocks back on his heels, leaning for a moment's canted blink against the near wall. "Once or twice, just to see if she could give a statement--" he concedes with professional callousness, discomfort hedging his thoughts in the lie's telltale. Shoulders hunch embarrassment. "You going to hook yourself up to monitors or something? How the hell am I supposed to -- this dangerous?" Belated alarm prickles at the baritone, paired to the squint of accusation.
"There are risks to anything." By now, Rossi should be well aware that good doctors never pad things to make them sound better. Jean sounds confident nonetheless, stepping into the elevator as it chimes and sliding to one side to let the cop follow her in. "But I've been training in this sort of thing for nearly twenty years. I'll clip a monitor on me, but it's mostly a precaution. You wouldn't go into a crime scene without having backup on hand, would you?"
Language Rossi understands. Chris steps after Jean on a light foot, casting one wary glance at the antiseptic elevator's walls before compressing himself into a corner, shoulders slouched for ease. "Yeah. Okay. I can do that. Thinking loudly's my specialty," he says, dry-voiced. "Merlin and Parshall tell you anything interesting? I never understand what the fuck they're talking about. Too bad Ziegler's at that conference. He's a fan of yours."
"Just that she's definitely catatonic, not comatose. She's had a couple of periods where she'd be conscious, but still completely responsive to outside stimuli beyond basic animal functions like pain from a pin being poked." Jean replies, tone absent as she rifles through the file folder to see if there's anything else to cover. "There is activity in her brain, but she's basically walled herself off from the world. And Ziegler, huh?" she wonders, intrigued as anyone at hearing someone likes them. "Might have to look him up at a conference some time. So... which room?"
"318," baritone offers over the elevator's chime and hiss of doors. Chris pauses -- "After you, Doc," -- before shepherding the woman down the hall's gently-lit path, heels clicking against the tile. A smile turns its automatic flirtation towards passing nurses, exchanging greetings ("Hey, Carol. Hey, Lauri.") around explanation. "Jeff Ziegler. He's one of the neurologists. Good guy. Promised to tell him if you were coming, but I wasn't expecting the aunt to cave like that. Figured it'd be at least a few more weeks."
"Well, sometimes family can trigger funny reactions in people," Jean opines, tone neutral-to-relaxed as she watches the familiar interactions happening around her, and jots down a few mental data points as a result. "And it helps that in this case, 'family' is a little girl. If it was someone's drunken and lecherously abusive old uncle in a catatonic state, things would probably be different. 318, 318, 318... ah." Rossi's shepherding proves good, because Jean looks up to find herself at their destination.
The door is open. Rossi presses himself into the wall beside it, craning his neck around the lintel to peer in. It is an anonymous room, as unmarked by personality as the small, still form sitting blank-eyed in a wheelchair. Books stack neatly on the bedside table, proving the passage of some kindly reader, at least; Chris says wryly, "Think Father Andrew just talked a good talk. --Hey, Alison."
"All right, family and men of the cloth," Jean amends her previous statement, before she slips into the anonymous and sterile little room and the levity slips away as well. "Hello, Alison," she greets solemnly, stepping over to the wheelchair to crouch down and look up at that slackly expressionless face. "My name is Jean, and I'd like to talk with you." And then... silence. From the look on Jean's face, she's suddenly been struck by a tsunami of negative nostalgia, where she was expecting nothing more than a rogue wave.
Chris ambles past Jean, an eye for that vulnerable little doll in its seat. Visitor chairs scrape, skidding across the floor: one for the doctor, one for him. Green eyes skew back. Sharpen. "What's up?" he asks, pausing with a hand on each metal-rimmed back. "Getting something?"
In the wheelchair, Alison Beckley stares at phantoms of her own making, blue eyes round and empty. In Alison Beckley, memory careens and jolts in an endless, frenetic chase of horror, guarding a closed door. Keep out. (Keep in.)
Jean draws in a long breath, a touch more uneven than pleases her, but seems to snap back into focus after that. "No, no, not yet, nothing more than just the surface thoughts, the loop she's caught in, that sort of thing. Just... memories, you know?" she explains herself, eyes dark and turned inwards. "Once upon a time, I was her... but if you can get a nurse in here with a heart monitor, we can get started. I don't know how deep I'll have to go."
Concern flicks between Jean and Alison, burrowing a thin crack under determination. Anxiety for the girl, foremost; under it, less articulate, worry for Jean. The two balance for a second's measure, weighted on a scale of need ... and then Rossi is prowling out the door, calling. "Hey, Lauri. You got a--" It takes only a moment or two for him to return, trailing a nurse and monitor after him. Hands in his pockets, worry riding his shoulders, he props himself against the wall and watches as machines are plugged in and arrangements are made.
Jean is soon settled in a chair with some leads sticky-padded to her chest and a pulse oximeter clamped to her finger. The nurses fuss and adjust and tweak, medical jokes are made, but eventually it is back to Jean, Rossi, and the silently staring child. Careful of her medical tethering, Jean rearranges herself that she can take Alison's unresisting hand in her own, giving Rossi a nod an an "I'm going to try and make contact now," before she lets her eyelids fall closed and wills her mental barriers down, down, down, reaching out to lightly rest mental fingers against the fringes of Alison's mind.
Rossi's lips thin, though his murmured thanks to the departing -- fleeing -- nurses are mellow enough. With a sigh of fabric and a creak of leather, he sinks into his seat. Hands clasp loosely between the knee-propped elbows, and the detective attends to both his charges, alert, attentive, deaf and blind in an alien world.
Static. It is the first bite of unpracticed defense. White noise, sparks, the rushing and inchoate chatter of unshielded minds just beyond understanding. The mirth of a joke; the snarl of frustration, jangling together in a prickly hedge for Alison's fairy tale. Where is the monster? Go away.
Beep, beep, beep. Jean's heart rate slows but remains strong, respiration dipping as well as she slides with practised ease into the half-meditation of psychic contact. Tuning her mind to compensate for the static, slipping past it on a different frequency, she hovers just inside that wall of thorns, waiting there to see what the response is and to choose a role for herself. She considers and rejects fairy godmothers, and instead simply settles on herself, Jean Grey, warm and caring teacher and confidante. "Alison?" she calls out on the mental plane. "Are you here?"
Silence answers her, though it is a watchful one, aware with the sense of presence behind it. Dust shifts across the mental landscape, tiny devils fleeing over emptiness-- no, over grass. A purple sky; a toppling picket fence; an obese and lopsided cow. A small girl with red hair and freckles, regarding the visitor with determined hostility. "Go away. Alison doesn't want to come out to play."
"Why not?" Jean answers with a question, settling into a cross-legged seat on the grass and turning her face upwards to regard the small and fierce little guardian of a girl. "It must get awfully lonely never to come out and play. It did when I was hiding."
The girl glances over her shoulder: a house wavers out of hiding, ill-defined, green-gabled. "/We/ play with her," she declares, folding her arms. Bright eyes glare, brilliant. "I don't know you. Who are you? You're not supposed to be here."
"But there's only so much 'scope for the imagination' inside here," Jean points out, the figure twigging memories and quotations as the house wavers into being. She remains sitting on the lawn, idly twirling a blade of grass between her fingers. "What happens when you run out of stories to tell? And I'm nobody special. Just a friend."
"There're more stories," the girl informs, unknitting her arms to plant her hands on underfed hips. She regards Jean with lofty consideration. "There's scope for the imagination, here. And they bring us stories. We listen to them down at the Lake of Shining Waters, Diana and Alison and I." Eagerness leaps into the piquant face as she speaks; under them the green deepens and births tiny daisies, illusion firming into reality.
"But what about actually doing some of those things you only hear about in stories?" Jean wonders, with all the gravity of a child addressing another about something of Great Import. "You couldn't travel to see the Great Pyramids here, only what you think they'd look like. Or ride a pony, just what you think it would feel like. Where's the fun in -only- playing pretend? Don't you want to do things for real some times? To make playing pretend more special?"
The girl clasps her hands together on a caught breath, freckles standing out against the pale skin. "I ride ponies, and I can use my imagination. This is /home/," she says, imbuing the word with fierce, protective passion. "This is where Marilla and Matthew are. We couldn't leave them. They /need/ us. Marilla wanted a boy, you know, to help Matthew on the farm, but he doesn't need the hired boy when we're here."
"What about Allison, though? Aren't there people who need -her-?" Jean wonders. "You're Matthew and Marilla's girl, but she's got family who worry about her since she's gone. Can you imagine how they must be feeling?" Prompting the imaginative Anne to consider this, Jean hangs back and waits. In the physical world, her heart rate begins to slow even further.
She struggles with it, visibly, even as in the real world, Chris Rossi leans to eye the monitor, jaw setting in a harsh, hard line. "Her family's coming for her. They're just not here right now," Anne says, casting another glance over her shoulder at the house before dropping to sit on her heels. Confiding, she adds, "They went on a trip and she couldn't go. She was in the depths of despair before he brought her. Have you ever been in the depths of despair?"
"Yes, Anne, I have." Jean answers, and while she's still taking a Miss Stacey-style role for herself in all this, she'd definitely an adult for all her love of the childlike. Her eyes are entirely serious and grave. "It's not a very good place, the depths of despair. But who brought her?"
Great, speaking eyes widen. "Why, Matthew did," says Anne, accepting without question the older woman's familiarity. She plucks a stalk of grass and threads it between her lips, chewing on its stalk with farm-girl pleasure. "He built Green Gables, you know. It's very romantic, isn't it? There's such /scope/ here. It isn't anything like where Alison used to live with /her/ family. They were--" The thrilled voice falters. Recovers slowly, puzzled. "You're not in the story."
"Nope. I'm from the outside world, not the story world here," Jean confirms, allowing this realization and encouraging it as she wraps her arms around her legs and cocks her head to peer at Anne. "There are a lot of people in the outside world who are worried and scared for Alison. They miss her, and they can't come visit the way that I do. I'm a telepath, you see. You wouldn't know what that is, but Alison might."
Anne rocks back onto her calico-covered seat, her own arms wrapping tightly around green-stained knees. The thin face clouds. "Why can't they come visit? There's plenty of trains that come through Bright River. I don't think she should leave Avonlea until her parents come. Diana thinks it's romantic for a heroine to be wronged and cast out of the bosom of her friends and family, but Marilla says that romance is just being uncomfortable, all dressed up in fine linens."
"Because Alison's hiding away here. They don't even know that she can hear when they read the stories," Jean explains, drumming her fingers against one knee, although her lips twitch inopportunely at the image of Marilla. "I can leave and tell them she's all right, that she's here, but hiding away like this, no-one else from outside can see her except me. The trains don't run to where the rest of us live."
"You could bring them to Green Gables." Anne brightens at the thought, sitting up with inspiration's quick eagerness. "They could see that she's happy here. Matthew loves us, and Marilla--" Brightness dims, marginally; behind the girl, the walls of the house flicker, losing definition for a moment's ugliness: the veil thins, baring caged horrors before solidifying again. "--She /cares/, I think. You could come live with us, if you wanted. It's not full of afflictions and sorrows like the outside world. Green Gables is /home/."
"I can't bring them to Green Gables, Anne," Jean replies with a sad little shake of her head. "To bring too many minds inside someone else's? It could hurt Alison to do that, and I won't do that to her. She'll always have Green Gables with her, Anne, it's a place that never truly leaves you, but if she ever wants to see all the people that miss her and worry about her, she'll have to see the outside world again." And then, ever so quietly, Jean whispers "Is she scared to think about that? I was."
Arms wrap again around knees, making a tight little bundle of Anne, round eyes and solemn, slanted mouth. "Heroines are never scared," she explains. "Heroines are /frightened/, but they fight dragons and die tragically, and their names live on in songs and poems. I imagine I'm a heroine sometimes, but when I'm done, I'm just plain old Anne Shirley of Green Gables. Still, I'd rather be plain old Anne Shirley than--" Her voice quavers again, trailing off; hair, pig-tailed, loses some of its color. Brown, beneath the red. Blue eyes, under the green.
"Hello, Alison," Jean greets quietly, watching the mental shift with quiet fascination. She shifts a litle, arms unwrapping from her legs, repositioned to indicate that she's quite huggable if comfort should be sought. "I used to pretend I was the little girl from Misty of Chincoteague, when I was hiding out. I think I like Green Gables better -- Chincoteague and Assateague have fierce storms, so sometimes I'd scare myself."
The girl scrambles -- away, away -- and stares at Jean with great, startled eyes. "I'm /Anne/," she says, voice fierce (hair ripples, red, brown, red, /red/) while the grass slowly withers beneath them. "Alison's with ... she's making a cake. Diana's coming. We're going to have a party and pretend we're Lady Elsabeth and Lady Gruselda of Norway having the Duchess of Camelot to tea. I like storms. Aren't they lovely? They're like great, angry thoughts that haven't been put to bed yet. I'm /Anne/."
"Who wouldn't want to be Anne of Green Gables?" Jean wonders, tone soothing, smoothing, conciliatory as she backs away from that mis-step. "Living in a lovely world, with people who care about her, where the bad things may shake the world, but it's never broken. I think a lot of people envy you, Anne. It doesn't ever change here, and many people want that."
"Things change," protests Anne over a tiny, choked sob. Grass dies, fading to dull, brittle brown. "The Jersey had a calf yesterday, and Gil-- that /boy/ got his hair cut, and Marilla made me a new dress. I'm wearing it to church tomorrow. It's not /pretty/, but I can pretend it's covered with lace and pearls and has mutton sleeves."
"Little things," Jean counters thoughtfully. "Safe things. It's very safe here, no matter what happens when you try to walk on ridgepoles like Josie Pye."
Anne -- Alison -- regards Jean with frightened resentment. "It should be safe. Matthew said so. It should be safe for little girls."
"And the outside world should be safe too. We failed you, Alison," Jean admits, with old, sad eyes and a little shake of her head. "We failed you in one of the most profound ways it's possible to fail someone. But can't you find it in yourself to give us another chance? To try and show you that the outside world can be good and beautiful too?"
The girl hesitates, catching a strand of hair between her teeth to worry at it, torn. "I'd have to leave Marilla and Matthew, and Green Acres," she says wistfully. "Could I come back?"
(--And in the real world, Chris Rossi buries his face in his hands, muttering imprecations, and stands to stalk to the door. "Hey, Lauri. C'mere a sec, would you? This heart rate normal?")
"Any time you like." Jean assures steadily. We don't increase the pressure, we lower the wall. We don't increase the pressure-- Outside, forgotten, her own body's gone slack, nail beds gone blue but cheeks brightly flushed as her brain emphatically orders more blood, more glucose, more power and control. "This is all in your mind, Alison, no-one can keep you from your own mind, no matter how much we want you to stay. But will you at least give us a chance?"
Anne is torn, visibly, fading around the edges to bare the Alison beneath. She huddles where she sits, folding into the tangle of her limbs -- into clothes changing to modern jeans, into a cheek smudged with blood. Wide, liquid eyes, peering uncertainly at Jean. "Will you be there?"
(Bodies move around Jean, murmuring in clinical, quizzical professionalism; the monitor is inspected, debated, and rechecked. Well? Low, but not /dangerous/. "You sure? This is really starting to frost my cookies.")
In Avonlea, the indistinct rumble of voices threads through the quiet chirping of birds. Female voice. Male voice, inarticulate but unmistakable. Alison's head lifts. "Matthew--?"
"Yes." Jean promises. "I'll be there. In fact, I'm right in the room with you in the outside world. We can wake up together, just say the word." Open, inviting, trustworthy and confident, a hand is extended, friendship and security in one. "Should I ask Matthew's permission?" she wonders.
The thin hand reaches, hesitates, then slides cool and trembling fingers into Jean's. "We should tell him, before I go," Alison says wistfully, shifting up to her knees. Another glance turns back to the house -- ominous, for all its quiet beauty and inviting charm -- before skipping aside to penned meadowland beyond. "He'll worry, if I don't tell him where I'm going. We're kindred spirits, Matthew and I. Our /souls/ speak to each other. We don't need words."
"Then let's go talk to him." Jean decides, letting her hand clasp warmly around those hesitant girl-fingers in return, warm because she wills it to be so, in this domain of thoughts alone. Even if concern for the integrity of Alison Beckley's psyche has her keeping such manifestations solely to herself. The house and its ominous qualities will keep for another day and some future therapy session. "I always did like Matthew. He's got a very gentle soul, it reminds me of my father's."
"Do you know him?" Alison wonders, rising to dust grass off her pants before wrapping her other hand around Jean's, clinging. The small head ducks towards the woman; she is more tentative without Anne, more ethereal and shy without that indomitable character to hide in. "He doesn't talk a lot. Sometimes he goes days without saying a word."
"But when he speaks, it's always exactly the right thing," Jean concludes the sentence, her other hand resting gently between Alison's shoulders, supporting and soothing. "Yes, I know him. Call him over, Alison, and we'll make sure things are looked after. We wouldn't want Mrs. Rachael Lynde to gossip."
Mrs. Lynde. The slim spine stiffens with remembered hostility, then relaxes -- "She /means/ well," Alison confides -- and then they are in the meadow, watching a silver-haired man pitchforking hay. An elderly man, but a formidable one: kindness in the weathered face; power in the shoulders and strong back. A frightened mind's reworking of a character, from advocate to protector. The girl leans into Jean, troubled. "He'll be hurt."
"Yes, but he'll be proud, too," Jean predicts, lifting her hand briefly from Alison's shoulders to give Matthew and his hay a friendly wave. "Remember how Anne goes away to school in the story? And how Matthew and Marilla miss her terribly, but they're also very proud of her for stepping out into the wide world? You'll be like Anne." Half-formed, an idea bubbles up in her mind, but she doesn't speak of it. Rossi and aunts and other doctors, oh my.
Matthew straightens to regard the two, woman and child, and folds his mouth into a solemn line before stumping to meet them, pitchfork for a cane. "Like Anne," sighs Alison, flickering momentarily back into her broken disguise. "Matthew, look. She came to visit, and she wants to take me away with her, to see the real world. Wouldn't that be a splendid adventure, Matthew? You've always said I should leave Green Gables someday. I could go with her, and spread my wings. Do you think I should? I wouldn't want to if you would miss me, though. I couldn't bear /that/." An opening. A hopeful one.
The old man inspects Jean, mute and questioning. (Out in the real world, Rossi drops back onto his seat, folds his hands to fist his chin, and stares blankly at Jean. "Here's the deal. This was probably a bad idea. I'll give it five more minutes, and then I'm thinking about you naked. Got it?")
"I'll watch over her, Matthew," Jean assures, eschewing analysis of just what part of Alison's psyche she's talking to, and simply addressing what she 'sees' before her. That can wait for the inevitable case report. Instead, steady and strong, she dredges up what she can remember of her well-thumbed girlhood L.M. Montgomery. She's about to deliver something neatly metaphorical when outside influences cause her eyes to go blank for a moment. Somewhere in Rossi's head there's a silent raspberry, before she returns to the hayfields and Matthew. And decides to leave her promise at that.
Matthew rocks back on his heels, considering, while Alison waits with white-faced anxiety, visibly yearning to -- stay? To go? "Reckon you can come back if you want," he says at last in a quiet baritone, wistful. "Green Gables'll still be here. If you want."
The girl sighs quietly, and turns her face into Jean's arm.
Gently, reassuringly, Jean strokes at Alison's hair. "Let's go be heroines, then, honey," she suggests. "Take my hand, and we'll wake up together, all right? Just like stepping through a mirror and finding another world."
The hand in Jean's tightens spasmodically; Alison looks up at Jean with wide, terrified eyes. Her voice quivers, small. "Will it hurt? Will I have to see--"
Green Gables looms abruptly, sweeping towards them as thin walls shred. Blood. Gut-wrenching terror. The taste of tears. Matthew curses -- /curses/ -- and is abruptly between them, stoically poking the house into submission with his pitchfork. A ludicrous image, and yet ... not. "Goddammit, Doc. That's not funny." The real world, articulating with his mouth. Alison shrinks. Time to go.
And like someone surfacing from a deep free dive, Jean shifts planes and returns to the realm of the conscious. There's a hug for the fading Alison and a whisper of "I'll meet you on the other side." before heart rate ramps up and breathing increases, the monitors the first signal of returning consciousness. A bare ten seconds later, Jean's eyes blink open and she's staring intently at little Alison Beckley, whose hand is still in hers. "Come on, honey," she murmurs. Poor Rossi is ignored by the doctor focused on her patient.
Poor Rossi exhales with sudden relief, straightening in his chair with an abrupt stretch of spine. "/Doc/. You had me--" The words bite off; the pale gaze narrows and skips to Alison, hope suspended and aching.
In the wheelchair's cage, little Alison Beckley -- seven years old, once upon a time -- blinks. Swallows. Stirs and grips with a weak clench of fingers the hand that rests in hers. /Wakes/.
"Hello, Alison," Jean murmurs, settling back in her chair with a slow smile and a vast sense of contentment mingled with the fatigue of this complicated undertaking. It -worked-. She's -here-. Unfortunately, Dr. Grey in her clean white lab coat is too worn out to be outwardly jubilant, so she settles for the next best thing: "I don't know about you, but I think I want some ice cream."
"Sweet Mary, Jesus and Joseph," breathes Rossi, dampening flaming exultation to sink by the girl's wheelchair. "Doc, I'll get you enough ice cream, you'll be able to /bathe/ in it. --Hey there, Alison." Baritone spins gentle, oh gentle, through the Brooklyn accent. Chris smiles. "Welcome back."
The girl blinks again, dazed behind the slow drift from oblivion to awareness. Confusion tangles with exhaustion, muzzling even the attempt at speech; the blue eyes turn to Rossi, then swing up to Jean in bewildered recognition.
"Told you I'd be here," Jean murmurs to Alison, still with that slow and sleepy smile in place, high on endorphins and success. "This is Christopher Rossi. He's the man who told me about you -- he's the fellow who never gave up hope we'd see you again. So he's pretty excited right now."
An assertion which the detective promptly denies. Maturely. "Am not." Like so. (Liar.) One broad, warm hand folds over Alison's free one, pressing gently; the other, run through black hair to stand it on tip-toes, balances its elbow over a knee so Rossi can crane his glance back at Jean. "Thanks, Doc. You okay? Everything, you know. Okay?" Under the excited glitter of his voice, honest concern moves its shadow: winks at the woman, white-rimmed and worried.
"I just need some ice cream," Jean reiterates, tapping the fingers of her free hand against her temple to indicate -why-. "Energy can neither be created 'nor destroyed, so I need to top up my batteries. -And- we need some ice cream just because. Would you like some, Alison?"
Fingers shift under both their hands, grasping at movement unpracticed after years; Alison blinks at Jean, mouth opening to an ungainly croak. Fright spills into her face at the sound. Not her voice--
"Right," agrees Rossi, unraveling to stand. Movement is /his/ forte, and the prodding that agitates a beehive's workers. With a last grin down for woman and child, he stalks out the door, pursuing the buoyant summons and demand of baritone. "Hey, Lauri. Listen. You got any ice cream? That's the creamy stuff that isn't jello--"
Newly woken Alison stares at Dr. Grey, heartbeat quickening towards remembered terror.
"It will come, Alison. In fact," Jean assures, now holding the frightened child's hand between two of hers and rubbing the back of it soothingly. "The ice cream will probably help. You just haven't said anything for a very long time here, so your throat's a little scratchy and rough. It was like that for me, too, when I first woke up again, and I was scared too."
The contact soothes Alison's fear, dampening it with the reminder of warmth; the hand in Jean's is chilly to the touch, though it, too, warms slowly under her touch. Through the bemusement -- strange place, strange noises, strange smells -- familiarity nudges here and there, pushing into place unrealized fragments of memory to piece together a whole. A question. She clings to it, unvoiced though it may be. 'Scared too.'
"Mmmhm." Jean confirms the unvoiced thought. "When I was just a little bit older than you, I'd gone and hidden away inside my head too, because I kept hearing everyone's thoughts, and they wouldn't go away, no matter how frightening they were or how much I wanted them to. So I hid, because it was safe in my head. But then a very kind old man named Charles Xavier came and convinced me to come back out again. And he helped me, and so now I'm here, so that I can be here to help -you- not be afraid." She pauses, and there's a faint little twinkle in her eyes as she suggests that "It's something that should be in a story, don't you think?"
If there is a reciprocating twinkle, it is lost in the tattering mists of the mind. Alison drifts a solemn, wrinkled look around the room, marking its furniture and its adornments without recognition.
Outside in the hall, Rossi's voice waxes again, traveling with its owner back to the room. "--amount of money Merlin charges to be a dick in the same room with you, he's good for it. Hey. Ice cream." He is an odd Ganymede, but a fruitful one; he comes bearing bowls of ice cream in both hands, spoons wedged deep into chocolate. "Lauri had a tub in her freezer," he informs, as that nurse pops her head into the room with round eyes, only to ejaculate an Oh-My-God and disappear in haste.
Gravely, Jean offers a "Thank you, Chris," before diving into the ice cream with a blissful little smile. Come to me, glucose my love. More gravely still, she holds out a second spoon and its' cargo of chocolately goodness to Alison. "The room's a little bare right now, we'll have to see about some flowers. In the meantime, see what you think of this:" Because Jean has it on fact that psychic chocolate tastes no-where near as good as the real stuff.
The hand that reaches for the spoon is tremorous and unsure, and the delicate fingers clumsy enough to miss on their first try. Ready tears spring to fill Alison's eyes, pooling to trickle a glittering path down pale cheeks. She sniffles.
"Hey there," Jean murmurs softly, brushing the tears away with the backs of two gentle fingers. "You don't think that Sleeping Beauty didn't have a few pins and needles and really messy hair when she woke up, do you? Just give yourself a couple of days, and you'll be up and running and ready to leave here and go some place with nicer rooms and better food. And I'm right here for you, OK?"
So, speaks Chris Rossi's slouched and settled pose, is he. Whatever intent trips from mind to mouth, it is aborted before it is well begun; the hall rattles with the swell of noise: doctors, nurses, the machinery of medicine racing to verify what eyes have already borne witness to. With a crooked grin for Jean, a kinder one for Alison, the detective stands to make way for science.
And Alison Beckley, blinking spiky lashes at Jean, swallows tears ... and smiles.
[Log ends]
Jean visits Alison Beckley, a young, catatonic victim from one of Rossi's cases, and visits Green Gables.