Scent Dog
She'll help.
Good enough.
---
It's February and it's cold, and all the same, Jean Grey's sitting in a chair on the front porch, bundled up in a winter coat, and with a wool blanket across her lap. The reason for this? Jean is smoking a cigarette, or would be, if she'd remember the critical part where you actually inhale, rather than watching it burn down.
An off duty Chris Rossi paces the long path across the yard and drive in civilian clothes, black coat draped long and heavy over jeans and -- ludicrous -- a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. It is his mood and mind's cast that wears sackcloth. Crammed like meat in a nutshell, private anguish snarls and snaps at thin barriers, lunging at cracks of weariness, only to be stuffed back and subdued. Gravel crunches underfoot. The bowed, black head attends to his pace, measuring out yards with stolid concentration.
Smoke spirals lazily in the light wind, the drape of Jean's hand a weary, threadbare sort of elegant. Her head snaps up at Rossi's approach, however, and dark green eyes settle on him to stare as he trudges up the carefully cleared walk. She doesn't wave, doesn't call out. Merely gives a nod and a brief check to see that there's a spare chair near her.
He is on the first step before he registers her presence; the lift of head bares a tired face, sketched and smudged with the marks of sleepless nights. Rossi pauses there, one foot on gravel, the other on wood, the body waiting for recognition to spill slowly, so slowly, across the expression's false tranquility. "Doc," he says at last. It is a greeting, of sorts.
"Chris," Jean greets in turn. She doesn't offer the free chair, assuming that he'll sit if he wants to. Instead, she reaches wrong-handed into the pocket of her coat, and offers over the pack of cigarettes living there instead. Her own expression tries for serenity, for focus and calm, but her eyes are too red rimmed, the muscles of her cheeks too inclined to flex and tremble at emotional input for the attempt to wholly work. "I'm sorry," she murmurs. "She was a good woman."
The detective's lips twist toward a smile's ghost, and he finishes climbing the stairs, shaping his weight on each level before sinking it all -- body, mind, mood -- into the empty chair. A hand digs out of its pocket to accept the cigarettes. "Yeah," he says, tapping one out. "Thanks. --That's right. She interviewed you once."
"And covered my march for me," Jean agrees, finally taking her first drag of the half burned down cigarette in her own hand. She's silent a moment, concentrating on the steadying, practically-medicinal rush of hot nicotine hitting her bloodstream. "Scott feels that he failed her," she states after the silence has spun out long enough to be odd. "A lot of people do... it's hanging around this place like a fog. Logic says that we didn't, it was the FoH, but... what I wouldn't give for the power to go back in time."
"There a mutant power for that?" Rossi asks idly, molding his spine to his chair, long legs stretched and crossed at the ankles. Peace, wholly illusory, settles that lean frame, hooding the silent, raptor face; behind it, under it, pain frets and gnaws, hollowing the man from the inside out. "Figures Summers would. He's got impossible standards."
"You think the world would look this way if there was?" Jean wonders wryly, and tosses over a lighter to go with the cigarettes. "Always has. Worst for himself, but they're hard on others too. He thinks you're perfect, then you struggle to live up to that belief... but what can we do for you, Chris Rossi?" she wonders, in a sudden swing to unpredictable energy, prodded by some pitchfork from who knows what source.
Rossi plucks the lighter from its arc, tossing back the packet in exchange, and births fire to light his cigarette. The sharp-edged profile bends to a shielding hand, lit from below. "The Friends," he says, over dragon smoke. "I want them."
Jean snaps the cigarettes out of the air, and returns them to her coat pocket, nail beds blue from the cold, and ignored all the same. "Their leader in New York's a guy named 'Prime'. I've got nothing on him, he seems to be a ghost. Or someone playing pretend. You want to make contact with the lower levels, check out Hell's Kitchen. There's a bar, Paradise Found. Cage fights in the basement, they recruit from there."
Sharp and focused in tone, the direction offered by the question's stirred Jean to life, away from the bone-chilled paralysis of indecision and self doubt. A police officer wants information -- her self-questioning on ethics isn't needed here, only answers.
Except. (Except.) Dissatisfaction flays itself against the flechette of attention. "We know that," says Rossi. His head turns slightly; a green eye glitters. "We know all about that. I want /them/. Him. The one who killed her."
"Then you want Prime. The same one who took my father." Jean states, watching Rossi with eerily childlike solemnity. "Take him and you take them. I wish I knew what his mind felt like..."
"Can you find him?" The cigarette gestures, drawing transient, transparent runes. "Can you pick him out of their brains?"
Jean at once withdraws, a sharp physical reaction to the question. Her cigarette drops to the porch as her arms wrap around herself, her legs draw in and her eyes go wide, the reaction clearly that of trauma given a fresh poke with a sharp stick. Stiffly, rigidly, she forces herself to settle back into repose again, having caught herself at it. "I can... but do you know what you're asking me?"
The deep baritone roughens, harshening across a wrench of -- no. Safe, safe, locked hard, locked down behind the remote face. Professional dispassion (lie!) mates with selfish, selfless, ruthless need. "She's human, Doc. She's the sort they swear they're protecting. If he'd do that to a human, how many mutants do you think this guy's already killed? How many more do you think he's going to kill?"
"Rossi, -don't-!" Jean's voice cracks on the word, desperation breaking through the thin veneer of composure she's worn. "Please. I want to help, but do you know what you're asking me? What I've -done-? I can't trust myself with anyone's mind right now... I'd kill him."
Something in Rossi splinters; something else studies Jean through green, stained-glass eyes. Black desire, fanged and taloned, scrabbles at the edges of hard-won discipline, shredding at her shields, his shields, to soak tongues with the metallic tang of blood -- << Kill him make him suffer gun to temple finger on trigger pull pull make him /pay/-- >>
In the physical world, the human one, the detective clamps his jaws tight over the leap of pulse, and asks tightly, "You know that for a fact?"
"Facts, facts... I've got too many facts, too much I thought was fiction..." The smile Jean turns on Rossi is sickly and strained. "Do you know that I lobotomized two anti-mutant thugs two weeks ago, Detective? Aggravated assault, and I'm the only one who'll be able to testify to it. No-one else remembers, and I didn't until this morning. I forced grey matter out the corners of their eyes... I should be in -jail-, and you want my -help-?" She laughs, edgy and weird, and then falls silent to fumble a fresh cigarette.
The cigarette trails a silent, ephemeral question mark of smoke, forgotten. Rossi's mouth thins, flattening over the wrestle of cop with man, intellect with emotion. "--You confessing to a crime, Jean?"
"Yes." Jean states quietly, a penitent seeking Father Rossi's absolution. "And it's about the only one I can. The others... God, the others, there's either no law, or it was self defence, or it's been done to terrorists," She laughs, again, more controlled this time. "I wouldn't be worrying about the Brotherhood for a while, by the way... they're all stuck on their island and can't come to the phone right now."
Silence answers her, stretched thin between them. Rossi turns sightless eyes back to the front yard, profile picked out in grace: the stuff of mortal clay.
Inexorably, quietly, Jean doesn't let that silence hang. "So, Detective Rossi," she wonders, once again the steel doors of control and composure slammed, painfully into place. "Do you really want a recovering madwoman rifling through the brain of the head of the Friends of Humanity? Do you -really- want to risk what I could, all too easily, do to him if I lose it again? You're only going to get one chance on this -- I don't know why you'd want to trust me."
Painful amusement stirs at the last, rolling like an spiky urchin under the Brooklyn cynicism. "I don't," Rossi says baldly, truth haltered and hobbled by stranger, shadowed undercurrents. "I haven't for a long time. What /you/ could do to him. What /I/ could--" Would. He breaks off, and for a timeless moment shares it without speech: the weight of the gun in the hand, the kick of force, the smell of cordite and the kill, oh, the /kill/--
That statement hurts. It's obvious in the hunch of Jean's shoulders before she gets a hold of herself, of the pained acceptance that flashes briefly through her eyes. A lack of trust now is to be expected, encouraged, even. A lack of trust from when she was still, in her own mind, untainted, unspoiled...? Now it's Jean's turn for silence. At length, the imagery recieved, she states in a small voice "Don't do it like that. Just... don't. Won't bring her back. Won't bring her any more peace than a trial... it'll just let him make you like him." And, more softly still. "She wouldn't want that."
Anger flares, rasping raw. "Don't tell me what she would or wouldn't want. She doesn't have--" Discordant, jangling thought, bitten off, though the mind finishes it, grating to completion. Doesn't have the /right/. The cigarette spins, tossed in a wide, bitter arc across the porch, and nibbles tiny sparks as it bounces to a halt against a post. Rossi's rise is like a tidal wave; the chair slams back into the wall. His shoe, less thoughtless, crushes the cigarette underfoot.
"Then don't do it because a quick death's too good for him," Jean states in the silence following the outburst, once again finding a sense of balance through focusing on someone else. "Catch him. Break him. Stand him up before a jury of his peers and let him see that the humanity he's so desperate to protect wants him and every one of his people dead. Then, knowing that he's been tried and found wanting by the entire society he claims to be saving, flip the switch and let him fry."
It is a rare thing for Chris Rossi to laugh. He does so now, a sound devoid of true mirth, lanced though it is by a certain black humor. "You really are an idealist, aren't you?" The coat skirls around his turn, leaned now on a hip and a hand and the porch's railing. A shoulder tucks behind a post; the pale eyes mock her. "You know how many perps I've lost on a technicality? On the fucking system?"
"Do you think this is any ordinary perp?" Jean counters, before shaking her head with her own black laugh. "I'm no idealist, Chris. Not any more. Idealists don't have blood on their hands."
Another bark of laughter, singularly humorless. "I'll get you an encyclopedia someday," he says, turning away again. Elbows prop wide on the railing, and Chris bows his head over the loose clasp of hands, baring the strong line of throat and broad slant of shoulders and spine. "You can look up Magneto and Mao."
"Just send me the 'M' volume," Jean replies, snorting and shaking her head, but with some semblance of actual normal life to her eyes. "Save on money." She puffs industriously at her cigarette, and then tips it over the railing and into a snowbank, barely begun. Eventually, she turns to look at Rossi in profile, and wonder again, calm this time, and interested, "What do you want me to do?"
"Find him," says Rossi, to the peaceful idyll of the winter yard. "Give me his name. Give me his name, and their names -- the others that were there, who helped him." << And I'll take care of the rest. >>
"I can do that." Perhaps there's some sense, some sanity to Scott's love of outlines and parameters -- if you know what you're supposed to do, endpoint in place, you know how far you can go. Jean burrows deeper beneath the wool blanket. "I may disappear for a time," she advises. "If I do, don't tell anyone here where I've gone."
"Where are you going?"
"Some place away," Jean replies, staring into the middle distance. "Some place still in New York, but some place not here. Some place where I can learn how to trust myself again."
Rossi's mouth curves; his gaze, his attention, his focus turns inward, shuttered against inspection. "Then I can't tell anyone where you've gone, can I?"
"I'll be in touch," Jean assures, still absent. "But they can't know. They want to help me, you see. Support me, surround me, protect me... it's what we do here. What I do. What they'll want to do, return the favour. But I'll get you what you want, Chris."
The detective stirs, straightening. The pallid afternoon light chalks the line of his cheek and the harsh, unforgiving slant of his jaw. "I know," he says, and looks over his shoulder towards her. Looks truly /at/ her, for the first time in a long, long time. Almost smiles. "You look like shit, Doc."
"You sure know how to charm a lady," Jean snorts, and almost smiles back, before going serious again, the edge of the wool blanket pleated between her fingers. "Iatrogenic DID is no fun, and the fix is even worse. But it's over. Can't go back."
"Doctors," says Rossi, dry, "and their polysyllabic vocabularies. Use small words, lady. I'm a cop."
Jean snorts, and notes that "You're more than just a cop." But, with many thoughtful pauses, she tries to explain herself. "When I was a girl, my abilities manifested too early, too strongly. That's what drove me into that catatonic state I told you about. The Professor restrained them for me, blocked connections, toned it down. Unfortunately, some of my psyche got tucked away with it. Over time, the block wore away, I came into my full powers at the age of twenty seven. But the bit of my psyche, of me, was still left to one side. Mostly the ego... you're familiar with Freud and Jung?" she questions, pausing to gather her thoughts again.
The glance Rossi skips at Jean is sardonic. "I know Abbott and Costello, too. So, what. You're all id now? You're not acting like it." Curiosity bends, distracted away from the ouroborus of private pain.
"Ego, actually. Want, take, have, with none of that little voice to say 'but you shouldn't'," Jean corrects. "Something happened, there was..." But even the deposed Black Queen bites her tongue about the Inner Circle, simply shaking her head. "A couple psionicists with a heavy grudge decided they wanted to see what made me tick. Sleep dep, illusions, all your standard interrogation stuff. All targeted at playing with my superego. The subpersonality, which hadn't gotten any of it, started to take over unpredictably, whenever I was pushed too far. I'd get gaps in my memory I couldn't explain. Wake up with psionic headaches I had no reason to have."
Det. Rossi processes the explanation in silence, shifting to place his back to the yard, leaning into the pillar and frame of wood that gates them, separating humanity from manicured, oppressed Nature. Then: "What did you do them?" His head tilts, and a memory of Magneto -- threatening, terrifying, questioning -- moves behind his eyes. "The Brotherhood."
That brief ease to Jean's tone, Jean's body, brought by the comforting routine of medical explanation, vanishes at this question. She doesn't reach for the cigarettes again, but she stiffens and slides down in her seat, staring into space. When she answers, it's in clipped syllables, a military debriefing. "Took a boat, then a zodiac when I got closer. Sank the five boats in their harbour. Dealt with Victor Creed on the cliffs. Went into the island complex and took down their power generating and water purifying infrastructure. Two hostiles present and neutralized. Caved in a passage to the recruit dorm. Then I approached Magneto. He had nanites in much of his body tissue, from an earlier incident where he'd nearly died. I removed them. If he's not dead, it's only because he's somehow managed to survive the dozens of strokes and embolisms this would cause, and also managed to keep his kidneys and liver from failing. Then I destroyed one of their helicopters, and left in the other. Former Senator Kelley's... I returned it to the government helipad." And the rest is silence. Silence, and staring, as she slides further out of sight, shielding herself with the rough blanket.
Rossi considers, folding his arms. And, after a moment, offers, "Huh."
Jean doesn't seem to notice the bemused Rossi. She's still staring into space.
Pragmatist that he is, Det. Rossi wonders, "Do the Feds know?"
"I pretty much gift-wrapped the helicopter." Jean points out.
"One thing I know for a fact about the G," says Rossi, NYPD-born and -bred. "They're fucking morons."
"If the Professor wants to share, he will. I don't want them to count on me."
"You removed the -- what did you call them? Nanites? You didn't kill him. Why not?"
"Apparently my ego isn't a killer," is the only answer Jean has.
An eyebrow arches, faintly quizzical. "So you haven't killed anyone? Phenomenal, cosmic power, and morality's got you in an itty-bitty living space?"
"Two dead, the ones in the generator station. They tried to set me on fire." Back to the clipped, is Jean's tone. "I dropped a turbine on them."
"So your ego /is/ a killer," notes clinical, thoughtful baritone. "Just ... selective."
"Magneto didn't do anything. Just sort of stood there. Danced the tango." And now, Jean's puzzled. "I think he wanted me to kill him."
Rossi stirs; eyes flare slightly, showing thin rims of white around the green. "Danced the tango," he echoes with mild incredulity. The body at rest stirs, levering itself up from the scaffold of architecture. "But he's not dead for sure."
"To competition standard." Jean confirms, adjusting the collar of her coat against a chill wind. "And no, I can't say for sure. But he's going to have to abandon his island base. And he's going to grow old like any other eighty year old, now."
"I'll believe it when I see it." Cynicism wraps itself around the words, tracing the Brooklyn scoring of baritone. That same wind tousles black hair, scraping it across the brow and into the blink of eyes. Rossi hunches his shoulders, hands plowing into pockets; the cop's attention strays, revolving back around again to darker thoughts, more dangerous thoughts, hidden from view behind impassivity. "You want me to arrest you? I'm not taking you in for a crime I got no body on."
"Well, what else am I supposed to do?" Jean wonders, and despite the hint of defensiveness about it, it's a genuine question. "I've always claimed I support the rules and laws of society. Even if terrorists don't count, what about those two men in Hell's Kitchen? There's laws against that sort of thing, no matter who they were beating up."
"I can take a statement," Rossi says, sparing her another glance: abstracted, distracted by the question. "Suspicion of a crime -- MA'll look into it. Try to find the vics. If we find them, or a witness, or evidence, you get charged. The DA's office decides whether to indict. You plead guilty, if you want. Or not."
"There won't be any evidence... but I'd like to make a statement," Jean confirms, lips thinning as guilty conscience rages at her own intelligence and her ego's sense of self-preservation. "If Hell's Kitchen had any good free clinics, maybe, but they're overworked, underfunded... -damn it-." Jean suddenly swears, and rises from her seat to pace the length of the balcony, agitated.
The cop peels a crooked grimace out of the quickening breeze, and stumps down the porch steps before dropping to a seat on the top one. Knees straddle air; elbows plant on knees, and in between them, bare hands clasp, the one around the other. "Come on down to the precinct, then," he invites. Something trembles under the dry voice: appreciation for the ridiculous? Perhaps. "Or tell Lazzaro, next time he comes up for one of his magic mutant workouts. I'm off duty."
"This isn't funny," Jean glares briefly, but the expression quickly loses heat, and the pacing loses speed, until she settles down to sit on the porch steps beside Rossi. "I... fine. I'll talk to Detective Lazzaro. And get you Prime. Although it might take a bit."
"It's not funny," Rossi agrees, face empty and dispassionate once more. His gaze turns away, back to the haven and sanctuary of the yard: there are sparrows there, happily oblivious to human grief and guilt. A seed! They squabble over it, black, button eyes shiny; a half-second later, the quarrel forgotten, they discover another. A seed! "Your problem is, you think cops are in the business of justice."
"So if not cops, then who?" Jean questions, watching the sparrows as well and murmuring to herself for a moment. Lilies of the field, one sparrow's fall. Idly, she tugs a few hairs loose from her scalp, causing God to have to do a renumbering with a black little smile.
"Ask God," says Rossi, rising abruptly. "If He talks to you. He hasn't listened to me in years." He stumps down the last few steps, shoes crunching onto gravel at the bottom; across the yard, startled, the sparrows swirl up like ash to shape giddy eddies in the sky.
And Jean remains sitting, eyes settled once again on the middle distance rather than watching Rossi move off. Perhaps she's considering prayer.
Without farewell, slouched in the black wings of his coat, Chris Rossi stalks the path's line back the way he came, bearing with him all he brought with him. Hollow grief, private anguish, bitter anger -- and something new. The suggestion of a face to go with the fantasy. Hope, at the barrel end of the gun.
It isn't God, but it'll do.
[Log ends]
Rossi asks Jean for help hunting down the Friends, and Jean confesses that she might have squished pretty much everybody she knows during a crazy, esoteric psionic rampage. Mutants are weird.
Good enough.
---
It's February and it's cold, and all the same, Jean Grey's sitting in a chair on the front porch, bundled up in a winter coat, and with a wool blanket across her lap. The reason for this? Jean is smoking a cigarette, or would be, if she'd remember the critical part where you actually inhale, rather than watching it burn down.
An off duty Chris Rossi paces the long path across the yard and drive in civilian clothes, black coat draped long and heavy over jeans and -- ludicrous -- a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. It is his mood and mind's cast that wears sackcloth. Crammed like meat in a nutshell, private anguish snarls and snaps at thin barriers, lunging at cracks of weariness, only to be stuffed back and subdued. Gravel crunches underfoot. The bowed, black head attends to his pace, measuring out yards with stolid concentration.
Smoke spirals lazily in the light wind, the drape of Jean's hand a weary, threadbare sort of elegant. Her head snaps up at Rossi's approach, however, and dark green eyes settle on him to stare as he trudges up the carefully cleared walk. She doesn't wave, doesn't call out. Merely gives a nod and a brief check to see that there's a spare chair near her.
He is on the first step before he registers her presence; the lift of head bares a tired face, sketched and smudged with the marks of sleepless nights. Rossi pauses there, one foot on gravel, the other on wood, the body waiting for recognition to spill slowly, so slowly, across the expression's false tranquility. "Doc," he says at last. It is a greeting, of sorts.
"Chris," Jean greets in turn. She doesn't offer the free chair, assuming that he'll sit if he wants to. Instead, she reaches wrong-handed into the pocket of her coat, and offers over the pack of cigarettes living there instead. Her own expression tries for serenity, for focus and calm, but her eyes are too red rimmed, the muscles of her cheeks too inclined to flex and tremble at emotional input for the attempt to wholly work. "I'm sorry," she murmurs. "She was a good woman."
The detective's lips twist toward a smile's ghost, and he finishes climbing the stairs, shaping his weight on each level before sinking it all -- body, mind, mood -- into the empty chair. A hand digs out of its pocket to accept the cigarettes. "Yeah," he says, tapping one out. "Thanks. --That's right. She interviewed you once."
"And covered my march for me," Jean agrees, finally taking her first drag of the half burned down cigarette in her own hand. She's silent a moment, concentrating on the steadying, practically-medicinal rush of hot nicotine hitting her bloodstream. "Scott feels that he failed her," she states after the silence has spun out long enough to be odd. "A lot of people do... it's hanging around this place like a fog. Logic says that we didn't, it was the FoH, but... what I wouldn't give for the power to go back in time."
"There a mutant power for that?" Rossi asks idly, molding his spine to his chair, long legs stretched and crossed at the ankles. Peace, wholly illusory, settles that lean frame, hooding the silent, raptor face; behind it, under it, pain frets and gnaws, hollowing the man from the inside out. "Figures Summers would. He's got impossible standards."
"You think the world would look this way if there was?" Jean wonders wryly, and tosses over a lighter to go with the cigarettes. "Always has. Worst for himself, but they're hard on others too. He thinks you're perfect, then you struggle to live up to that belief... but what can we do for you, Chris Rossi?" she wonders, in a sudden swing to unpredictable energy, prodded by some pitchfork from who knows what source.
Rossi plucks the lighter from its arc, tossing back the packet in exchange, and births fire to light his cigarette. The sharp-edged profile bends to a shielding hand, lit from below. "The Friends," he says, over dragon smoke. "I want them."
Jean snaps the cigarettes out of the air, and returns them to her coat pocket, nail beds blue from the cold, and ignored all the same. "Their leader in New York's a guy named 'Prime'. I've got nothing on him, he seems to be a ghost. Or someone playing pretend. You want to make contact with the lower levels, check out Hell's Kitchen. There's a bar, Paradise Found. Cage fights in the basement, they recruit from there."
Sharp and focused in tone, the direction offered by the question's stirred Jean to life, away from the bone-chilled paralysis of indecision and self doubt. A police officer wants information -- her self-questioning on ethics isn't needed here, only answers.
Except. (Except.) Dissatisfaction flays itself against the flechette of attention. "We know that," says Rossi. His head turns slightly; a green eye glitters. "We know all about that. I want /them/. Him. The one who killed her."
"Then you want Prime. The same one who took my father." Jean states, watching Rossi with eerily childlike solemnity. "Take him and you take them. I wish I knew what his mind felt like..."
"Can you find him?" The cigarette gestures, drawing transient, transparent runes. "Can you pick him out of their brains?"
Jean at once withdraws, a sharp physical reaction to the question. Her cigarette drops to the porch as her arms wrap around herself, her legs draw in and her eyes go wide, the reaction clearly that of trauma given a fresh poke with a sharp stick. Stiffly, rigidly, she forces herself to settle back into repose again, having caught herself at it. "I can... but do you know what you're asking me?"
The deep baritone roughens, harshening across a wrench of -- no. Safe, safe, locked hard, locked down behind the remote face. Professional dispassion (lie!) mates with selfish, selfless, ruthless need. "She's human, Doc. She's the sort they swear they're protecting. If he'd do that to a human, how many mutants do you think this guy's already killed? How many more do you think he's going to kill?"
"Rossi, -don't-!" Jean's voice cracks on the word, desperation breaking through the thin veneer of composure she's worn. "Please. I want to help, but do you know what you're asking me? What I've -done-? I can't trust myself with anyone's mind right now... I'd kill him."
Something in Rossi splinters; something else studies Jean through green, stained-glass eyes. Black desire, fanged and taloned, scrabbles at the edges of hard-won discipline, shredding at her shields, his shields, to soak tongues with the metallic tang of blood -- << Kill him make him suffer gun to temple finger on trigger pull pull make him /pay/-- >>
In the physical world, the human one, the detective clamps his jaws tight over the leap of pulse, and asks tightly, "You know that for a fact?"
"Facts, facts... I've got too many facts, too much I thought was fiction..." The smile Jean turns on Rossi is sickly and strained. "Do you know that I lobotomized two anti-mutant thugs two weeks ago, Detective? Aggravated assault, and I'm the only one who'll be able to testify to it. No-one else remembers, and I didn't until this morning. I forced grey matter out the corners of their eyes... I should be in -jail-, and you want my -help-?" She laughs, edgy and weird, and then falls silent to fumble a fresh cigarette.
The cigarette trails a silent, ephemeral question mark of smoke, forgotten. Rossi's mouth thins, flattening over the wrestle of cop with man, intellect with emotion. "--You confessing to a crime, Jean?"
"Yes." Jean states quietly, a penitent seeking Father Rossi's absolution. "And it's about the only one I can. The others... God, the others, there's either no law, or it was self defence, or it's been done to terrorists," She laughs, again, more controlled this time. "I wouldn't be worrying about the Brotherhood for a while, by the way... they're all stuck on their island and can't come to the phone right now."
Silence answers her, stretched thin between them. Rossi turns sightless eyes back to the front yard, profile picked out in grace: the stuff of mortal clay.
Inexorably, quietly, Jean doesn't let that silence hang. "So, Detective Rossi," she wonders, once again the steel doors of control and composure slammed, painfully into place. "Do you really want a recovering madwoman rifling through the brain of the head of the Friends of Humanity? Do you -really- want to risk what I could, all too easily, do to him if I lose it again? You're only going to get one chance on this -- I don't know why you'd want to trust me."
Painful amusement stirs at the last, rolling like an spiky urchin under the Brooklyn cynicism. "I don't," Rossi says baldly, truth haltered and hobbled by stranger, shadowed undercurrents. "I haven't for a long time. What /you/ could do to him. What /I/ could--" Would. He breaks off, and for a timeless moment shares it without speech: the weight of the gun in the hand, the kick of force, the smell of cordite and the kill, oh, the /kill/--
That statement hurts. It's obvious in the hunch of Jean's shoulders before she gets a hold of herself, of the pained acceptance that flashes briefly through her eyes. A lack of trust now is to be expected, encouraged, even. A lack of trust from when she was still, in her own mind, untainted, unspoiled...? Now it's Jean's turn for silence. At length, the imagery recieved, she states in a small voice "Don't do it like that. Just... don't. Won't bring her back. Won't bring her any more peace than a trial... it'll just let him make you like him." And, more softly still. "She wouldn't want that."
Anger flares, rasping raw. "Don't tell me what she would or wouldn't want. She doesn't have--" Discordant, jangling thought, bitten off, though the mind finishes it, grating to completion. Doesn't have the /right/. The cigarette spins, tossed in a wide, bitter arc across the porch, and nibbles tiny sparks as it bounces to a halt against a post. Rossi's rise is like a tidal wave; the chair slams back into the wall. His shoe, less thoughtless, crushes the cigarette underfoot.
"Then don't do it because a quick death's too good for him," Jean states in the silence following the outburst, once again finding a sense of balance through focusing on someone else. "Catch him. Break him. Stand him up before a jury of his peers and let him see that the humanity he's so desperate to protect wants him and every one of his people dead. Then, knowing that he's been tried and found wanting by the entire society he claims to be saving, flip the switch and let him fry."
It is a rare thing for Chris Rossi to laugh. He does so now, a sound devoid of true mirth, lanced though it is by a certain black humor. "You really are an idealist, aren't you?" The coat skirls around his turn, leaned now on a hip and a hand and the porch's railing. A shoulder tucks behind a post; the pale eyes mock her. "You know how many perps I've lost on a technicality? On the fucking system?"
"Do you think this is any ordinary perp?" Jean counters, before shaking her head with her own black laugh. "I'm no idealist, Chris. Not any more. Idealists don't have blood on their hands."
Another bark of laughter, singularly humorless. "I'll get you an encyclopedia someday," he says, turning away again. Elbows prop wide on the railing, and Chris bows his head over the loose clasp of hands, baring the strong line of throat and broad slant of shoulders and spine. "You can look up Magneto and Mao."
"Just send me the 'M' volume," Jean replies, snorting and shaking her head, but with some semblance of actual normal life to her eyes. "Save on money." She puffs industriously at her cigarette, and then tips it over the railing and into a snowbank, barely begun. Eventually, she turns to look at Rossi in profile, and wonder again, calm this time, and interested, "What do you want me to do?"
"Find him," says Rossi, to the peaceful idyll of the winter yard. "Give me his name. Give me his name, and their names -- the others that were there, who helped him." << And I'll take care of the rest. >>
"I can do that." Perhaps there's some sense, some sanity to Scott's love of outlines and parameters -- if you know what you're supposed to do, endpoint in place, you know how far you can go. Jean burrows deeper beneath the wool blanket. "I may disappear for a time," she advises. "If I do, don't tell anyone here where I've gone."
"Where are you going?"
"Some place away," Jean replies, staring into the middle distance. "Some place still in New York, but some place not here. Some place where I can learn how to trust myself again."
Rossi's mouth curves; his gaze, his attention, his focus turns inward, shuttered against inspection. "Then I can't tell anyone where you've gone, can I?"
"I'll be in touch," Jean assures, still absent. "But they can't know. They want to help me, you see. Support me, surround me, protect me... it's what we do here. What I do. What they'll want to do, return the favour. But I'll get you what you want, Chris."
The detective stirs, straightening. The pallid afternoon light chalks the line of his cheek and the harsh, unforgiving slant of his jaw. "I know," he says, and looks over his shoulder towards her. Looks truly /at/ her, for the first time in a long, long time. Almost smiles. "You look like shit, Doc."
"You sure know how to charm a lady," Jean snorts, and almost smiles back, before going serious again, the edge of the wool blanket pleated between her fingers. "Iatrogenic DID is no fun, and the fix is even worse. But it's over. Can't go back."
"Doctors," says Rossi, dry, "and their polysyllabic vocabularies. Use small words, lady. I'm a cop."
Jean snorts, and notes that "You're more than just a cop." But, with many thoughtful pauses, she tries to explain herself. "When I was a girl, my abilities manifested too early, too strongly. That's what drove me into that catatonic state I told you about. The Professor restrained them for me, blocked connections, toned it down. Unfortunately, some of my psyche got tucked away with it. Over time, the block wore away, I came into my full powers at the age of twenty seven. But the bit of my psyche, of me, was still left to one side. Mostly the ego... you're familiar with Freud and Jung?" she questions, pausing to gather her thoughts again.
The glance Rossi skips at Jean is sardonic. "I know Abbott and Costello, too. So, what. You're all id now? You're not acting like it." Curiosity bends, distracted away from the ouroborus of private pain.
"Ego, actually. Want, take, have, with none of that little voice to say 'but you shouldn't'," Jean corrects. "Something happened, there was..." But even the deposed Black Queen bites her tongue about the Inner Circle, simply shaking her head. "A couple psionicists with a heavy grudge decided they wanted to see what made me tick. Sleep dep, illusions, all your standard interrogation stuff. All targeted at playing with my superego. The subpersonality, which hadn't gotten any of it, started to take over unpredictably, whenever I was pushed too far. I'd get gaps in my memory I couldn't explain. Wake up with psionic headaches I had no reason to have."
Det. Rossi processes the explanation in silence, shifting to place his back to the yard, leaning into the pillar and frame of wood that gates them, separating humanity from manicured, oppressed Nature. Then: "What did you do them?" His head tilts, and a memory of Magneto -- threatening, terrifying, questioning -- moves behind his eyes. "The Brotherhood."
That brief ease to Jean's tone, Jean's body, brought by the comforting routine of medical explanation, vanishes at this question. She doesn't reach for the cigarettes again, but she stiffens and slides down in her seat, staring into space. When she answers, it's in clipped syllables, a military debriefing. "Took a boat, then a zodiac when I got closer. Sank the five boats in their harbour. Dealt with Victor Creed on the cliffs. Went into the island complex and took down their power generating and water purifying infrastructure. Two hostiles present and neutralized. Caved in a passage to the recruit dorm. Then I approached Magneto. He had nanites in much of his body tissue, from an earlier incident where he'd nearly died. I removed them. If he's not dead, it's only because he's somehow managed to survive the dozens of strokes and embolisms this would cause, and also managed to keep his kidneys and liver from failing. Then I destroyed one of their helicopters, and left in the other. Former Senator Kelley's... I returned it to the government helipad." And the rest is silence. Silence, and staring, as she slides further out of sight, shielding herself with the rough blanket.
Rossi considers, folding his arms. And, after a moment, offers, "Huh."
Jean doesn't seem to notice the bemused Rossi. She's still staring into space.
Pragmatist that he is, Det. Rossi wonders, "Do the Feds know?"
"I pretty much gift-wrapped the helicopter." Jean points out.
"One thing I know for a fact about the G," says Rossi, NYPD-born and -bred. "They're fucking morons."
"If the Professor wants to share, he will. I don't want them to count on me."
"You removed the -- what did you call them? Nanites? You didn't kill him. Why not?"
"Apparently my ego isn't a killer," is the only answer Jean has.
An eyebrow arches, faintly quizzical. "So you haven't killed anyone? Phenomenal, cosmic power, and morality's got you in an itty-bitty living space?"
"Two dead, the ones in the generator station. They tried to set me on fire." Back to the clipped, is Jean's tone. "I dropped a turbine on them."
"So your ego /is/ a killer," notes clinical, thoughtful baritone. "Just ... selective."
"Magneto didn't do anything. Just sort of stood there. Danced the tango." And now, Jean's puzzled. "I think he wanted me to kill him."
Rossi stirs; eyes flare slightly, showing thin rims of white around the green. "Danced the tango," he echoes with mild incredulity. The body at rest stirs, levering itself up from the scaffold of architecture. "But he's not dead for sure."
"To competition standard." Jean confirms, adjusting the collar of her coat against a chill wind. "And no, I can't say for sure. But he's going to have to abandon his island base. And he's going to grow old like any other eighty year old, now."
"I'll believe it when I see it." Cynicism wraps itself around the words, tracing the Brooklyn scoring of baritone. That same wind tousles black hair, scraping it across the brow and into the blink of eyes. Rossi hunches his shoulders, hands plowing into pockets; the cop's attention strays, revolving back around again to darker thoughts, more dangerous thoughts, hidden from view behind impassivity. "You want me to arrest you? I'm not taking you in for a crime I got no body on."
"Well, what else am I supposed to do?" Jean wonders, and despite the hint of defensiveness about it, it's a genuine question. "I've always claimed I support the rules and laws of society. Even if terrorists don't count, what about those two men in Hell's Kitchen? There's laws against that sort of thing, no matter who they were beating up."
"I can take a statement," Rossi says, sparing her another glance: abstracted, distracted by the question. "Suspicion of a crime -- MA'll look into it. Try to find the vics. If we find them, or a witness, or evidence, you get charged. The DA's office decides whether to indict. You plead guilty, if you want. Or not."
"There won't be any evidence... but I'd like to make a statement," Jean confirms, lips thinning as guilty conscience rages at her own intelligence and her ego's sense of self-preservation. "If Hell's Kitchen had any good free clinics, maybe, but they're overworked, underfunded... -damn it-." Jean suddenly swears, and rises from her seat to pace the length of the balcony, agitated.
The cop peels a crooked grimace out of the quickening breeze, and stumps down the porch steps before dropping to a seat on the top one. Knees straddle air; elbows plant on knees, and in between them, bare hands clasp, the one around the other. "Come on down to the precinct, then," he invites. Something trembles under the dry voice: appreciation for the ridiculous? Perhaps. "Or tell Lazzaro, next time he comes up for one of his magic mutant workouts. I'm off duty."
"This isn't funny," Jean glares briefly, but the expression quickly loses heat, and the pacing loses speed, until she settles down to sit on the porch steps beside Rossi. "I... fine. I'll talk to Detective Lazzaro. And get you Prime. Although it might take a bit."
"It's not funny," Rossi agrees, face empty and dispassionate once more. His gaze turns away, back to the haven and sanctuary of the yard: there are sparrows there, happily oblivious to human grief and guilt. A seed! They squabble over it, black, button eyes shiny; a half-second later, the quarrel forgotten, they discover another. A seed! "Your problem is, you think cops are in the business of justice."
"So if not cops, then who?" Jean questions, watching the sparrows as well and murmuring to herself for a moment. Lilies of the field, one sparrow's fall. Idly, she tugs a few hairs loose from her scalp, causing God to have to do a renumbering with a black little smile.
"Ask God," says Rossi, rising abruptly. "If He talks to you. He hasn't listened to me in years." He stumps down the last few steps, shoes crunching onto gravel at the bottom; across the yard, startled, the sparrows swirl up like ash to shape giddy eddies in the sky.
And Jean remains sitting, eyes settled once again on the middle distance rather than watching Rossi move off. Perhaps she's considering prayer.
Without farewell, slouched in the black wings of his coat, Chris Rossi stalks the path's line back the way he came, bearing with him all he brought with him. Hollow grief, private anguish, bitter anger -- and something new. The suggestion of a face to go with the fantasy. Hope, at the barrel end of the gun.
It isn't God, but it'll do.
[Log ends]
Rossi asks Jean for help hunting down the Friends, and Jean confesses that she might have squished pretty much everybody she knows during a crazy, esoteric psionic rampage. Mutants are weird.