10/28/06 - Jean
---
=XS= The Roof - Xavier's School
Through a small little door accessed from the attic, one may stand or sit out here on a flat section of the mansion's roof on cool summer evenings, or anytime really, to think. Most of the mansion's grounds can be viewed from here as well as Westchester on, beautiful in the spring and fall when all things are blooming anew or the earthy, patchwork quilt of autumn lays across the land. Visible in the distance is the city skyline of New York. Over by the gardens, a tall oak tree boasts a treehouse in its branches. Someone feeling adventurous could probably jump and make it...
Night, and quiet, and a steady wind outside the windows sets tree branches to scratching eerily against the panes. Finished driving back the beast of paperwork as far as she can for another day, Jean is at last free to roam the school for her own purposes, and up to the roof she goes as a result. Whether it's some subconscious draw to the other telepath in the mantion, whether it's a conscious search, or whether it's simply wandering feet on familiar paths, the end is the same: the heavy door down to the attic is thrown open against the wind, and Jean steps out onto the flat of the widow's walk, bundled in a wool coat and a knit scarf, and with a steaming mug of tea in her hands. She walks with a focused weariness, fatigue mastered and measured, and stowed in shoulders hunched forward against more than just the wind.
He is already there in the wind, though it parts somewhat around the buttress that shields them: a solitary figure in his wheeled throne, silhouetted against the far lawn's lights. His suit blends with shadow, a somber black that might by day prove a different color -- like the night a blend of a thousand other shades that, seen through a painter's eyes, are more rainbow than solid. Professor Xavier watches the distant gates and the vans parked like hungry wolves at the entrance. Fewer now. Silent. Like him.
And behind him, Charles Xavier's hunting hawk comes to a silent roost, weary from bating madly in her jesses. << Charles. >> Jean announces herself, a single word spoken mind to mind before her thoughts withdraw back to herself. Anger and frustration still lurk, but are dragged below the mental surface now by growing and bleak chains of thought that grow longer as her own eyes turn to the lights of the news vans. Aloud, half-stolen by the wind, she continues that "I think I may have to resign as headmistress of the school."
The impassive figure by the roof's edge does not stir; the mind held captive in the failed body likewise, the echoes of that name swallowed whole by silence. There is nothing. No reply. No acknowledgment, save for the sense beyond senses that something powerful -- something aware, something intelligent, something vital for all its weariness -- considers the spoken words and weighs them against a feather.
"Do you know who John M. Ford is, Jean?"
Jean sighs, not so much weary as resigned to another round of following the meanderings of an old man's mind, and rounds the corner of a chimney stack to take a seat beside Xavier's feet, head bowed over her tea. "No," she admits. "What's his story?"
"A man of some genius," Xavier says, his profile revealing nothing though his voice flexes through strata: from dry to wry in the space of a sentence. "Though not in any arena that usually comes within my purview. I understand his primary claim to popular fame was that he once wrote two Star Trek novels."
"Original series or Next Generation?" Jean wonders, in a sudden, unbearable, and completely reflexive descent into geekery before she catches herself. There's a short laugh, rough and self-mocking, before she shakes her head and looks over her shoulder at Xavier, loose hair slashing across her face and obscuring it in turns of the fickle wind's fancy. "Go on,"
Xavier's glance aside is quizzical, and an eyebrow arches in question -- rhetorical, pardon? -- before he shakes his head in dismissal. "A man of some genius," he says again. Lips twist. "When a friend mentioned that she would, if she were a better writer, tie the inevitabilities of death and database error by means of a rhetorical figure involving worms, he created a poem on the spot and gave it to her as a gift."
Jean looks rather blank at this -- briefly appreciative of the imagery, mind, but soon lost in a search for meaning that's clearly run into worms of its own. Jerking her head sharply to clear her hair from her eyes, she wonders, just a touch too sharp, "What's your point in this, Charles?"
Something like a sigh flutters across the wind of minds. << 'Regret, by definition, comes too late; say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.' >> The Professor's mouth moves -- in a smile, perhaps, or not. The long, lean hands close around the chair's arms. "The universe winds down for some of us, Jean. Why do you wish to step down?"
"Because I've never been able to step -up-," Jean answers in a sudden rush, simply put and swiftly said, a surgeon's incision rather than a renegade stab. Silence follows this, averaging out the speaking until it matches the measured, muffled pace she continues at. "I do the paperwork, I organize the class schedules, discipline the miscreants, counsel the academically unsure... but the assassination's reminded me pretty clearly of just where my hands are tied. How am I supposed to answer the students when they want to know why we didn't stop Magneto? Especially when I have those questions myself?"
Eyes glimmer darkly in the night. Xavier looks down at Jean and once more the eyebrows lift. "'Say what you mean,'" he quotes once more, England's accents ancient on the neutral baritone. "'Why, foolish old man, didn't you stop Magneto when you had the chance?'"
"Exactly." Far from neutral, something gleams in Jean's eyes, wildness subsumed and sat upon, restraint made easier by spending it on Logan the night before. "Oh, I know the why for when he's been at the mansion -- don't bother explaining that. Amnesia, repairs to Cerebro, hell, even I've snuck him in for medical attention when he's shown up bleeding. But what about the rest of the time, Charles? It's not like we can't find where he lives."
"No," Xavier says, and the voice is deceptively free and easy, absent the strain that tightens shadow in the deep-set eyes. Behind them, the telepath's mind closes tight, furling into its shell to leave nothing exposed. "The easy route is gone. It will be harder now that he has perfected his telepathic dampener. He has left his base. His new location will take some finding."
"Are you even going to try?" Harsh words, tone sharp, Jean doesn't look to meet aged eyes as she says them, instead hunkering down further into the long wool of her coat with a mind spiking frustration anew. "That's why I can't be headmistress, Charles. I can't be the voice of authority when I don't even have an answer to -that-. I've been trying, and all it's done is left me looking like a hypocrite mouthing comforting -lies-."
"I presume you think I have been simply hiding my shame in Cerebro these past few days," Xavier says, and the words are remote as the baritone is, warmth bleeding away to leave chill behind. Above her, the Professor turns his gaze to the horizon, seen in memory where invisible in night. "It seems that Erik has learned new tricks. It will require something more subtle than simple searching to unearth him now."
"I don't -think- anything at this point, Charles." Chill meets chill, and as Xavier's eyes turn away, Jean's eyes turn towards him, her own diction crisping and firming. "Mushrooms generally don't."
There is silence once more. The presence of Charles Xavier withdraws though the body remains. It says nothing.
Jean waits. She waits all of ten whole seconds before rising to her feet. "I'll have a formal letter of resignation on your desk in the morning, Charles. I will, of course, keep teaching where needed and stay on in my capacity as chief medical officer, unless you'd prefer I resign free and clear."
"It is your choice, Jean," says Professor Xavier, quiet. "As it has always been. You must follow your conscience."
"Dammit!" Jean whirls at this, the quiet acceptance and the closed mind spurring one last flare of temper. "Are you ever going to actually treat this as anything more than a goddamned chess game? Or some sort of experiment you can watch over like a benevolent god? My -conscience- has questions. The students have questions. And all you're doing is keeping your own counsel as you always do."
The mute back is stiff and straight; the shoulders, stooped with age, set in their carapace of silk. "A /game/," says Xavier, and the air crackles with that word, catching it up in a tangle of echoes. The world shudders and shifts: colors reel, losing cohesion; shadows deepen, fracturing past black into spiderwebs of blue. "A game," he says again, more gently. "I would beggar myself for all of you. I would sacrifice anything and everything. What would you have me do, Jean?"
Jean turns, hands clutching at her plastic mug with knuckles an unseen white within the leather gloves she wears. Standing now, looking on Xavier as equal rather than mentor, she nods once at that crack in the dam walls, that ominous swell of power lurking behind. "I would have you," she clips out, copying that high and fine British polish of diction. "Do something. Say something. -Share- something. I can be your public face, Charles," she assures, with an odd flash of softness melting the precision, loosening her grip. There's a feeling of risk, of pusing too far, accompanying this frankness, clearly palpable on the surface of Jean's mind. "But... I can't be your private one, and we need you now. We need to know where this ship's headed."
Xavier's mouth curls. It is a smile shared only with the last stubborn autumn insects, the mercurial, ephemeral life falling towards swift winter. There is nothing of joy about it. "I waited too long," he says, and his voice -- flat, meditative -- gains in sonority, deepening as he amends, "It's a hard thing, to give up the past. He's one of the only ones left. There are so few. The only one besides Moira who remembers. I hoped too long, and yet -- we need him, Jean. He still has a part to play."
Jean has turned fully from the door now, setting the tea undrunk and rapidly cooling on the narrow ledge beside it. Shoulders still hunched against the wind, stance still weary, she nevertheless seems content to stay. And to listen. "Does he?" she questions, querulous as a child facing a painful incongruity in their world. "I remember him the way he was too... not like you do," she admits, clarifying the obvious. "But what he's become? Would the man he was thank us for letting him run free to be the man he is now?"
"The man he was," Charles says aloud, more to himself than to his demanding audience. "He has always thought I was too compassionate to do what was necessary. He knows me better than any man alive, and still he continues to be so blind--" He trails off. The night, stretched too taut, too thin across an unreadable skeleton, shivers and exhales to return to normalcy. "Jean."
"It's time the world knew about the X-Men."
Whatever conclusion Jean was expecting, it certainly wasn't that. Taking a few steps forwards, off the flat platform and onto the slope of the roof, she whips her head around in surprise, and steps unwisely as a result. Xavier's answer from her comes first in the form of a muffled thump, and a sharp curse word as she lands unceremoniously on her tailbone.
There is a smile for that -- a true smile -- sensed through the unfurling of one great and aging mind. A touch brushes against the younger one, assuring itself that no serious injury has been done, and then withdraws again to a courteous distance. Not remote this time. Simply nearby. Waiting.
Jean's mind is full of the bright startled flare of physical pain (There will be bruising. Oh, will there be bruising. And likely snickering speculation from students.) and her rich vocabulary's store of curse words that she's not saying aloud. Rubbing away with one hand, she tries, metaphorically, to grab a little dignity with the other. "That's... a bold move," she ventures.
"Too many secrets," Charles says aloud, warming the darkness with the rich cadence of his voice. "Some battles need to be fought in the open. The Brotherhood has been too long in the public eye without competition for public opinion. Wishing for peace does not mean that we need be passive -- and Erik has given the world its villain. He invites us to give the world heroes. So be it."
Gingerly, Jean abandons her attempt at sitting on the slope for a time when there's more daylight and less sudden surprises. Meticulously careful about her feet this time, she returns to the platform and leans against the side of the closed in access back down. "It's not that I don't think this is a good idea..." she replies, measuring her words with equal care. "But..." One hand waves towards the news vans and their lights. "Timing?"
Xavier turns his head at last, a faint blur of light limning the skull beneath the skin. An ancient hand carved him out of marble, shaping him of strong lines and hollows. "Something to consider," he says. The dark eyes glimmer. "Things to arrange -- the President wishes to have a word with 'X.'"
"I guess Langley finally found a moment to brief him, then," Jean assesses, nibbling on her lower lip in thought. "Will you need a ride to the airport? I kind've need an excuse to be in the city to go look up Rogue," she admits, eyeing her left foot intently. Her shoulders hunch still more.
"If you wish." The wheelchair finishes turning; the master of Xavier House faces his erstwhile pupil, hands resting at peace on the seat's arms. He regards her gravely, patience biding old and canny behind the face. "And what of the school? Will I still find a resignation letter on my desk in the morning?"
"I think so," Jean says, firmly, but with frustration's fire back down to banked embers, and a more general focus. Nodding to herself, she repeats it, this time with eyes on Xavier. "Yeah, I think so. I need to pull back -- between teaching, medicine, research, activism, training... I haven't been able to read Nate a bedtime story in a month."
Xavier inclines his head. "It is your choice," he says as he did before, this time adding, "I regret the necessity, but you must do as you feel best. And the rest?"
"The rest?" Jean echoes, mentally recounting the conversation in the time the question buys her. A distinct mental wince is appended to more than one part, and she drops her gaze from Xavier to pick up her mug of tea, completely undrinkable now.
"The X-Men." If there is uncertainty in the man, there is none in his voice, qualms bored helically through the mind's wood. "What of the X-Men?"
"Talk to us, Charles," is Jean's advice, the pronoun placing very clear limits on just how far that resignation's going. "Scott would probably follow you blindly into hell, for what you've done for him. Ororo's always been stronger than I am. The rest of us... I hate to say it, but we need answers as much as any of the kids. Logan's not happy, but the idea of doing something should help. Hank's too intelligent not to have questions, but too polite to ask them. I don't know what Kurt's thinking. The junior members... mostly have midterms and rent."
There is silence then, of a different sort than before; a tired one, with a quality of time ticking on, inexorable and ruthless. "Every day, you choose to stay with the X-Men," Xavier says at last. "Every day. All of you. It is not the only thing I have tried to give you, but it is the most precious. The power to choose, without restriction or the burden of debt and affection."
"If it's a burden, it's one we choose to bear, Charles." Jean murmurs. Mental tallying done, a thought for offering apology flickers across her mind before being discarded. Instead, she peers critically at the old man in the wheelchair, shields dropping enough to let her mind brush briefly against his, better indicator than what she can see in the dim light streaming upwards from school windows. "When was the last time you got some proper sleep?"
Charles gestures, sweeping aside the relevance of the question; there is more than one resemblance between two old, contrary men. "Answers," he says instead, and the wheelchair crunches forward across gravel. "The President and I will speak. And when I return -- perhaps we will have answers. A plan. And then we will talk."
"Then let me know what time your flight leaves," Jean bids, nodding towards the door. "In the meantime... I think I'd better figure out what to tell the students."
The wheelchair stops. "Jean."
Jean stops too. "Yes, Charles?"
"I could not do this without you."
A ripple across the psyche, a half-laugh escaped into the cold night air. A flash of memory: Jean as a young girl, irrepressably eager to please. Jean the adult woman steps quickly back over to the wheelchair, dropping one knee to give the dignified Charles Xavier a hug.
Professor Xavier endures it with dignity, resigned to such displays of affection. One liver-spotted hand pats her elbow, affection conferred in the brief caress. "Yes, well. I believe it is time to go indoors," he says, a hint of discomfiture creeping across the baritone. "The season is too far advanced for us to remain out of doors at this hour."
"How -did- you manage to get the wheelchair up here?" Jean wonders, at last giving voice to a back of her mind question. But she waves a hand, dismissing an answer to -that- particular question as optional, and instead retrieves her tea before taking her place at Xavier's right hand for the return back downstairs. "Hear, hear. I think I'm definitely going to tempt fate and try and make hot chocolate. Do you want some?" she offers, one glucose-thirsty brain to another. "I have little marshmallows."
Whatever answer Xavier has to make is lost to the door's closure behind the two figures. Silence falls over the roof, peaceful night filled only with the murmur of passing insects.
[Log ends]
Jean confronts Xavier on the roof of the school.
=XS= The Roof - Xavier's School
Through a small little door accessed from the attic, one may stand or sit out here on a flat section of the mansion's roof on cool summer evenings, or anytime really, to think. Most of the mansion's grounds can be viewed from here as well as Westchester on, beautiful in the spring and fall when all things are blooming anew or the earthy, patchwork quilt of autumn lays across the land. Visible in the distance is the city skyline of New York. Over by the gardens, a tall oak tree boasts a treehouse in its branches. Someone feeling adventurous could probably jump and make it...
Night, and quiet, and a steady wind outside the windows sets tree branches to scratching eerily against the panes. Finished driving back the beast of paperwork as far as she can for another day, Jean is at last free to roam the school for her own purposes, and up to the roof she goes as a result. Whether it's some subconscious draw to the other telepath in the mantion, whether it's a conscious search, or whether it's simply wandering feet on familiar paths, the end is the same: the heavy door down to the attic is thrown open against the wind, and Jean steps out onto the flat of the widow's walk, bundled in a wool coat and a knit scarf, and with a steaming mug of tea in her hands. She walks with a focused weariness, fatigue mastered and measured, and stowed in shoulders hunched forward against more than just the wind.
He is already there in the wind, though it parts somewhat around the buttress that shields them: a solitary figure in his wheeled throne, silhouetted against the far lawn's lights. His suit blends with shadow, a somber black that might by day prove a different color -- like the night a blend of a thousand other shades that, seen through a painter's eyes, are more rainbow than solid. Professor Xavier watches the distant gates and the vans parked like hungry wolves at the entrance. Fewer now. Silent. Like him.
And behind him, Charles Xavier's hunting hawk comes to a silent roost, weary from bating madly in her jesses. << Charles. >> Jean announces herself, a single word spoken mind to mind before her thoughts withdraw back to herself. Anger and frustration still lurk, but are dragged below the mental surface now by growing and bleak chains of thought that grow longer as her own eyes turn to the lights of the news vans. Aloud, half-stolen by the wind, she continues that "I think I may have to resign as headmistress of the school."
The impassive figure by the roof's edge does not stir; the mind held captive in the failed body likewise, the echoes of that name swallowed whole by silence. There is nothing. No reply. No acknowledgment, save for the sense beyond senses that something powerful -- something aware, something intelligent, something vital for all its weariness -- considers the spoken words and weighs them against a feather.
"Do you know who John M. Ford is, Jean?"
Jean sighs, not so much weary as resigned to another round of following the meanderings of an old man's mind, and rounds the corner of a chimney stack to take a seat beside Xavier's feet, head bowed over her tea. "No," she admits. "What's his story?"
"A man of some genius," Xavier says, his profile revealing nothing though his voice flexes through strata: from dry to wry in the space of a sentence. "Though not in any arena that usually comes within my purview. I understand his primary claim to popular fame was that he once wrote two Star Trek novels."
"Original series or Next Generation?" Jean wonders, in a sudden, unbearable, and completely reflexive descent into geekery before she catches herself. There's a short laugh, rough and self-mocking, before she shakes her head and looks over her shoulder at Xavier, loose hair slashing across her face and obscuring it in turns of the fickle wind's fancy. "Go on,"
Xavier's glance aside is quizzical, and an eyebrow arches in question -- rhetorical, pardon? -- before he shakes his head in dismissal. "A man of some genius," he says again. Lips twist. "When a friend mentioned that she would, if she were a better writer, tie the inevitabilities of death and database error by means of a rhetorical figure involving worms, he created a poem on the spot and gave it to her as a gift."
Jean looks rather blank at this -- briefly appreciative of the imagery, mind, but soon lost in a search for meaning that's clearly run into worms of its own. Jerking her head sharply to clear her hair from her eyes, she wonders, just a touch too sharp, "What's your point in this, Charles?"
Something like a sigh flutters across the wind of minds. << 'Regret, by definition, comes too late; say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.' >> The Professor's mouth moves -- in a smile, perhaps, or not. The long, lean hands close around the chair's arms. "The universe winds down for some of us, Jean. Why do you wish to step down?"
"Because I've never been able to step -up-," Jean answers in a sudden rush, simply put and swiftly said, a surgeon's incision rather than a renegade stab. Silence follows this, averaging out the speaking until it matches the measured, muffled pace she continues at. "I do the paperwork, I organize the class schedules, discipline the miscreants, counsel the academically unsure... but the assassination's reminded me pretty clearly of just where my hands are tied. How am I supposed to answer the students when they want to know why we didn't stop Magneto? Especially when I have those questions myself?"
Eyes glimmer darkly in the night. Xavier looks down at Jean and once more the eyebrows lift. "'Say what you mean,'" he quotes once more, England's accents ancient on the neutral baritone. "'Why, foolish old man, didn't you stop Magneto when you had the chance?'"
"Exactly." Far from neutral, something gleams in Jean's eyes, wildness subsumed and sat upon, restraint made easier by spending it on Logan the night before. "Oh, I know the why for when he's been at the mansion -- don't bother explaining that. Amnesia, repairs to Cerebro, hell, even I've snuck him in for medical attention when he's shown up bleeding. But what about the rest of the time, Charles? It's not like we can't find where he lives."
"No," Xavier says, and the voice is deceptively free and easy, absent the strain that tightens shadow in the deep-set eyes. Behind them, the telepath's mind closes tight, furling into its shell to leave nothing exposed. "The easy route is gone. It will be harder now that he has perfected his telepathic dampener. He has left his base. His new location will take some finding."
"Are you even going to try?" Harsh words, tone sharp, Jean doesn't look to meet aged eyes as she says them, instead hunkering down further into the long wool of her coat with a mind spiking frustration anew. "That's why I can't be headmistress, Charles. I can't be the voice of authority when I don't even have an answer to -that-. I've been trying, and all it's done is left me looking like a hypocrite mouthing comforting -lies-."
"I presume you think I have been simply hiding my shame in Cerebro these past few days," Xavier says, and the words are remote as the baritone is, warmth bleeding away to leave chill behind. Above her, the Professor turns his gaze to the horizon, seen in memory where invisible in night. "It seems that Erik has learned new tricks. It will require something more subtle than simple searching to unearth him now."
"I don't -think- anything at this point, Charles." Chill meets chill, and as Xavier's eyes turn away, Jean's eyes turn towards him, her own diction crisping and firming. "Mushrooms generally don't."
There is silence once more. The presence of Charles Xavier withdraws though the body remains. It says nothing.
Jean waits. She waits all of ten whole seconds before rising to her feet. "I'll have a formal letter of resignation on your desk in the morning, Charles. I will, of course, keep teaching where needed and stay on in my capacity as chief medical officer, unless you'd prefer I resign free and clear."
"It is your choice, Jean," says Professor Xavier, quiet. "As it has always been. You must follow your conscience."
"Dammit!" Jean whirls at this, the quiet acceptance and the closed mind spurring one last flare of temper. "Are you ever going to actually treat this as anything more than a goddamned chess game? Or some sort of experiment you can watch over like a benevolent god? My -conscience- has questions. The students have questions. And all you're doing is keeping your own counsel as you always do."
The mute back is stiff and straight; the shoulders, stooped with age, set in their carapace of silk. "A /game/," says Xavier, and the air crackles with that word, catching it up in a tangle of echoes. The world shudders and shifts: colors reel, losing cohesion; shadows deepen, fracturing past black into spiderwebs of blue. "A game," he says again, more gently. "I would beggar myself for all of you. I would sacrifice anything and everything. What would you have me do, Jean?"
Jean turns, hands clutching at her plastic mug with knuckles an unseen white within the leather gloves she wears. Standing now, looking on Xavier as equal rather than mentor, she nods once at that crack in the dam walls, that ominous swell of power lurking behind. "I would have you," she clips out, copying that high and fine British polish of diction. "Do something. Say something. -Share- something. I can be your public face, Charles," she assures, with an odd flash of softness melting the precision, loosening her grip. There's a feeling of risk, of pusing too far, accompanying this frankness, clearly palpable on the surface of Jean's mind. "But... I can't be your private one, and we need you now. We need to know where this ship's headed."
Xavier's mouth curls. It is a smile shared only with the last stubborn autumn insects, the mercurial, ephemeral life falling towards swift winter. There is nothing of joy about it. "I waited too long," he says, and his voice -- flat, meditative -- gains in sonority, deepening as he amends, "It's a hard thing, to give up the past. He's one of the only ones left. There are so few. The only one besides Moira who remembers. I hoped too long, and yet -- we need him, Jean. He still has a part to play."
Jean has turned fully from the door now, setting the tea undrunk and rapidly cooling on the narrow ledge beside it. Shoulders still hunched against the wind, stance still weary, she nevertheless seems content to stay. And to listen. "Does he?" she questions, querulous as a child facing a painful incongruity in their world. "I remember him the way he was too... not like you do," she admits, clarifying the obvious. "But what he's become? Would the man he was thank us for letting him run free to be the man he is now?"
"The man he was," Charles says aloud, more to himself than to his demanding audience. "He has always thought I was too compassionate to do what was necessary. He knows me better than any man alive, and still he continues to be so blind--" He trails off. The night, stretched too taut, too thin across an unreadable skeleton, shivers and exhales to return to normalcy. "Jean."
"It's time the world knew about the X-Men."
Whatever conclusion Jean was expecting, it certainly wasn't that. Taking a few steps forwards, off the flat platform and onto the slope of the roof, she whips her head around in surprise, and steps unwisely as a result. Xavier's answer from her comes first in the form of a muffled thump, and a sharp curse word as she lands unceremoniously on her tailbone.
There is a smile for that -- a true smile -- sensed through the unfurling of one great and aging mind. A touch brushes against the younger one, assuring itself that no serious injury has been done, and then withdraws again to a courteous distance. Not remote this time. Simply nearby. Waiting.
Jean's mind is full of the bright startled flare of physical pain (There will be bruising. Oh, will there be bruising. And likely snickering speculation from students.) and her rich vocabulary's store of curse words that she's not saying aloud. Rubbing away with one hand, she tries, metaphorically, to grab a little dignity with the other. "That's... a bold move," she ventures.
"Too many secrets," Charles says aloud, warming the darkness with the rich cadence of his voice. "Some battles need to be fought in the open. The Brotherhood has been too long in the public eye without competition for public opinion. Wishing for peace does not mean that we need be passive -- and Erik has given the world its villain. He invites us to give the world heroes. So be it."
Gingerly, Jean abandons her attempt at sitting on the slope for a time when there's more daylight and less sudden surprises. Meticulously careful about her feet this time, she returns to the platform and leans against the side of the closed in access back down. "It's not that I don't think this is a good idea..." she replies, measuring her words with equal care. "But..." One hand waves towards the news vans and their lights. "Timing?"
Xavier turns his head at last, a faint blur of light limning the skull beneath the skin. An ancient hand carved him out of marble, shaping him of strong lines and hollows. "Something to consider," he says. The dark eyes glimmer. "Things to arrange -- the President wishes to have a word with 'X.'"
"I guess Langley finally found a moment to brief him, then," Jean assesses, nibbling on her lower lip in thought. "Will you need a ride to the airport? I kind've need an excuse to be in the city to go look up Rogue," she admits, eyeing her left foot intently. Her shoulders hunch still more.
"If you wish." The wheelchair finishes turning; the master of Xavier House faces his erstwhile pupil, hands resting at peace on the seat's arms. He regards her gravely, patience biding old and canny behind the face. "And what of the school? Will I still find a resignation letter on my desk in the morning?"
"I think so," Jean says, firmly, but with frustration's fire back down to banked embers, and a more general focus. Nodding to herself, she repeats it, this time with eyes on Xavier. "Yeah, I think so. I need to pull back -- between teaching, medicine, research, activism, training... I haven't been able to read Nate a bedtime story in a month."
Xavier inclines his head. "It is your choice," he says as he did before, this time adding, "I regret the necessity, but you must do as you feel best. And the rest?"
"The rest?" Jean echoes, mentally recounting the conversation in the time the question buys her. A distinct mental wince is appended to more than one part, and she drops her gaze from Xavier to pick up her mug of tea, completely undrinkable now.
"The X-Men." If there is uncertainty in the man, there is none in his voice, qualms bored helically through the mind's wood. "What of the X-Men?"
"Talk to us, Charles," is Jean's advice, the pronoun placing very clear limits on just how far that resignation's going. "Scott would probably follow you blindly into hell, for what you've done for him. Ororo's always been stronger than I am. The rest of us... I hate to say it, but we need answers as much as any of the kids. Logan's not happy, but the idea of doing something should help. Hank's too intelligent not to have questions, but too polite to ask them. I don't know what Kurt's thinking. The junior members... mostly have midterms and rent."
There is silence then, of a different sort than before; a tired one, with a quality of time ticking on, inexorable and ruthless. "Every day, you choose to stay with the X-Men," Xavier says at last. "Every day. All of you. It is not the only thing I have tried to give you, but it is the most precious. The power to choose, without restriction or the burden of debt and affection."
"If it's a burden, it's one we choose to bear, Charles." Jean murmurs. Mental tallying done, a thought for offering apology flickers across her mind before being discarded. Instead, she peers critically at the old man in the wheelchair, shields dropping enough to let her mind brush briefly against his, better indicator than what she can see in the dim light streaming upwards from school windows. "When was the last time you got some proper sleep?"
Charles gestures, sweeping aside the relevance of the question; there is more than one resemblance between two old, contrary men. "Answers," he says instead, and the wheelchair crunches forward across gravel. "The President and I will speak. And when I return -- perhaps we will have answers. A plan. And then we will talk."
"Then let me know what time your flight leaves," Jean bids, nodding towards the door. "In the meantime... I think I'd better figure out what to tell the students."
The wheelchair stops. "Jean."
Jean stops too. "Yes, Charles?"
"I could not do this without you."
A ripple across the psyche, a half-laugh escaped into the cold night air. A flash of memory: Jean as a young girl, irrepressably eager to please. Jean the adult woman steps quickly back over to the wheelchair, dropping one knee to give the dignified Charles Xavier a hug.
Professor Xavier endures it with dignity, resigned to such displays of affection. One liver-spotted hand pats her elbow, affection conferred in the brief caress. "Yes, well. I believe it is time to go indoors," he says, a hint of discomfiture creeping across the baritone. "The season is too far advanced for us to remain out of doors at this hour."
"How -did- you manage to get the wheelchair up here?" Jean wonders, at last giving voice to a back of her mind question. But she waves a hand, dismissing an answer to -that- particular question as optional, and instead retrieves her tea before taking her place at Xavier's right hand for the return back downstairs. "Hear, hear. I think I'm definitely going to tempt fate and try and make hot chocolate. Do you want some?" she offers, one glucose-thirsty brain to another. "I have little marshmallows."
Whatever answer Xavier has to make is lost to the door's closure behind the two figures. Silence falls over the roof, peaceful night filled only with the murmur of passing insects.
[Log ends]
Jean confronts Xavier on the roof of the school.