2013.08.14 - Road Trip!

The day is overcast, but not particularly threatening rain. It's breezy, however, the wind on the cool side. Jean descends the front steps of the mansion, keys in hand and a light bag over her shoulder. She wears jeans, decent boots, a light green blouse, and a brown leather jacket cut in a trim, tailored style. Evidently, she's heading off somewhere. And, while she's not running, she's moving at a determined enough clip that it's evident wherever she's going isn't a leisurely trip.
As one redhead leaves the mansion, another returns, and this one is also moving with a purpose as she walks up the driveway. She's casually dressed - hasn't had chance to change from her excursion to Mutant Town - so she's wearing a red t-shirt, black shorts, dark red tights and flats. Not the most imposing of outfits, but there's something about the set of her shoulders that suggests she's walking toward a confrontation, even though she doesn't want to start one herself. She catches sight of Jean as she heads down the steps, and Rachel picks up her own pace. She doesn't quite break into a jog, but she's definitely on an intercept course. And in contrast to her previous encounters with Jean, Rachel's actually showing some decent telepathic discipline. Her shields are closed tight around her thoughts. "Hey!" Rachel calls, "Glad I caught you." Rachel's been hesitant in approaching Jean before, but there's a different kind of wariness about her now.
Jean glances up as Rachel calls out to her. Upon recognizing the other telepath, and noting just how tightly battened down the young woman is, the tension around her green eyes tightens and she reinforces her own shields. Just in case.
It's not that she doesn't want to talk to Rachel. Indeed, given what she's recently learned, they need to talk. But, she's no more sure how to approach it than the other woman is. 
"Hey," she replies. "Yeah. I'm just headed off to see a friend." Nevertheless, she stops, and meets her gaze. "What's up?"
 
Rachel had thought she'd have had much more lead time for planning. She might even have roped in Kitty if her room-mate hadn't just left for her cruise to the Bahamas, because who else can Rachel confide in at the mansion? The answer would have been 'Jean' until very recently.
Having got Jean's attention, then, Rachel doesn't have much idea what to do with it. The only thing she is sure of is that she doesn't want to talk right here, at the bottom of the mansion's entrance steps. "Great, I'll come with you." Rachel says quickly. "You can drop me off anywhere I can get a ride back." She carries on, not caring if she sounds crazy for once. "We can talk on the way. I need some advice... about how to spot when a friend's mind has been messed around with." Well, it's out there, and Rachel's watching Jean's reaction like a hawk.
Jean doesn't even bother to hide her reaction. She simply sighs. "Yeah," she says shortly. "I figured." She gestures down the lane to where her car is parked. 
"C'mon," she says. "Get in. Gonna be a trip, but you might as well come. too."
She thumbs her key fob, circles around the car, and pulls open the driver's door. 
As she slides in, she pushes the key into the ignition and turns it over in one flowing movement, before she finally reaches to do up her seatbelt. Then, her hands sit on the wheel, waiting for the younger telepath to get settled so they can go.
 
Rachel visibly relaxes when Jean simply sighs. Whatever she'd expected Jean to do, it doesn't materialise. Having the more skilled and experienced telepath in her mind recently has given Rachel a healthy respect for her capabilities, and she's just had a dent put in her somewhat simplistic belief in Jean's perennial good intentions. "That's OK. I've got nowhere else to be." Rachel answers simply, falling in beside Jean for the walk to the car and then peeling off toward the passenger side. Her hand's still on the door handle as the engine starts, and Rachel gets in quickly. She doesn't really believe Jean would ditch her, but... she's in now, in any case. Rachel's eyes run across the expensive interior of the car as she fastens her seatbelt, but for now all she does is get comfortable - or at least as comfortable as possible, there's still a bit of tension in the set of her shoulders. She's really only got one question, and it's not the one she asks. "Do you want to know how I know?"
Jean shakes her head. "I know how you know," she says, turning the wheel and pressing gently down on the accelerator. The car draws away from the curb as she guides it down the lane and out the gate. The turn she makes will ultimately take them past the town and onto the freeway.
She doesn't stammer or hurry to justify herself. But, she does offer an explanation: "Shift and I are running a very delicate operation. We're trying to influence Magneto's inner circle."
She glances to the girl, now, her driving fairly relaxed -- insofar as she doesn't push the speed limit. But, she's not dawdling, either.
"Kwabena came to me a few weeks ago and asked me to help him embed himself in the Brotherhood and work his way into Magneto's trust so that he could funnel information back to us on the situation in Genosha." As she speaks, she relaxes her shields -- and she does it quite purposely. She needs Rachel to sense the truth of her words, and the emotions behind them. She's not ashamed of what she did. But she is conflicted. Indeed, that's part of the reason for this trip. 
"The Brotherhood has several telepaths in its employ it uses to monitor its operatives -- and anyone else that tries to get close to Magneto. Most of them are at a level either you or I could overpower easily. Certainly, they're not the sorts who could read either of our minds without our knowing. Even if they gestalted. But, they are good enough to read a non-telepath's mind that way. And, if they found evidence that Shift wasn't sincere in his offer to work with Magneto, there's no way he'd be able to get anything at all of use to us."
Best case scenario: Magneto would use Shift to feed them misinformation. Worst case? Good-bye, Shift -- whether that farewell was because of physical death, insanity, or personality death... the results would be the same. 
"The only way I could protect Shift from those telepaths was to remove any hint of our plan from his mind and monitor him from a safe distance." A beat. "It was his idea, and I can't say I like it even now. But, when it became clear Magneto's agenda seems to have more to do with killing humans than liberating mutants, we had to do something. A frontal assault won't work. He's too strong. But this?"
Now, she finally grimaces. "I don't know if it's any better. Shift is in Connecticut right now. That's where we're going."
And if the girl is smart, she'll probably realize that the only reason Jean is actually telling her all this is because she is one of the few mutants out there powerful enough not to fall prey the Brotherhood teeps and thereby accidentally betray them. Jean knows full well, if Rachel does betray them, it will effectively be intentional.
And she trusts her.
 
Rachel's a bit taken aback when Jean casually confirms that Rachel's discovery isn't news to her. She's only got time to begin her real question, "Then why..." Before Jean's firmly and easily taken control of the conversation. And Rachel can't even protest, because Jean's done it by telling her exactly what she wanted to know.
At Jean's first, concise statement, Rachel's silenced, suddenly acutely aware that she's walked right into the middle of something much bigger than she imagined - and also that it wouldn't have taken much for her to have ruined whatever plan Jean had. If she'd have gone digging... If she'd have gone to anyone else first... Rachel still doesn't like it, on an instinctive level. That's as much about her own experiences as what been done here, though, and Rachel keeps herself from interrupting, makes herself listen to the whole story. Her expression is attentive, even if the wariness is still in her eyes - at least until Jean's shields fade out a bit.
A look of surprise, quickly hidden, flits across Rachel's expression as she recognises what Jean's doing, and Rachel accepts the unspoken invitation. It's a lot harder for Rachel to reject what Jean's done out of hand when she can feel Jean's own uncertainty warring with the necessity of the act. Rachel's half-turned in her seat now, not looking at the road, all her senses, physical and telepathic, on Jean.
When the older redhead's finished, Rachel doesn't move for a moment, but then first the touch of her mind against Jean's disappears, and she slumps back in her seat, pushing a hand through her hair as she struggles with her thoughts. "Then Dad doesn't know." It's said mostly to herself, but it's proof that Rachel does, at least, understand why Jean felt able to tell her the truth, and she understands the implications. That she doesn't think to correct herself just shows that the truth's rattled her.
Rachel takes a deep breath and lets it out carefully. "That's just..." Crazy. Wrong. Necessary. Crazy enough to work? Rachel's not sure. "We've got a problem." Rachel says, more firmly, more obviously to Jean rather than herself. "Shift might not know why he's doing what he's doing, but he /does/ know he's in trouble. He told me as much. And..." Rachel hesitates. "I don't think he's got a lot of friends left to pull him out of it." She looks at the road ahead for a few seconds, pensively. "Except us?" She finally suggests.
"Except us," Jean confirms. She glances to Rachel, having caught the 'Dad' slip. 
"And, no," she adds. "No one else knows, but you and I. No one else can know. If any of them were to be compromised?" She shakes her head and sighs again. 
"This is messy, Ray. Really, really messy. Moreso than just about anything else I can ever remember doing." Short of her memories of how the Dark Phoenix destroyed a solar system. Of course, that wasn't so much messy as it was psychologically horrific. In actual fact, there was a certain elegance and efficiency to the act itself. 
And, perhaps, to a certain degree, the same can be said here. 
"Yesterday," she tells Rachel, now, "Shift was torn whether or not to confront Magneto or to take some time to think. Thankfully, he decided to go think. And we're going to find him." She glances over her shoulder to change lanes, and then glances back to Rachel. "I don't know how this is going to play out specifically, but I do know one of two things is going to happen: Either we're going to abort and I'm going to restore his memories, or I'm going to have to push him further under, so that he doesn't object nearly so much to what Magneto's doing." 
There's a distinct sense that she'd quite definitely prefer the former to the latter. She doesn't want to push him under further.
"Unless he can come to terms with it on his own, of course."
 
Even though she's doing her best to put a businesslike face on the situation, Rachel's own feelings are conflicted. Jean has a good reason for what she did - but even she's not sure it was the right thing to do. It means Rachel's been wrong about her - not only is she not the villain of this piece, which Rachel didn't want to believe anyway, but neither is she the idealised image from Rachel's memories. 
Oddly, despite the fact that she's still struggling to assimilate everything she's been told, Rachel speaks with more confidence now. She's still the junior partner, but at least she's acting like a colleague now.
Jean's first admonition gets a swift nod from Rachel. "Got it." She confirms, although there is another thought in her mind. Nate. He's got the power to spare, but... she doesn't know if she should drag him into this. She pushes the thought away as Jean continues, and she can't really disagree.
The tension from Rachel's side of the car is suddenly back when Jean fills her in on the latest developments. The thought of Shift going up against Magneto, alone, not to mention not in his right mind...? Rachel subsides a bit when she realises that if he'd gone through with it, they'd already be too late. "Good." It's quiet, but relieved.
Relief that vanishes as soon as Jean explains further. Rachel's surprise is obvious. She'd clearly taken this to be a rescue mission. "If you push him any further... even if it works, even if we get what we need... will he be able to deal with what he's done, who he's been, when he comes out the other side?" Rachel's not sure if she's really asking the question of Jean. "He was talking about agreeing with Magneto. He believes the humans want us all to die, and he wants to win the war against them. If he acts on that, what's going to be left of him afterwards?"
It's always tough when kids learn their parents aren't perfect, aren't the paragons of virtue they were made out to be. Jean knows that. But, at the same time... she's not Rachel's mother. It's possible the Jean Grey of Rachel's timeline had it all together a whole lot more than she does. She can't possibly know. But, in the same way she refuses to believe that the alternate futures her so-called children have experienced are not guaranteed to be her future, so she refuses to be made to feel inadequate about who she is in the here-and-now by the spectres of alternate versions of herself. 
Which isn't to say it's easy for her to push it away. Jean has always felt herself to be something of a fraud. 
In this case, however, she's coping the best she can with what she's got. She won't, herself, call Nate in, because she knows his power is woefully unstable and, if they're not careful, it will kill him. So, it all comes down to her. And, perhaps, Rachel, if the girl wants in. 
"I don't know," she answers Rachel, now, speaking honestly. "And, to be honest, I don't know if I would be able to handle it." She shakes her head. "I already carry the memories of too much blood on my hands. I don't want to add Shift's to it. "Truthfully, I want to pull him out. I think this is a bad idea. There have to be other ways to resist, to get the information we need. But, I need to see him, and see what he really thinks about all this, before I do anything else."
She lifts a hand to push hair back from her forehead. "Magneto has swept to power so quickly, no one's had a chance to counter him. And the UN has more-or-less approved it, accepting Genosha into their ranks as they have." She glances sidelong at Rachel, now. "There are only three ways I can think of to counter him: Embed someone in his column, like Shift; Relocate the whole team to Hammer Bay and take him on directly, which is virtual suicide, given what he did to that mountain base; Or find some way to strip his legitimacy outside of the Genosha, with the UN or otherwise. And I have no idea how to do that."
She scowls. "What I'd really like to know is what he's blackmailing the UN people with to get them to fold so quickly against him." A beat. "Though, maybe what we really need to do is scan them and find out if their minds have been messed with..."
It's possible.
Rachel's unaware that Jean doesn't /already/ consider her to be 'in'. She as much as told Shift she was already, and just because she knows the real story now is no reason to back out. Rachel's no longer expecting Jean to let her off once their conversation is over, and she'll probably have an argument on her hands if she tries it.
Rachel's words are quiet and carefully chosen when she answers Jean's uncertainty. "When you look inside my head, you'll find some of those memories. But they're not just memories, with me. The blood is on my hands, and it never really comes off. You're never quite what you were before." Rachel pauses, shrugs, and continues. "If it works? If it's all 'worth it', then maybe that'll be enough. I don't know." Rachel looks back at Jean. "But we can't make the decision for him now it's gone this far..." Rachel snorts quietly. "Even if /I/ want to. I think it has to be his. Even if we don't like it." Rachel's realised that the time to say 'no' is long past.
When Jean moves on to politics, Rachel's on shakier ground, and just accepts Jean's summary at face value. The three options don't sound any more palatable to her. There's a resigned nod of understanding first, a rather vehement shake of her head next, and another quiet snort at the last. It's only when Jean scowls and throws out another idea that Rachel's ears prick up. "If you're looking for someone to tell you that's immoral and we shouldn't do it..." She says, her tone deliberately mild. "...you're talking to the wrong person." Rachel starts to smile. "And you already said Magneto's telepaths aren't a patch on us." She glances toward Jean. "We could do it."
Jean gives Rachel a lopsided smile. "We could," she concedes. "And, I'll tell you, someone has got to stand up to Magneto. Because if he gets a firm base in Genosha, and can take over that island, he'll start expanding from there." Her smile has faded. "The fact is, if you only go by his words, by all the speeches he's made, you'd swear he was buiding a veritable utopia for mutants. But, if you look at his actions, it's quite the opposite. The future may not be written, yet, but if he keeps going like this, I can see all those dystopian apocalypses I keep hearing about becoming all too real." And she's not into that idea at all.
She steers the car along the exit to Connecticut, and glances at the time. She's not so much pressed for time as she is feeling it. 
"So, yes. I think we need to look."
It would be easy, wouldn't it, if those UN delegates or people close to them were being mind-controlled? If they could suddenly 'wake up' and undo the harm that's already been done? Sadly Rachel doesn't think it'll be that easy, but compared to the far more dangerous play they're making with Shift, and to which she's now considering herself an accomplice, it's a pleasant thought.
One that Rachel doesn't have time for right now. "So he's lying, and people are believing him because they want to be convinced? Because it's easier than standing up to him?" Rachel doesn't really know what she believes, but when Jean alludes to the various dark futures on offer, Rachel shakes her head grimly. "It's not going to happen. Not again." Rachel's eyes stray toward Jean again. "We're not going to let it, right?" Rachel doesn't want to feel like she's in this alone, and maybe neither does Jean.
It's never that easy. But, it'd be a start. And that's something. But, Jean nods to Rachel's initial words. "That about sums it up, yes. People want to believe him -- especially oppressed people. Ray, I've seen mutant concentration camps where people were gassed just for having the x-gene. We haven't gone as far as that here, but, is it any wonder mutants from places like Africa or Eastern Europe look so favourably upon him?" She gives a mild shrug, but there's no question in her mind about it. 
"There has to be an alternative. We just need to find it. Because, no. I have absolutely no intention of letting the apocalypse come to pass."
She gazes out at the road stretching before them, turns, and gives the other red head a tight smile. "First, however, let's just find Shift."
One problem at a time.
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