2013.07.27 - Put That Phoenix Down

It's mid-afternoon. The sky is that hazy overcast that sometimes happens in summer -- an almost perfectly white-grey sky with little wisps of underclouds that go scuttling along. It's bright enough to feel like a nice day in spite of the fact there's no direct sunlight. Lake birds cry out to one another, dipping and diving over the water. A light breeze stirs up a few waves and brings with it cooler air, making the day pleasantly mid-tempuratured instead of steaming hot. Even thehumidity seems down today. All in all... not too shabby. 
Jean Grey sits on the slope of the hill leading down to the shore, back against her favourite tree trunk, arms looped around her knees. She has left her almost ubiquitous tablet behind in her office or her room, and is actually, apparently, without anything else to distract her, other than the sights of the lake and the meadow.
 
Rachel Summers has had a busy couple of days, capped off with a very disturbed night's sleep. Old memories dredged up by her run-in with 'Inhibitor Prime' and what happened afterwards chased her through her dreams and prevented a restful night for her, and probably her room-mate as well. She's been conspicuous by her absence all morning, but a little after lunch she emerges from wherever she'd been hiding herself.
Still finding the mansion a little crowded, but mindful of the near-disastrous results of her last foray into the city, Rachel took to the grounds instead, and at length her wandering steps bring her to the shore of the lake. She's dressed in practical jeans and boots, another unconscious reaction to recent events, and her steps slow as she approaches the water. When things are this quiet, she wouldn't be much of a telepath if she didn't know she wasn't alone... and the constant trickle of power that leaks from her as she masks the brands on her face betray her to anyone who's paying attention.
Slowing to a stop on the slope, about level with Jean's tree, Rachel turns her head to look over at the older redhead. This is a meeting that was inevitable, but still one she has no idea how to play. Standing irresolute for a few seconds, she finally makes a small grimace to herself and then offers a wave to Jean.
The movement out of the corner of her eye, not to mention the sense of a 'talent' approaching, alerts Jean that her reverie must be abandoned. She turns her head, regards the other redhead for a moment, and pulls herself to her feet. "Hi," she greets, returning the wave with a small smile. She can sense the other woman's apprehension, read it in her body language. 
That small smile pulls wryly to one side. "Red hair. The feel of a telepath." A beat. She chuckles softly. "Let me guess: You're Rachel."
 
There's a small part of Rachel that hoped Jean would ignore her wave, but that reticent, apprehensive part of her is promptly drowned when Jean gets up and waves back. Rachel looks momentarily surprised, but then grins before she can stop herself. Getting her expression under control, she takes the few steps necessary to join Jean.
She actually laughs, although a bit nervously, as Jean drolly reveals that she knows exactly who Rachel is. One hand raises unconsciously to be run back through that red hair as it's mentioned, before Rachel stuffs her hands firmly in her pockets. "That's me." Rachel says simply, but can't quite leave it there. "Sorry, if it seems like I've been avoiding you..." She starts, then shakes her head and relaxes a bit as she realises she's being ridiculous. "...it's just that I've been avoiding you." She confesses with a slightly impish smile. "Kinda awkward." She admits. "But hi."
Jean shakes her head a little, somewhat to reassure the younger woman. Physically, only about 5 years separate them. But, it probably feels like more. "Not so awkward as you might think," she says easily, that wry smile still on her lips. "No need to apologize. Frankly, I'm inclined to a certain amount of avoidance, myself. I probably wouldn't even have actually realized who you were, except that I've had a few run-ins, lately, with time-lost Summers and Greys. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say." 
Her head cants slightly. "Which do you go by? Summers or Grey?"
And will she have to explain this to her parents...
 
The tension is leaving Rachel by degrees as Jean seems determined to put her at her ease. Rachel's problem is still the /lack/ of a physical age difference. Looking straight at a carbon copy of her mother who's simply too /young/ is disconcerting. "Yeah." Rachel replies equally wryly. "The way I thought this would go, in my head? You were still in denial at this point." Rachel's grin has crept back onto her face as she speaks, and she's not really trying to hide it any more.
As she relaxes, she takes her hands out of her pockets and loosely crosses her arms, shifting her weight to one leg to slouch more comfortably. "Hope." Rachel says with a nod, and an amused look in her eyes as she remembers that conversation. "She stopped running long enough to tell me that." She looks briefly curious, then adds, "Nate?" It has to be, really. Unless there are more that she /doesn't/ know about.
Slightly troubled by that possibility, Rachel's a little caught out by the question, but looks up and answers automatically. "Summers." She replies, with a silent 'of course', before she remembers this /isn't/ her world, and makes a vague gesture encompassing Jean and then toward the mansion. "Um, you and D... Scott." She confirms.
Hope. Nate. "Both," Jean confirms with a nod. "That was a bad day. I was fighting with Scott. Ran into Nate. And then Hope. All within hours of each other." She chuckles dryly. "So, you know. I've had time to come to terms." 
Summers. Good. She doesn't have to try to explain to her family, then. Awesome.
Again, another chuckle. "And, it seems, no matter which reality anyone comes in from... it's always Scott." As she says it, however, there's a softness in her eye. Apparently, she's not going to buck too much at that fact. Not, mind, that she could actually tell anyone what the current state of her relationship with the so-called 'first X-Man' is. They're getting along, currently. That's good enough. 
She glances about, looks at her tree, and gestures to it. "Sit with me?" Not a command, nor even a direct request, so much as it is a suggestion. She glances to the lake. "Or would you rather walk?" She'd be good with that, too. And, it might help with any lingering anxiety either might feel, just to be moving.
 
Rachel's eyebrows rise slightly. Nate /and/ Hope on the same day? Jean's head must have been spinning! Rachel winces in sympathy, "Ouch." She says, with feeling, but then adds, "If you survived them, I must be easy."
It's probably a good thing that Rachel's totally unaware of Jean's relief that she's not obligated to introduce her to the family, though.
Rachel tilts her head curiously when Jean mentions Scott, but since things are going wildly better than she'd expected she feels safe to be a little daring. "Hey, you could do worse!" There's definitely some mischief in her eyes now. "You and..." Rachel shakes her head sharply. "Sorry. My... you and Scott? They were pretty good to me." Definitely, definitely not an alley that Rachel wants to go down right now. She'd just got a little too comfortable for a moment, but now she's grateful when Jean changes the subject.
Whether Jean was thinking better of her earlier suggestion of not, Rachel's settling to the grass almost before the alternative is offered. "Here's great." She says, looking up and squinting a bit at the sunlight in her eyes. Drawing up one knee she drapes an arm comfortably around it, the other one propping her up. "I'd pretty much done a circuit of the grounds before I got here." She draws a deep breath and looks out at the lake. "Sometimes I can't believe I'm really here. That the old place is still..." She waves a hand. "Like this." She shrugs. "I feel like I'm about to wake up, when I'm here."
Yeah. That particular day, Jean felt like her head was going to explode. But, she doesn't dwell on it, any more. Bigger fish to fry and all that... Still, it causes her to flash a grin. "Easy?" she replies. Again, that dry chuckle. "Honey, right now, you're probably the most straightforward thing I have to deal with. So... yeah. If you want to put it like that, sure." Then, she shrugs, dismissing it. "Joys of being an X-Man."
She doesn't pursue the question of Scott further, however. It's still a subject she's feeling her way through on her own, without adding temporal complications to it. Despite the fact that all 3 time-lost Summers/Greys insist she and Scott somehow end up together, Jean refuses to have her future dictated to her. She'll figure it out on her own, thankyouverymuch. "I'll take that under advisement," she says with a wry smile.
She lowers herself back onto the grass as Rachel does. Her knees come back up and she settles her back once more against the trunk. This time, she only drapes one arm over her knees, rather than both. She listens to the girl's musings and gives an oblique cant of her head back and forth. "I can imagine," she concedes. "I expect I'd feel the same way. We always grasp on to the familiar, when we can. Especially when life takes a sudden left turn. There are days I've felt like that, too."
Given she's still dealing with the aftermath of waking up after the supposed 'death' of the Dark Phoenix, yeah. She actually gets it. Different context, same effect.
 
Rachel looks frankly disbelieving as Jean takes her joke about being the easy option as truth, just for a moment, but then looks down and chuckles a bit to herself before glancing up again, a bit of a gleam in her eyes, "So that's what I signed up for, when Kitty moved me in?" It's a rhetorical question, she's not looking for an answer, she's just amused at herself for being so self-important. These are the X-Men. An extra redhead around the place isn't going to cause them too much trouble.
As Jean deftly dodges Rachel's implied relationship advice, Rachel looks amused, not to mention a bit wistful, but she doesn't try to push her vision of the way things should be onto Jean. "Okay." She says, after a slight pause, and in a tone that's a little bit more sober, to show that she understands... at least for now.
Rachel remains looking out at the lake as Jean sits back down, thinking about her own words and wondering how much she does believe that she's not actually dreaming. Outside the Mansion, with the others, it was almost like she was back 'home', where you did what you had to do to survive and didn't think too hard about it. These peaceful surroundings feel as distinct from that as they do to her own world. She is listening when Jean speaks, though, and looks back at her when she's finished. "Then maybe..." She says, uncertainty in her tone and eyes, before she rallies again and just asks. "Maybe you can help me? Since I've come here, my memories? ...it's like a hall of mirrors in here, and they're all smashed. I remember being fourteen, and I remember..." She swallows, eyes skittering away from Jean for a moment before returning. "Some things that happened right after, but then? It's all just fragments and images."
She goes quiet for a few seconds, then speaks more quickly, almost rushing in case Jean's going to interrupt. "And that's not all. My powers...? They're like yours. Only... when I'm tired? Or when I really /push/? It's like not all the strength is /me/." She fumbles for the words. "It's like... fire, flowing through me, but not burning me. Like I've dipped my fingers in a sea of fire. And it..." Rachel shivers. "It knows my name." She shifts position, as if she's about to get up. "Sorry, I must sound like I've lost my mind..."
Jean eyes the other redhead sidelong as she asks her to sort out her memories for her. She inhales a breath to answer... 
But then the kid goes on to talk about powers that she knows are symptomatic of the Phoenix Entity. The breath comes out in a whoosh, her lungs -- her whole body, really -- deflating. "Wow..." she says softly, raising a hand to rake it through her long hair. "You really must be my daughter, then." 
She holds up a hand, palm up, fingers very loosely curled. Her eyes glow golden for a moment and flames sparkle on her fingertips and lick over her hand and down her arm. "Look kinda familiar?" she asks, her voice layered with the faintest of telepathic harmonics. 
Truthfully, it's more a projection than a manifestation, but the intent is the same, nonetheless. To find out if the girl really is walking in her footsteps. 
Yeah. That's just what Jean wants to see. 
 
Rachel arrests her hurried scrabble to get up when she hears Jean's quiet words, and carefully lowers herself back down again, caution in her eyes as she watches Jean react to what, now she thinks about it, Rachel has to admit were a couple of big asks in a very short space of time. Rachel's about to answer, desperate to say something flippant about being Jean's daughter and restore the easy mood that had grown between them, but she stills when Jean raises her hand. She started this, she can't back out now.
As the fire springs up around Jean's hand, and her voice changes, it's Rachel's turn to draw in a breath. Sharp, startled. Yes, she clearly recognises the effect. But she doesn't answer verbally for the moment, instead shifting to sit cross-legged on the grass and taking a quick, calming breath. Her eyes close, and she reaches for the power she's touched before. She's not as skilled, not as controlled. There's a sudden heaviness in the air, and the grass around her flutters in an unfelt breeze - but then there's fire crawling across Rachel's body, and when she opens her eyes, they're the blank, white-heat of a blast furnace. "You tell me." She says, her voice equally augmented, and she lifts her hand, fingertips brushing Jean's as the flames brush against one another.
As the whisper of cosmic energies blows over the grass and crawls over Rachel's skin, Jean releases her manifestation. "Let it go," she tells the other telepath, her voice and appearance normal, now, though her tone is low and direct. 
Again, that slow inhalation of breath, followed by a heavy exhale -- though this time both are far more controlled than before. Her smile is smaller, now, a little more wry than before, and her eyes have lost their twinkle in favour of a serious glint. "If you don't yet have a name for it," she notes, "that, my friend, is a taste of the power embodied by the Phoenix Entity." A beat. "Although, I suppose it's more of a 'force', now, than a true 'entity'." She glances away, her eyes trailing over the shore and up into the sky as she looks around at the idyllic surroundings that no longer feel so calming to her. She returns her gaze to the girl who would be her daughter. 
"If you're smart," she says now, "you'll access it as little as you possibly can. That thing killed billions of people." Her eyes close. "I killed billions of people with that thing. Or, at least," her eyes reopen, "part of me did." 
The smile she gives now -- and the fact she gives any semblance of one at all actually shows just how far she's come since she first woke up -- is rueful, dark, and self-mocking. "Sure, technically, I was actually at the bottom of a bay, wrapped in a cocoon, healing from what should have been fatal injuries while the Phoenix pranced around in a facsimile of my body so no one would realize I was dead, but..." She shrugs. "It had an imprint, however ultimately imperfect, of my personality, my emotions, and a small sliver of my consciousness. Those are what drove it off the rails. So... yeah. My fault."
She gives the girl a direct look. "That power? Bad news." She rolls her head somewhat. "Seductive. Sometimes really useful. But, somehow, it feels like a deal with the devil." A beat. She chuckles. "Phenomenal cosmic power; itty-bitty living space. Really not worth the consequences."
It's possible that one day she'll understand it better and change her mind. Right now? Still dealing with the fallout. After the day she had yesterday? Really wanting to distance herself from it.
 
Rachel, even caught up in the power that's rushing into her, hears the tone of warning in Jean's voice, and knows that it's not a suggestion. She squeezes her eyes closed again, almost reluctant since everything seems brighter and more vibrant with the power in her, and releases her hold on it. Instantly the world seems a little smaller and darker, but when Rachel blinks her eyes open they're green again. She sighs a little at the loss, but her eyes are fixed intently on Jean.
Jean's disquiet is obvious, and Rachel stays silent while Jean names the power that she'd just touched. Her curiosity is obvious, and while there's unease, there's none of the fear that she should feel. Not until Jean continues, and talks about killing. Rachel's breath catches in her throat and her eyes widen. She doesn't believe it...! Except, somehow, she does. Now the fear is in her eyes as she watches Jean mutely. That Jean, or a part of Jean, could fall? Rachel's lost her free will to others before, done things she'll never forgive herself for, and if /Jean/ couldn't master this power, what chance does she have?
When Jean finally finishes, Rachel realises she's been holding her breath for far too long, frozen in place, and draws in a gulp of air as she's finally released. She swallows hard before she manages to answer. "There was always something." She says softly. "Something you... something /she/ wasn't telling me, something I was too young to know about. Something she'd tell me when I was older. She never got the chance, but now I know what it was." Rachel's eyes are still wide, still struggling with what she's been told. But then her gaze sharpens on Jean, and her voice sounds a bit less shellshocked. "I don't - wont' - believe you were responsible for all that death." Rachel says, the clearest and most direct words she's dared use to Jean. "Whatever this thing, this Phoenix copied, it missed the best bit of you. Believe me. I know." Her words are firm, as is the utter belief in her eyes when she says them.
Rachel's certainty doesn't last long, though, not when she looks at herself. "Everything else? I do believe you. I understand, and I won't go looking for it. Only..." Rachel catches her lower lip between her teeth, a nervous reaction that belongs on someone much younger. "I've never really /tried/ to reach out to it, before today. It's always just... come to me. And sometimes..." She winces. "It gets out of my control." Rachel sits up straighter and stops beating about the bush. "Jean, I don't have any right to ask this, but my formal training for dealing with this..." Rachel waves a hand vaguely at her head, but meaning her powers, "Ended when I was fourteen." Suddenly she smiles, again, for the first time since things got serious. It's small, but genuine, and hopeful. "Could you handle a student?"
Rachel's unwavering belief -- be it a conscious decision on her part or a little girl's stubborn refusal to believe anyone she might love could be evil -- is actually, surprisingly (from Jean's point of view), encouraging to the older telepath. And, some of her tension drains with that assertion. She even smiles. (Particularly when the girl finally remembers to breathe.) 
What's more, she weighs what Rachel has said, and it's not long before she nods. "Of course," she smiles. She gestures, flipping her hand in a way that encompasses the grounds. "This is a school, after all. And..." She gives a rueful shrug, here. "There isn't anyone I can think of other than Magneto himself--" whom she'd prefer the girl avoid like the plague-- "who can give you the best pointers for dealing with this sort of thing." A dry chuckle. "Not, mind, that I can promise you gold. My own track record is a little... spotty, to say the least." 
Nevertheless, she's willing. "Could be, if we practice together, we can help each other, eh?" She's not blind to the realities of the Phoenix. "The fact is, I don't think the Phoenix is going away. If you can access it that easily," just as she knows she can, "then it's as much a part of you as it is me. It's better to learn control -- physically, emotionally, mentally... spiritually -- than it is to just trust to chance."
Her smile turns almost coy and she confesses. "Besides. Honestly? It would be nice to have someone to talk to about some of this. It's not something most people will intuitively understand." 
A beat. "And, yes. If I can, I'll help you sort through those memories. They might help, too."
Rachel's belief in Jean? It's both of those things, mortified though she'd be to admit how much of that little girl is still in her, when it comes to Jean - even a Jean that's not really hers.
She waits, not quite as breathlessly as before but close, for Jean to give her answer - and when it comes, the answering grin from Rachel is broad and immediate. She hadn't wanted to deal with this on her own, and if it means going back to school? Well, Refugee Guerilla Fighter From The Future wasn't a job she applied for, it was more thrust upon her. She'll happily put it down for a while - particularly since she's not been having much luck with it lately. Magneto, though, Rachel blinks and looks distant for a moment when he's mentioned. There's an image in her mind, an older, white-haired man in a wheelchair, but it's gone, slipping through her fingers as they often do, and a small frown mars her expression. "I'll make Magneto my second choice, then." Rachel says, almost teasingly, a lot of her good humour restored by Jean's agreement, though she shakes her head at what she sees as the older woman's false modesty, that belief in her bleeding through again.
Rachel nods ready agreement to practicing with Jean. "As long as it's somewhere I can't break anything." She says, the humour in the words a little dark and rueful. "The Danger Room might be good, for starters..." She muses, but quietens when she realises Jean's not finished. "I don't want it to control me." Rachel says seriously, and adds, "I'm not going to /let/ it control me." Which sounds like something she's telling herself rather than Jean.
Finally, though, her smile returns in answer to Jean's. "We have to have the unique problems, right?" She suggests, before snorting quietly to herself. "Or not so unique after all." Her eyes flicker up to fix on Jean's again. "Thank you. For everything. I won't let you down." Wherever that last bit came from, it's seems important to Rachel, from the sudden, almost grim, determination in her voice.
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