Minisinoo
Warning: This is a mood piece. One mention of sex, but nothing I'd consider 'adult'. There are some medical issues addressed that might trouble the squeamish or those with a personal investment.
Notes: The song that Scott sings is Mary Chapin Carpenter's "This Is Love" off Stones in the Road. As usual, Crys is my oracle for medical details. Naomi has not edited this (yet) so blame all grammar errors on me.
Jean first noticed the lump while showering.
She didn't think much of it, at the time. She was only nineteen years old; why would she grant more than passing interest to a lump no bigger than a pea near the surface of her breast? She'd had moles of varying sizes since she was a teen, and took this for yet another, colorless. Or maybe a little gland infection. It was winter and she was getting over a cold. Anyway, nothing to write home about.
But it didn't turn dark, and it didn't go away. She noticed it again two months later as spring neared, and thought it might be a bit larger, but couldn't be sure. She dismissed it once more.
On her twentieth birthday, while Logan made love to her in his bed, he remarked on the hard spot under his fingers and tongue. Later, cleaning up in the bathroom, she examined her breast with careful palpations Her fingers were shaking. The lump was now the size of a small marble, unyielding under pliant flesh. She ignored it for two more weeks, hiding her fears even from Xavier by willful forgetfulness.
But it was a selective forgetfulness. It still allowed her to make a doctor's appointment at a local clinic, and keep it.
The doctor was a woman. She had red hair, like Jean, and glasses, too. Her name was Juliana Markle. And she took the lump very seriously indeed. After examining Jean's right breast, she numbed the area with a local anesthesia and inserted a needle to see if the lump might be only a fluid-filled cyst.
No fluid came out.
So Markle sent Jean down the hall to wait outside the clinic x-ray room. The air was cold, and raised goosebumps on Jean's arms. She rubbed them as she watched people come and go. All women. How odd to be surrounded by women when most of her life was spent surrounded by men, Ororo aside. She was so damn tired of finding the toilet seat up.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, the technician -- another woman -- arrived to take her inside, stand her up before the mammogram machine and squash her breasts as flat as a pancake, one at a time, to take x-ray images. Jean might have found it funny had it been less uncomfortable, and had she been less shocky with fear.
When the mammogram was over, she was sent back to the exam room to wait, and checked her watch. She'd been here almost an hour and a half. So much for lunch.
The doctor returned finally and took a seat beside her. Jean didn't have to touch her mind to read her face. "We need to schedule a biopsy and lumpectomy," Markle said, voice gentle. "It can be done as an outpatient procedure at the hospital. We'll put you under general anesthesia, then make a small slit in the skin of the breast to remove the lump. That will be analyzed for malignant tissue and if such is found, we'll do hormone tests and biopsy your lymph nodes."
Sitting on the cold chair, hands clasped between her knees, Juliana Markle's words passed by Jean Grey like dandelion seeds in a summer wind. Light and soft and full of a promise for weeds. "I'm only twenty," she said. Her voice was tight. She had to swallow three times just to get the words out. "I only turned twenty two weeks ago."
"The lump may still prove to be benign. But we need a biopsy to be sure. If it is malignant, the earlier we catch it, the better."
They talked more, talked for twenty minutes. Then Markle gave Jean pamphlets and photocopied instructions for outpatient surgery. The appointment was made.
Jean went home. Xavier knew immediately that something was wrong, but let her be. She'd talk to him when she was ready. She walked through the mansion without speaking to anyone, up to her room. After dropping her purse there, she fled to the dock over the lake. It was late April but unusually warm, almost muggy. She could smell the overpowering perfume of crape jasmine and dying cherry blossoms. Petals from the cherries made swirling clouds, kissing her hair with pure white. So beautiful and brief. The afternoon sun beat down like a cross-examination. But the jury was still out. She sat on the dock, lotus style, while the sun went down behind her and threw her shadow long over the weathered wood.
It was almost dark, the last gasp of sunlight glittering red-gold on the lake, when she heard feet approaching across deck wood.
Not Logan. She was glad. And that bothered her. But feelings weren't subject to reason, and the fear of death ran strong in her, washing against her mind like the tide. Swell and retreat, swell and retreat. How could an undying man understand that? The one who came now was as mortal as she, and as deep and quiet as the ocean. He could withstand the tide.
He didn't say anything, just eased himself down beside her. They sat in silence until it was full dark, then she scooted in against his side, telling herself it was the spring night chill that made her do it. He accepted her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. She laid her head on his chest. "Sing for me, Scott."
When she'd first come here and the voices in her head had overwhelmed, he'd used to sing her to sleep. His voice had given her something on which to focus. Now, he sang her favorite song from that time:
"If you ever need to hear a voice in the middle of the nightWhen it seems so black outside that you can't remember light
Ever shone on you or the ones you love in this or another lifetime
And the voice you need to hear is the true and the trusted kind
With a soft, familiar rhythm in these swirling, unsure times
When the waves are lapping in and you're not sure you can swim
Well, here's the lifeline.
And if you ever need to feel a hand take up your own
When you least expect but want it more than you've ever known
Baby here's that hand and baby here's my voice that's calling,
This is love, all it ever was and will be, this is love."
She wasn't sure when she started to cry but he realized it before she did, stopping the song to wipe her face gently with his fingers. She felt his lips at her temple -- just a light brush -- and finally gave in, turning to weep on his neck. He held her, rocking her. "I'm here, Jean."
Of course he was; he always had been. She clutched him tightly and wished she could have loved him better. After a long time, the tears slacked off, then ceased. She raised her face to see his. In the dark, the red behind his visor glowed softly, like a single firefly. Lonely. "I went to the doctor today," she whispered in the dark, vocalization stolen by the anxiety that pumped her heart and stopped her breath. Perhaps if it wasn't truly voiced, it couldn't truly be. "A women's clinic. I have a lump in my right breast. The doctor wants to do a biopsy. It'll just be outpatient surgery, but I'll have to go under. They'll cut it -- " Her voice caught and she stopped, took three breaths and began again. "They'll cut out the lump, and test it. They'll have the results in a few days."
He didn't say anything to that, just pulled her back down against him instead. His grip was strong, both arms wrapped around her as if he could hold off whatever might come. After perhaps ten minutes, she twisted free and raised his hand to her breast, showing him where the lump was. This wasn't, she was sure, the way or reason he'd first hoped to touch her there. He was gentle, tentative like a dream, careful as if she were as fragile as blown glass, chippable on the edges. After a moment, he pulled his hand down and asked, "Do you want me to go with you? Or would you rather Logan, or maybe Ro -- "
"No -- you. I want you."
"Okay."
Two days later, they sat for an hour and a half in an impersonal waiting room. Steel blue seats and pale grey walls. She tried to read gossip columns in month-old issues of People . Scott didn't even try. He just twisted up a copy of Motortrend in his big hands until the pages curled. No one but the professor knew where they were today, not even Logan. She hadn't been able to tell him, had barely spoken to him since the appointment, though she knew it confused and hurt him. But Logan's appeal lay in the danger of his person. He thrilled because he was a risk. Suddenly her life was full of risks of the normal kind, risks she was afraid to name lest she make them real.
If it was malignant, would she lose her hair to chemo? Would she lose her breast to surgery?
Would she lose her life?
So she sat in the waiting room with the safest person she knew, the one she could tell her secrets to and know they'd be kept. He held her hands when she couldn't keep them still. "They're cold," he said.
"I'm nervous."
"It's going to be okay, Jean."
"What if it isn't?"
"That doesn't sound like you. You're the fighter."
Can't I be scared? she snapped back in his head, and felt him flinch. "Sorry."
"No need. And I didn't mean the biopsy. I meant it's going to be okay in the end. Whatever the tests show. You're the strongest person I know."
She laughed at that, coming from him. It was ridiculous. The bedrock telling an aurora borealis that she'd withstand the centuries. She was bright, but she was fleeting and knew it. Ethereal. Beautiful. Transient. He'd be there tomorrow and the next day and the next year. She might not.
"Jean Grey?" a nurse's voice called as the waiting room door opened. It seemed louder than it was, like gunshot in the night.
For whom the bell tolls,
Jean thought, and then wondered if she'd thought it too loudly. Scott's
face had blanched. She slipped her hands out of his and followed the nurse.
Three days later, she returned to the clinic for a check-up, to be sure the area of the incision was healing properly. After the nurse had verified that, the doctor called her into an office and sat her down in a chair. Scott came with her. He held her hand.
"Your test results came back this morning, Jean," Juliana Markle said from behind the impersonal safety of her big walnut desk. "I'm sorry. The biopsy did show a malignancy in the mammary duct tumor that we removed, and in the lymph nodes beneath your right arm. But there were no other tumors revealed by the mammogram, and only one set of nodes was involved, so it's an early stage two ductul carcinoma, not far reaching at this point -- which is good news. Recommended treatment at this point includes chemotherapy for six months, to be certain all the cancer in the nodes is eradicated, and then a follow up of radiation to the afflicted breast . . . . "
Jean couldn't hear the rest. Oh, she could hear that the doctor was still talking, hear the woman's voice forming syllables that formed words that formed sentences and sense. But it all tumbled together in her head like unsorted laundry, or one of those frozen mixed vegetable packages that plopped icy into the frying pan in an undifferentiated, multicolored lump.
A lump. She'd had a lump in her breast. And it was malignant.
Malignant.
Cruel.
She was twenty years old and she had breast cancer. Life was a mystery.
Beside her, she could hear the soft baritone of Scott's voice asking the questions she couldn't ask because she'd forgotten how to speak like she'd forgotten how to hear. But he was listening. He'd remember, and he'd help her understand it later, a little at a time as she was able. He'd help her make the choices she'd have to make.
She would lose her hair.
She might lose her breast. She wrapped arms around her body, across her chest.
And her life?
"What's the survival rate?" she blurted suddenly, interrupting whatever they'd been saying.
The doctor folded her hands on her desk and actually smiled. How could the woman smile? "Since it's early stage two, I'd say the survival rate for five years is seventy to seventy-five percent. Not quite as good as for stage one, but very promising."
Promising. The word roared in her ears. Three in four lived.
One in four died.
What was so goddamn promising about that?
She hugged herself tighter. When the visit was over, Scott took her hand and led her out, as if she were a child. She heard him say, softly, the same thing he'd said in the hospital waiting room: "It's going to be okay, Jean. You're the strongest person I know."
She brushed it off. "I should go see my parents. I have to tell them. I didn't tell them until I knew for sure, but I have to tell them now. Will you come with me?"
"Of course. Just give the word when you want to go. Tell me what you need. I'm here."
"Okay," she replied, and gripped his hand. Hard. They took three steps. And there in the clinic hall, on the other side of the results, she suddenly found herself staring into blank white uncertainty. The world disappeared, and between one step and the next, she collapsed.
Scott Summers caught her on the way down.
Feedback always welcome, either as a review or directly to minisinoo@yahoo.com
And no, there is no sequel planned. I've got enough to write already. ;
begin public service announcement Ladies, please do your monthly breast exams, no matter how young you are, and regardless of whether anyone in your family has had cancer. Go for your annual pap smear, too, while we're at it. end of public service announcement
You can read more Ultimate X-Men
fanfiction at The Medicine Wheel
http://www.greymalkinlane.com/min