what you don't say

Summary: Too many classics will melt your brain.

Prompt: milliways_bar DE Challenge
Recipient: Ceitfianna
Summary: Charles & Jean; what you don't say
Disclaimer: Jean Grey is from current comicsverse and Charles is from the beginning of X-Men: First Class. This takes place in the wonderful, beautiful milliways_bar.

.

.

.

She'd laughed at the Rebecca reference, giving him a look he so rarely got to see given how often they talked across places but seldom in the same room, and seldom in the same space in a room even.

"Would you have me by more like Mrs. de Winter?"

He was still smiling at her teasing, but he'd set his hands on his knees. "I meant more that what it seems what I know of you is shaped by the things I don't know, more than the ones I do."

The smile stays tucked into one side of her mouth, even when it becomes a small sigh, and her green eyes go to the plucked grass still being twirled between her fingers. "You know I would answer any question you decided to finally ask."

The acknowledgement is more a thought in his thoughts to himself, not directed at him. His forray toward seriousness follows hers. "The same as you know I'd only have you tell me what you'd want me to know."

But they both know it isn't as simple as that either. He'd still like to live his life, free to experience it as a book where the last chapters have not been spoiled. Even if it might be another book. One alike, but not exact.

Jean considered it, before wrinkling her nose, glancing from the grass which brushes her cheek and mouth, to him across her shoulder again. "You should be careful what you ask for. I am not one to have been contented with only burning down the house."

There is always something of an affectionate child in her, when he has the chance to see her. And something wilder, bigger. A dichotomy that shifts effortlessly before him. "No? Something bigger?"

"A whole world, once?" She said a little more somberly. Eyes of emerald fire, and yet the expression of a woman who could be so young, so completely open even in her secerts. Waiting to judged, as though he and only he could. (Again.) "Though it was both me, and not me. More like...a shadow of myself, that hadn't found its way yet."

He took a moment, trying to process the seriousness of it, and severity. The careful way she put it, phrasing it as thought it was long past, and even more removed. Before he simply asked, a little wryly and gentle, "Are you sure you aren't a Rebecca, then?"

Jean rolled her eyes, setting her chin back on one hand as she laughed unexpectedly and tossed the grass at him with the other. "Too many classics will melt your brain."