Notes: This is AU in that it makes absolutely no sense with the timeline. It's something I imagine could (should) have happened after X2, had Jean survived. Also I'm no great fan of hers, as will probably be clear.
Sometimes two people could live in the same house, work in the same place, sleep in the same bed, eat at the same table—sometimes two people lived their lives side by side and had barely a thing to do with one another. In fairness, their schedules did not much overlap. They had their sporadic nighttime work, but outside of their spandex adventures she was a night owl, a doctor whose research could wait; he was an early bird schoolteacher.
Scott realized he rarely saw Jean anymore. There were distances that always needed to exist between them. It had been decades since his last… ocular accident… but he still slept facing the window. He got it: women like to cuddle. He couldn't. But she used to sleep against him anyway. He used to hold her hand.
"Jean?"
"What are you doing here?"
It was not a friendly question. When he made his way to the lab it was usually on a direct order involving a broken bone or five, blood loss… not healthy and whole as he looked now.
A moment later, "Don't you have a class?"
"It's break."
"Oh."
"I thought we could talk."
"I'm busy, can it wait?"
"It's five minutes, Jean, please."
"I know, but I'm busy."
Scott's jaw twitched. It was brief, a second, something she only would have seen if she had looked up at that moment.
Or if she had been looking at him.
"You know, Jean, it—" Scott began, then stopped himself. He didn't like that tone.
But he meant what he had wanted to say: it would be nice to think you would say that to anyone.
He took a breath. "This is important to me."
He had no idea what she was doing, but he knew she wasn't feeling what he felt. Her heart wasn't torn between twisting and pounding, pained and anxious. Not that he showed it, unless you knew that he tilted his wrist inward when he was upset.
Or pained.
Or anxious.
She looked at him, more than three seconds for the first time in…
"Okay. What is it?"
"Do you love me?"
She slid her glasses off and set them beside a tray of medical jargon. "What kind of question is that?"
"I imagine it's the kind of question people only ask when they have to."
"I… yes, I love you."
The pause was too much, too telling. Scott lowered his head.
Jean sighed. "Logan."
He nodded.
"He has feelings for me. That's not something I can control."
"I'm not asking you to control his feelings. If he has feelings for you, even if you have feelings for him—it is what it is."
She did have feelings for Logan, but attraction wasn't cheating. Logan was different, that was all. He was assertive and forward, traits Jean did not want to like in men but did, anyway. He was everything Scott wasn't. Not that she disliked Scott, but sometimes, well, a person can't control her thoughts.
"That's it? It is what it is?" she asked. Jean shook her head and a tendril of hair slipped loose. "Do you love me, Scott?"
"I'll always love you. I'd prefer if you moved your things—I have classes for the rest of the day. It's Tuesday, so I'll have study hall and then Danger Room in the evening. It's Ororo's, but I can take over, she'll understand. You can keep the room, if you like, but I'm busy at least until after study hall."
She gaped at him. Decades they had been together. Since they were teenagers. Something was falling apart, the floor was trying to buck her off like a mechanical bull, and he wanted to discuss logistics?
"Do you love me?"
Simply, aggravatingly, "I love you."
"Then why do you accept that? How can you accept—"
He was doing that thing with his wrist, but it was twitching now.
"What do you think it's like for me?" she asked. "You are leaving me because I look at Logan, what do you think it's like for me that you spend so much time with a beautiful woman?" For years, she had endured that. She didn't understand why it was different for her to look elsewhere.
"What—Ororo? Jean, you know that she's a le—that she's my foster-sister. How could I even think about her that way?"
His arguments were always so dratted logical, but they never assuaged her feelings.
It wasn't wrestling, it was sparring.
"How could you not?"
They weren't 'out together', it was reconnaissance.
Scott opened his mouth, closed it again.
Yes, they were hanging out, but they were friends. Why shouldn't they?
Jean was petty and jealous and she knew it. She never wanted Scott to accept that about her; she wanted to change it. But she wanted him to understand it.
He shook his head. "This isn't about you loving Logan, Jean. It's not even about you kissing Logan."
Jean rested her hand on the table, aiming for subtlety. She missed. She missed the side of the table, too, knocking the lab tray to the floor.
She closed her eyes, unable to move, so Scott came in and began picking up her work.
"I thought you wanted to be with me."
"I do. I want to be with you. More than anything in the world, and I will always love you. But you've made another choice."
Scott stood, uncomfortably close to Jean. She could almost feel his pulse.
"I want you to be with me, Jean, but only because you want it. I'd rather be alone than settled for."
He knew how to hold things in, but his wrist was twitching and his voice nearly shaking.
"I have to go—third period in four minutes. Do what you like with the ring."
Jean managed to keep upright as Scott walked away from her. She managed to say something, too, but she didn't know what she was doing. She didn't know if she wanted to be with Scott. That was the problem, she hadn't known for a long time.
"What kind of man doesn't fight for what he loves?"
He paused.
She didn't want him to pause. A woman would have run away, which she would have preferred with the tears tugging at her eyes.
Whatever sort of man he was, Scott was a man. He turned around. "I could give you a dozen metaphors. You're the sun and the moon and the stars. You're not a prize, though. You're not some thing to be won but a person who deserves respect and consideration. You made a choice."
Did she?
"I respect that."
He left then.
For the first time in decades, Jean was alone.
The End