Note: This is set in Season 4, after "Uprising" and before "Cajun Spice". I actually started writing it back then, but shelved it until just recently. So it's been five, six years in the making. Yeah. Well. Better late than never, right? :)

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"Being red, she loves him best; and being white,
Her best is better'd with a more delight."

Venus and Adonis

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"Scott's missing."

The words, blurted out over the phone line without so much as a "hello" or "Merry Christmas" preceding them, made absolutely no sense to Jean. She stood with the phone poised at her ear, in the middle of her family's kitchen, with her mother and sister talking and laughing loudly over the music of a holiday CD in the living room. An entire long second passed. "I'm sorry?"

"Scott is missing," Rogue said again, louder, as though Jean was hard of hearing. "He's not at the Institute-"

Relief hit her with an almost physical blow; it was all a misunderstanding. Scott wasn't missing. Her Christmas vacation could go on just as pleasantly and smoothly as it had been before. "No, no," Jean said, correcting the other girl not unkindly, "he was going to come straight here after he got back from Hawaii."

"I know." Rogue's accent was thickening by the moment, a sure sign of her distress, and even as Jean tried to refute the possibility of Scott's disappearance, she knew that Rogue almost never got upset without due reason. "But he's not here at the airport-"

"You're at the airport?" Jean asked in surprise. Then she realized that the background noise on the line - halfway buried under the background noise from her family's celebrations - wasn't static, but the sounds of a crowded airport terminal.

"Yeah. My Christmas present to him - someone to pick him up." The tone was laced with accusatory venom. Jean had not been there to pick Scott up, and Jean was his girlfriend. The fact that Jean's plans had been in place for months, long before Alex's last-minute offer, evidently made no difference.

Jean said nothing, and after a moment Rogue exclaimed, impatient, "I've been here for two hours, his plane just landed, and Jean he is not on it!"

The older girl was still trying not to panic. In fact, she was trying to calmly reason things out the way Scott would have; her first inclination was blind terror. She clamped down on the fear and forced herself to think. "Well, have you called Alex? I mean, did Scott even leave on time?"

"I'm not-" Rogue bit off whatever she was going to say and restarted with, "Yes I called Alex. Alex said Scott made his flight."

"Couldn't he be stuck, in - in a layover?"

"Honolulu to New York non-stop. Jean, you've gotta come down here."

Jean glanced over her shoulder at her mother and sister, at the red-and-green, gold-tinsel splendor of the house. She hadn't spent any time with her family for months, not since the dual pressures of college and mutant crusading had cut back her vacation chances severely. "What about Storm or the professor? Aren't they-"

"The professor went off somewhere, and Storm went to visit her sister," Rogue said. Now she sounded more upset than angry or bitter, and her accent had taken over completely. "There wasn't nothing gonna happen except Scott comin' home."

Jean closed her eyes, breathing in the warm, soft scent of cinnamon and pine. Her father had joined in the conversation and the laughter had grown accordingly; there were presents under the big tree in the living room, and four glasses of eggnog imperceptibly souring on the counter two feet away, where she'd left them when the phone rang. 

No, she hadn't seen her family for months, and it was Christmas Eve - but they would just have to miss her.

Scott was the priority. He was always the priority.

"Give me five minutes," Jean told Rogue, "and I'll be on my way."