Jean might have been able to hold Ryan down on her own by telekinesis, but somehow she didn't quite dare. Time was she'd have been confident restraining anyone and known she wouldn't hurt them. But she didn't feel she knew her own strength at the moment, and she was having… accidents. Like the levitating chair, like eavesdropping without meaning to, like waking up to find something on the nightstand beside her was facing a different way. But she always regained control. She was stronger. She could fight this. She could beat it.
She drew up a dose of flumazenil. You had to be careful with this stuff. But in Ryan's case he might die if she didn't use it. He'd need repeated doses, he'd need very careful monitoring for hours, he might need holding down. She walked back to his side. He was still breathing, but badly, very badly. His O2 sat was still okay, but only just, and it was falling. This would probably go better if she managed to convince everyone else she was confident that she'd made the right call. She strode back to Ryan and sunk the drug in to his IV port.
,
At first, it all seemed to be going exactly as she'd have wanted it to. Ryan's breathing got stronger, his reflexes started to come back, she took him off the oxygen, but left the tube in until he started trying to swallow it. Of course, the other problem with using flumazenil was that if that wore off before the rohypnol did and he stopped breathing again, it would be nearly impossible to get the tube back down him. She beckoned his mother over once he started to look like he might open his eyes. The two of them sat there, talking to him reassuringly. He was coming. If anything, he was coming too fast. If she'd been waking him up from anything other than a drug overdose, she'd have thought about giving him a phenothiazide to smooth things over.
When he started to move purposefully, she had an inkling there might be trouble ahead. When he started to try to speak, she knew they were in trouble. He was trying to get up, for all she was telling him not to, trying to shout. She stood up and took hold of his shoulder, trying to push him back down.
"Don't try to get up. You won't manage it."
He shouted incoherently and hit out at her, fortunately he was still far too doped to do more than brush her face with his knuckles.
"Okay, we hold him."
The others were already stepping forward. She and Bobby took an arm each and pinned the boy. He drew his legs up – yes, he could bend – and tried to kick Jean and Bobby in the head, but Scott and Logan were already there, pulling his legs down, holding them. Ryan was yelling incoherently, struggling madly, joints dislocating and reducing with every movement. Even by flumazenil standards, this was not a good recovery.
"Logan, take both his legs, Scott, come here." Both of them did as she said.
"I think I can see why you didn't suggest this with Logan." Scott said as he took Ryan's arm from her. Ryan's mother was still trying to calm him down. She didn't seem to be having much of an impact. "I've seen you sedate people before when stuff like this happens." Scott said after a second. "Is that not…"
"No. Not when over-sedation is the problem we're trying to correct. If he were genuinely a danger to us or to himself I would, but he's not, so we'll just hold him down for five minutes. It'll pass." Or she sincerely hoped it would.
She took a step back. A patient with an anaesthetic overdose was a compromised patient. As such, she didn't dare use alpha-2 agonists or phenothiazides to quiet him down. Maybe at a really, really low dose, she could get away with phenothiazides. She hated to have a kid in her infirmary under her care looking this distressed. But she risked doing horrible things to his blood pressure. Benzodiazepines and phenothiazides would both drop his blood pressure, she might do irreparable damage to his kidneys if she tried to relieve the distress. The distress wouldn't last. She had to bear it. And she had to convince everyone else in the room that it really was the best option. Could her power help him? She might be able to graft calm on to the boy. She'd only attempted to graft emotions once, other than on The Professor to practice, she'd never tried to fight a pharmacological effect like that, she'd never even tried to do a detailed read on someone who was sedated. She didn't know what she'd find. Even keeping hold of Logan when he'd been drugged had been a real struggle.
,
But Ryan was settling. He was struggling less viciously, though his joints were still popping about in unexpected ways.
"Mom?" He managed after a minute or two.
"I'm here, Ryan. I'm here."
"What's happening?" He sounded terrified.
"Let him go." Jean said quietly. Scott, Bobby and Logan took their hands off the boy and stepped back.
"I took you to a doctor." Mrs Tang was saying. "I couldn't wake you. You stopped breathing."
"Two people can go." Jean said, only to the X-men, and Bobby. He wasn't officially one of them yet, but she knew Scott wanted him on board. "Even if we have to do rounds of that, he's not that strong."
"I'm staying." Bobby said at once.
"You don't have to prove anything to us." Scott said. "Go enjoy the sunshine."
"No, I want to." Bobby said. "And… I'm glad to be out of the sun for a bit."
Logan snorted. "Do you melt?"
"No. I just prefer it when it's not a hundred degrees."
"Am I gonna be okay?" Ryan asked.
"Yes." Mrs Tang looked up at Jean for confirmation.
"You should be." Jean said. Medical school trained you never to promise one result or another. "All the others have been so far."
"Yes." Mrs Tang said again. "You're going to be okay Ryan." That wasn't what Jean had said.
"I have a stack of essays to mark." Storm said quietly, taking a step towards the door.
"We don't need five of us, go." Jean said. Storm went. Jean looked at the remaining three. This was going to turn in to a stand off. Bobby wouldn't leave because he was trying to show Scott he'd be a good X-man (which Scott had already decided), then Logan and Scott would refuse to back down to each other. Not her problem. But it really wasn't good for them to fight in front of Bobby.
"Mom, where am I?"
"Xavier's School for gifted youngsters." Jean said, walking back towards Ryan. He was her problem. "Such as yourself."
"What's wrong with me?" His heart rate was high now. Anxiety. Flumazenil almost always causes anxiety. He'd be okay.
"You were dosed with a sedative." Jean said. "My guess is you were given the dose for a full grown man, so we had to treat you. We've given you the antidote, but the antidote makes you feel scared when there's no reason to be. I want you to remember that what you feel is the side effect of a drug. It isn't justified, it isn't rational."
"Am I going to be okay?" Ryan repeated.
"Yes."
,
"So now we have four." Charles said, looking around at his X-men. Jean had sent young Mr. Tang home around fifteen minutes ago. She was… unsettled. Disquieted somehow. Perhaps it was tiredness. He imagined that being presented with a patient you'd never seen before who wasn't breathing was stressful, stress was tiring. He hoped it was tiredness. Logan was also less than perfectly calm, but he was as calm as he ever was. Charles suspected that living on the run for over a decade had made it impossible for Logan to ever fully relax. He lived on edge, always wary. Scott and Storm were reassuringly calm and focused. They were here to discuss a threat as the X-men and find a way forward.
"Six." Storm said. "I asked around. Two other mutants in the state at least have had it happen to them in the past month. Still fits the pattern. Men, out in public somewhere, eating or drinking something, they pass out, they wake up somewhere else and can't remember anything."
"Either way, we may confidently call it an epidemic now. And we still have no idea who's orchestrating it, or why."
"So let's go to principles." Storm said. "Everyone so far has survived, so probably not annihilators, so probably supremacists or eugenicists."
"We don't have any reason to think it's Magneto, do we?" Scott said. "Last time he was in the business of snatching mutants, he was after specific people. This doesn't look targeted at all, not for power type not for level…"
"No." Storm said. "One of-"
"Not for what?" Logan asked.
"Level." Scott repeated.
"What?" Logan repeated.
"Don't ask." Jean said. "High level mutants are supposedly more powerful ones, but there are about five different classification systems in use."
"The problems mainly come down to how you choose to define 'power'." Charles said. "But I do agree with Scott, if Magneto wanted mutants, I suspect he'd have rather more refined means at his disposal than drugging drinks."
"It looks like catch-and-release for whatever reason." Jean said. "They come back the same day unharmed so far, even if they're taken alive. I can't think why supremacists would be doing that."
"So eugenicists." Scott said. Certainly of the three categories of people who were likely to interfere with mutants, that seemed most likely: mutant supremacists, mutant annihilators, and eugenicists.
"I'd agree." Charles said. "Are there any groups we've been hearing from recently?"
"Galton's Chosen used to be the big ones." Jean said. "But we haven't heard anything of them since about '94."
"I haven't heard anything specific." Storm said.
There was a silence.
"Whoever they are, we need to broaden our warnings." Scott said. "We've only been trying to get the word out to adult men so far, clearly that's not enough."
"How young do you think we need to go?" Storm asked.
"Probably as soon as they manifest." Jean said. "And for what it's worth, I think we should be telling women to watch their backs too. Just because we don't know of a woman being targeted yet doesn't mean it won't happen."
"Most women already do that stuff though." Storm said. "Don't take a drink from a stranger, don't take your eye off your drink…"
"Put the warning out to all manifested mutants never the less." Charles said. "At the present time, I think that's all we can do, other than continuing to treat any and all who come to us for aid. Now there is, of course, one other thing we need to discuss in depth tonight."
I'm not currently offering any definitions for medic-ese.
Would you like me to?