Jean didn't say anything else, so neither did Storm, until The Professor came in, pushing the door open with his wheelchair. He still looked exhausted. He stared hard at Jean. She stared back at him.
"Jean?"
"I can't hear her." She said. The Professor didn't reply at once. "Is it over?"
"Let me read you." He came further in to the room, he had a notepad on his lap. He positioned himself right in front of Jean and handed the notebook to Storm, flipping it open as he did so. "Storm, this is a list of questions designed to prompt specific thought patterns in Jean. When I ask you to, please read them aloud, slowly. Jean?" He reached for her. She set her head in his hands, her hands on his shoulders. Storm felt her mouth was slightly open, so closed it.
There was nothing to see, of course there wasn't. Occasionally one of them would twitch, but Storm had no idea what was going on really. She wasn't a telepath. She'd know when she needed to. The Professor must have been confident Jean couldn't hurt him.
It was probably five minutes before The Professor said, "Storm, if you would…"
Storm almost startled and looked down at the list in her hand.
"Ah… What is your date of birth?"
They were an odd mix of questions, from really basic stuff about herself and people she was close to; birthdays, powers… to medical stuff that Storm could only imagine The Professor had looked up – how else would he have known what a T-wave on an ECG signifies? – to things that had to be references to specific things one of them had said to the other, in jokes that were decades old.
"How many lights are there?" Storm asked, smiling.
She saw Jean smile too, and The Professor. "Four." Jean answered, without opening her eyes. She'd grown up with Star Trek The Next Generation, she, Storm and Scott. They'd spent months asking The Professor how many lights there were because they thought he looked like Picard.
Storm carried on. "Who introduced The Professor to Mendelssohn?"
"Erik Lehnsherr."
"Where did…"
When Storm got to the end of the questions, they pulled back from each other.
"Were you intentionally dampening me?" The Professor asked.
Jean shook her head. "I just… I feel… leaden."
"That might still be psychic shock, I had to do more than I wanted to do. But there's no sign of her, Jean." Jean looked back at him. "There's no sign of The Phoenix." Jean drew a breath as though she wanted to say something, but stopped herself. "The barriers are still shattered, there's nowhere she could be hiding but still there's no trace of her, Jean. I can't feel anything that's not you."
Jean didn't look as happy about that as Storm would have expected, as though she didn't really believe it was over. Maybe if she'd fought that hard for that long, it was hard to stop fighting.
,
Scott hissed and stopped, two thirds of the way up the stairs. He should have let Hank put his arm in a sling, that way he'd remember not to use it. But Hank had gone now, he had politics to get back to. He'd decided Jean was functional enough that he could leave her. Scott and Storm had just seen him off.
"You okay?" Storm asked him.
"I'm fine." He'd had a hell of a lot more than broken ribs to worry about in the past few days, the past few weeks come to that. Broken ribs and two missing X-men weren't exactly nice problems to have, but at least Jean had stabilized. At least The Phoenix was gone. At least he wasn't facing losing her. At least he wasn't facing having to kill her.
"You need to find Jean for pain relief." Storm said.
"She'll find me." She was vacant and exhausted, she was starting at shadows, but she was Jean. She was quiet. She'd stopped begging them to kill her.
"Right." Storm said. "I'll chase any stragglers to bed, you turn in."
Scott didn't protest.
He opened the door of his and Jean's room and reached for the light switch as he pushed the door shut behind himself, thinking that she'd come and find him, with the painkillers, when she was ready. But she was already there. She'd been sitting in the dark. She stood up when he came in.
"Bupe." She said. She had a loaded syringe in her hand. He held out his arm to her. She reached for him.
Jean had two very distinct modes of touch, always had done. When she was a doctor, her touch was direct and purposeful; she did what she needed to do and she was unapologetic about it. She touched as much as she needed to and no more. When she was his lover, she was gentler, slower, she paused to see how he was reacting to her, and she'd come right in to his space. She knew how dependent he was on touch once his glasses were off, so she stayed close, so close he could hear her posture by the sound of her breathing.
Her grasp and twist of his left forearm couldn't have been more plainly a doctor's touch. That was okay. She'd given herself a hell of a fright. Scott knew what it felt like to have a power you couldn't control, to pull back because you felt you were a menace to everyone around you. He also knew what it felt like to have someone invade your head and make you hurt someone you loved. And he still believed that. He had to disregard whatever The Phoenix had planted in his head. He had no grounds to doubt Jean. He had no grounds to be jealous of Logan.
He blinked as the needle pierced his skin.
"You've got about five minutes before that hits you." She said quietly, letting go of him, looking at his arm, not his face. He caught her right hand with his left. She didn't quite pull back, not with her hand at least, but she didn't look up at him, her breath caught, she didn't let him pull her hand to him. He recognized this look, he knew it. How many mutants had they seen who were scared of themselves?
"Jean," She still didn't look at him. "I don't blame you." She drew a breath. "Look at me."
She didn't. "I could have killed you." She said. "And it'll hurt you for months."
"Jean, I don't blame you." She drew a breath, she was going to tell him he should. "Whose fault did you say it was when I came after you with-" With his eyes. He couldn't even say it. What Stryker had tried to make him do was too… He couldn't even think it.
"This isn't like that." She said. "What Stryker did to you was purely external, I was… She – it – came from inside me, like she's always been there, ever since I displayed, she's been there. She was always part of my power."
But… hold on. The Professor had said he hadn't been able to find any trace of The Phoenix when he'd examined Jean earlier.
"Can you feel her now?"
Jean shook her head and pulled out of his hand. "I can't feel anything." Scott frowned. Jean dropped on to the end of the bed. "I can't even feel you." Scott sat down next to her, carefully. "My telepathy's… it's dead. I can't feel anything." She gave a soft cough that might have been trying to be a laugh. "I'm normal." Scott felt his jaw drop slightly. "God, Scott, I'm normal." She shook her head. She still wasn't looking at him. "Maybe that's a good thing."
But Jean wasn't normal. Jean was a mutant, she was one of them; the freaks, the hunted, nature's experiments, Homo sapiens superioris. She was an alpha-class, a level three rising four. She had never been supposed to be normal.
"No." He managed after a moment. "No, Jean, that's like anyone else losing their sight."
"If that's the price I have to pay to stop her…"
He knew there were arguments he could have made. He'd been round this circuit enough times himself, or with students, but they just wouldn't come. He wanted to hold her, but every line of her body told him she wouldn't let him so much as touch her hand.
He could feel the pain relief slowing him down, making him less able to think or move. Things started to blur, but he was pretty sure Jean became a doctor again and helped him change for bed.
,
"Jean?" Storm said. Jean started. She'd been sitting in her study, a book in her hand. She wasn't usually easy to startle. She sensed people coming. It had been a week now, she still wasn't… "Hank called. He said he wants to check up on a couple of patients. I said you'd call him back."
"He means Scott." Jean said quietly, getting to her feet. "There's no one else who's changed in months."
"You." Storm said, falling in to step beside her. "You had a horrible few days. Do you feel like your power is stabilizing now?"
"I think it's stable." Jean said. That jarred with what Scott had told Storm. Scott had said Jean was in control, she wasn't doing things without meaning to any more, but she was petrified at the thought of using her powers at all. To Storm, that wasn't stability, not for a voluntary power. That was deep repression.
"So what are you…" She asked slowly.
"Weakly telekinetic, like I was before all this." Weakly telekinetic. Storm had seen Jean hold full grown men in the air for minutes at a time years before any of this trouble had started.
"Telepathic?" Storm asked tentatively.
Jean shook her head. "I never was, not really."
"Yeah you were. You've been able to read and disrupt minds as long as I've known you."
"Not the way The Professor is. I'm a telekinetic first, my telepathy's always been unreliable."
"Being less telepathic than The Professor doesn't make you not supposed to be a telepath."
Jean drew a deep breath. "I'm okay with this, Storm." Storm looked at her. "Really, I am."
Jean turned her back on Storm and picked up the landline.
Storm stepped back. "Maybe you shouldn't be." She said, too softly for Jean to hear her.
Should it interest anyone, a T-wave on an ECG signifies repolarisation (reset) of the largest muscles in the heart, so that they are ready to contract again. Weak or absent T-waves usually represent low blood potassium (as any Brit will tell you, no pots, no tea)