Disclaimer: The X-Men are copyright Marvel Comics, and X-Men Evolution is owned by Kids WB, I think. In any case, I don't own either.

Merry Christmas, a little late, to Jen1703 and Escaflowne, both of whom requested the next chapter of FtA for their present! And thanks, as always, to Jen for awesome beta-ing!

From the Ashes

Chapter 3

Bobby glanced down at his wrist for what was probably the tenth time in the last five minutes, then sighed and let his shoulders slump. It was 12:45. If Jean were going to show, she would have already; he couldn't remember her ever having been late for anything. Of course, he also couldn't remember her ever having stood anyone up, but since he honestly couldn't say he'd ever gone on a date with her, he wasn't sure how accurate his recollection was.

Not that this was a date, of course. But he supposed that was a closer analogy than "pseudo-younger brother tagging along", which pretty much summed up any appointment he'd had with Jean in the past.

"I'm sorry I'm late," a familiar but breathless voice announced behind him, and he nearly tipped over his chair as he whipped around in his seat. Jean looked stressed, he decided, feeling a surge of concern that caused his forehead to crease before he deliberately pushed it aside and smiled up at her.

"No big, it gave me a chance to look over my homework," he assured her, gesturing toward the vacant chair beside his. He glanced at the table, still littered with his Experimental Psychiatry book and syllabus, then scrambled to his feet and began pushing them together.

Before he'd gotten too far with the process, Jean plucked the course outline out of his hands and sat down, not in the chair he'd indicated but the one across from him.

"How did you manage to get stuck with Dr. Milligan?" she asked, her nose wrinkling as she looked over the papers.

"Only session still open – why, is he that bad?" he asked apprehensively. His worst suspicions were confirmed as Jean nodded, and he sighed. "Well, that explains how I got into the class this late in the game. At least he gave me all the assignments so I could get started on them before the first class."

"Don't worry, you'll have plenty of time to catch up in class," she assured him. "He falls asleep regularly. When's your first session?" she asked curiously, looking back down at the syllabus.

Bobby shook his head and grinned. "All questions called on account of hunger," he replied, gesturing toward the counter serving an array of food that appeared mediocre at best. "What would you like?" he asked, then waved off her protestations before she had a chance to voice them. "I told you I'd buy, remember? In exchange for services rendered."

"Just what kind of services are we talking about?" Jean replied, arching an eyebrow.

Bobby felt his stomach do a nervous twitch. The eyebrow thing…it had been so long since he'd seen her do that he felt an odd sense of déjà vu, one resulting in a nearly overwhelming impulse to give her the hug of her life and explain just how glad he was to see her again. He brushed it aside with some difficulty, and instead forced a laugh and shook his head. "Now, that'd be telling," he replied with a near approximation of a wolfish grin, then chuckled. "Tour of the campus? If you don't have time today, we can schedule it whenever it's convenient…"

Her eyes narrowed a touch, and he watched as she seemed to study his face. "If you managed to find Dr. Milligan's office, I'm not at all sure you need a tour," she pointed out.

Bobby pouted. "Sure. Just because I ask five people directions and try three different buildings, I get gypped out of my tour. I see how this works. Now, what do you want for lunch?"

Jean sighed, a trace of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "A grilled chicken salad with ranch dressing?" she requested, then reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of water. "I've got a drink already; I'd rather finish this up before it gets warm anyway."

Biting back an urge to offer refrigeration services that would have been totally inappropriate in his current persona, he just grinned. "Okay, one salad. Anything else?"

She shook her head and smiled, and once more Bobby felt his stomach twist. "That's it. I'd like to be able to get into those pants I was wearing yesterday, assuming I can get the stains out."

A slow grin spread on Bobby's face as she mentioned getting into her pants, but he shook his head when she finished speaking. "That one's way, way too easy," he told her with a wink. He turned and made his way to the counter before she could reply, accompanied by mingled feelings of embarrassment and amusement that were seeping their way through her shields.

Apparently, he noted with a mischievous grin as he stepped up to place his order, some things never changed.

By the time he returned to the table with his tray, Jean had completely composed herself and was flipping through his book. "I took this last semester," she said apologetically, snapping the book shut and setting it aside. "I still have my notes, if you want to borrow them; I had a different professor, but she covered the same material as what Dr. Milligan has listed in your syllabus."

"I'd appreciate that," he admitted as he set the tray down on the table and slipped into his seat. "I'm not gonna lie – this whole thing," he gestured around the union with one arm while plucking a French fry from the tray with the other, "has me more than a little nervous, even without sleep-prone Professors whose classes I start in on three weeks late."

"Why did you get here so late?" Jean asked with an air of nonchalance that was just a little too casual to be genuine. "You mentioned waving your finger over a map?"

Bobby laughed, then nodded as he popped his French fry into his mouth. "I did," he admitted after he'd swallowed. "But I did it a month ago. Should've gotten here in time for registration; all my paperwork was in on time. But I had some transportation problems." All of which was true, in a manner of speaking. The computers, thanks to a late night hack from the internet café in town, would show that his transfer documents had been received the month before. And if Illyana's mistiming couldn't be construed as transportation difficulties, he wasn't sure what could.

He felt an itching sensation in his forehead, and forced himself to ignore it. If Jean wanted to have fun poking around at his shields, that was fine with him. He'd learned how to construct them from her and spent years reinforcing them since; he really doubted she was going to get through them now.

"Car trouble?" she asked, giving no sign that she'd been up to any attempts at telepathic nosiness.

"If I reply that I don't have a car anymore, will that answer your question?" he asked glumly as he unwrapped his cheeseburger and took a bite. Which was a bummer, actually. A car would be really nice, but he couldn't manage to justify the expense, even to himself. Until his job hunt came through he was going to have to be get by on the money he'd brought with him from the future. It was enough to live on for a couple of months, but he wasn't going to waste it on non-essentials.

Jean frowned, and for a moment, Bobby thought he'd given something away. Belatedly he noticed that instead of her eyes being fixed on him, she was looking over his shoulder, and he turned just as she let out a sigh of disgust.

"That's who I thought it was," she observed, then sighed again, this time with resignation. "Do you want to cut lunch short? I have a feeling I'm going to lose my appetite."

Bobby frowned and was about to ask why, but then saw that the students Jean was watching were affixing a sign to one of the tables reserved for campus organizations that declared them the Friends of Humanity. He froze, his burger somehow transforming to sawdust in his mouth. An almost physical need to run and hide overtook him, until he remembered that the FoH were still a radical fringe group at this point in history. One without government backing or the technology they'd used in the future to identify mutant bio signs in a crowd.

Still…

"Yeah, leaving sounds good to me," he replied as he got to his feet and began collecting his lunch, bundling it into its original wrappers to make it more portable. "Want to take this to go?" he asked on the off-chance that he'd be able to summon up some sort of appetite once they were well away. He was inclined to doubt it. Radical fringe group or no, the FoH were responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of a lot of people he'd called friends.

The fact that they'd drawn a huge amount of support due to the actions of the girl across the table, who was nodding and gathering up her salad…yeah. The likelihood of him regaining his appetite at this point was slim to none.

Jean watched Chris's face out of the corner of her eye as they headed down the wooden stairway to an outdoor eating area, noting that it was beginning to regain the color it had lost when he'd seen the human rights group set up shop in the Union. If she'd had any doubts as to whether or not he was a mutant, his desire for a hasty departure had dispelled them.

Not that she'd had any desire to argue. She raised the hand not holding her plastic salad container to rub at her temple, trying to dispel the tension headache she'd had since her run-in with Scott that morning. The presence of the FoH hadn't helped any, pushing her shields to their limits, and she knew full well they'd chosen their table location on purpose. As a known mutant, she'd been the focus of their attention several times in the past, and a quick peek into their leader's mind had confirmed that they were planning to up the ante and single her out as an example of "mutants in our midst".

As Scott had predicted. There were days when she really, really hated when he was right.

She felt a light brush of fingers on her arm, and realized belatedly that she'd stopped moving.

"You okay?" Chris asked, his voice soft and concerned.

"Just a headache," she replied, making a slight dismissive gesture with her hand as she looked up and met his eyes.

"Yeah, they have that effect on me, too," he replied vaguely. Chris frowned, then reached up and rested his hand on her back. "C'mon, there are some benches just up ahead; you'll feel better if you sit down and have something to eat."

"I'm fine," Jean protested, but let him steer her down the next flight of stairs to a wooden platform hosting a number of benches around its perimeter as well as a few picnic tables in the middle. As she'd half-expected, the tables were filled with students enjoying the moderate weather after the rain of the previous few days, but there was an empty bench on one side. With evident relief, she sat down on it and set her salad down beside her.

"Y'know, it'd probably help your headache if you ate something," he observed with a smile that was more than a little forced as he sat down on the other side of the bench and set his lunch beside hers.

"You're an expert?" she countered with a weak smile of her own.

"You could say that," Chris replied. His eyes, still clouded with concern and an emotion she couldn't quite place, nonetheless twinkled with a trace of mischief.

Jean rolled her eyes. "Do you ever actually answer a question?" she asked curiously.

"But where would be the fun in that? Here's one for you - do you ever actually ask the ones you want the answer to?" he countered as he unwrapped his fries, frowned, and took a bite of one with all the enthusiasm of someone being told they had a Danger Room session with Logan scheduled for 4:00 am.

She grimaced. "Okay, you might have a point," she admitted, grudgingly popping the lid of her salad container and plucking out a piece of lettuce. "But I'm not sure how to ask –"

"Yes, I'm a mutant," Chris said quietly, then laughed as her jaw dropped. "Oh, that was priceless…"

"Well, I guess I can answer what sort of gift you have, then," she replied with only a trace of annoyance. She took a sort of mental inventory, checking to see if her shields were really so shredded that someone she'd practically just met could see straight through them.

They weren't. Jean frowned and looked back up from her salad to see Chris shaking his head.

"You'd be wrong, probably," he shrugged. "It was just pretty obvious you wanted to ask. I guess I gave myself away by hurrying you out of the Union like that, but, well, your buddies in there sort of give me the creeps."

"Not my buddies," she protested sharply, then sighed and rubbed at her forehead again. "Right. Sarcasm. On a better day, I would have caught that."

"I don't imagine much gets past you," he replied with a shrug, then smiled. "So, you wanted to ask another question?"

"Are we playing twenty questions, then?" she countered with a trace of a smile.

"If you want to," Chris said nonchalantly as he picked up another fry.

He seemed amused by the prospect, Jean decided, and she couldn't help but smile more genuinely. Her headache, much to her surprise, seemed to be fading, and she leaned against the side of the bench and crossed one leg over the other so that she was facing him. "Fine. Precog, then? Since you know what I'm going to say before I say it."

"Nope. You're just obvious," Chris replied with a smirk and waved a French fry at her before popping it into his mouth.

"I am not!" she hmphed indignantly. Was she? Scott seemed to have a hard enough time figuring out what she was thinking these days, even with the benefit of their link, so she rather doubted it. "Fine, not a precog. Hmmm…"

"Don't think too hard, it'll make your head hurt," he advised.

Jean rolled her eyes. "My headache's better, actually," she observed as she plucked out another piece of lettuce. "You seem awfully full of medical advice, though – are you sure you're a psych major, and not pre-med?"

"I'm positive," he assured her, then grinned. "Which should give you a clue, right there."

She frowned and mulled that over for a moment. If, as he implied, his choice had had something to do with his mutant ability, him being a psych major suggested some sort of telepathy. Chris had already ruled that out, or…had he? She'd never actually guessed that; he'd just said she'd probably be wrong.

"Telepath?" she tried without much confidence.

He sighed and shook his head with feigned disappointment. "Nope. Still feeling stressed?" he asked in a deliberate change of subject.

"Not really," she admitted, then paused. She wasn't – which was distinctly odd now that she thought about it. And while she could chalk part of that up to the change of scenery, it didn't alter the fact that she felt more relaxed than she had in weeks; very unusual, given the circumstances and the fact that she was sitting here chatting casually with a mutant she barely knew, who kept trying to change the subject away from his abilities.

Or…was it a deliberate change of subject? He'd been dropping odd hints all along, and she tried fitting them together. A psych major, not telepathic, but with shields far stronger than her own, indicating to her mind that he'd had experience keeping something or someone out.

It wasn't adding up. So after a moment's consideration, Jean asked, "What area of Psychiatry do you find the most interesting?"

A grin split his face, and Chris nodded. "Now you're thinking. Umm, human emotional response to various stimuli," he answered after a moment's consideration, then sighed. "Something I was hoping to learn more about in Experimental Psychiatry, but I suppose I'm out of luck there."

Jean smiled and shrugged sympathetically while considering his answer. Feelings, then. Not her forte, as she tended to be inundated with other people's thoughts rather than their emotional state. A vague memory nagged at the back of her mind, something the Professor had been discussing with Moira MacTaggert, about a young girl she'd encountered in Ireland. She'd been interested in the case, because she'd never met someone with those particular powers…

Jean smiled, confident that she'd found the answer. "You're an empath," she stated with conviction. "Is that why my headache is gone?"

Chris shrugged and grinned a bit awkwardly. "Well, you were stressed. I'm not much at projecting, but I figured it was worth a shot."

Jean gave him a look that clearly expressed her disbelief as to the extent of his abilities, then eyed him curiously. "Is that why you lied about never having heard of the Xavier Institute?"

Much to her relief, Chris nodded, an awkward expression forming on his face. "You caught that, huh? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you guys were all over the news last year; it would've been hard to have never heard of you. I honestly didn't recognize you when I ran you over, though," he added in his own defense, then grinned sheepishly. "That was pure serendipity."

Jean laughed. "I'm not sure I'd call it that," she observed, recalling the state of her pants. "But if you'd come all this way to visit the Institute, why didn't you just go there to begin with?"

Chris shook his head. "I didn't. I actually came here to go to college. Oh, I'd thought about looking you guys up eventually," he admitted when she gave him a skeptical look, "but I wasn't in any hurry about it. It's not like I don't have my powers under control."

"True," she mused. Which was interesting, in and of itself. Given the struggle she'd had with hers, she found it difficult to believe that he'd attained this level of mastery on his own, with his sanity apparently still intact.

"What, you don't believe me?" he asked sadly.

"Let's just say I think there's more to you than meets the eye, Chris," she retorted with an intentionally enigmatic smile, then stood up and smoothed her pants. "I think we're going to have to take a rain check on the tour, though," she said, glancing down at her wrist to confirm her suspicions. Much as she'd like to ask the million questions his revelation had created, she didn't really have time. "I have class in about fifteen minutes."

"Tomorrow?" he asked hopefully as he got to his own feet, turning puppy dog eyes on her that might've been more effective had his eyes been brown rather than blue. A practiced look, she decided, but a cute one. And while it might be some sort of side effect of his powers, or even an intentional attempt to influence her emotions, she found herself completely inclined to spend more time unraveling the mystery of Christ Knight.

Or perhaps he wasn't doing anything to influence her decision at all. As intriguing as she found the mystery surrounding Chris, she couldn't deny he was an awfully comfortable person to talk to. With that thought in mind, she nodded.

"Tomorrow. Around two?" she suggested, and felt vaguely disappointed as he shook his head.

"I've got class at 1:45," he replied apologetically. "How's 3:00 for you?"

Jean considered it for a moment. She had no afternoon classes tomorrow, just a study group until around 1:30. And while she should spend the time at the Institute getting caught up on things there…well, Scott's reaction to her missed session that morning was still annoying her. If he was going to accuse her of shirking her responsibilities, she might as well do it occasionally. After a few moments' hesitation, she nodded.

"Three sounds good. Outside the Sciences building," she informed him, then turned to leave.

"Jean?" he said softly.

She turned back to see Chris smiling at her. There was a soft, sad expression in his eyes she couldn't quite define, one that disappeared so quickly she wondered if she'd imagined it. "What?"

"Thanks for lunch," he said with a shrug and a grin.

Jean smiled and rolled her eyes, then hiked her bag up onto her shoulder and headed off to class. Despite the morning's events and the afternoon's unexpected revelations, she realized that for the first time in longer than she cared to remember, she didn't feel the least bit stressed at all. And while part of that was likely the effect of Chris' powers, the rest…

Well, it had turned out to be a nice lunch, after all.

September 21, 2005

Dear Jubes,

I never could keep a secret long.

Oh, I can practically see you, rolling your eyes and saying, "Yeah, right, like that's a newsflash." And I realize it's not, but…

I would've done better, if the FoH hadn't shown up. Not the group we know, thank the Higher Power of your choice, but their predecessors; a group of college kids raising "questions" while radiating the same hate and intolerance their successors always do.

And, well, I freaked a bit. In my defense, it would've been hard not to, knowing what's coming, what they're going to do in the next eight years. The deaths, the camps…they all start here, more or less. Or at least, I think they do.

It's an odd situation. I mean…yeah, I know what's coming. I even know, based on what we managed to piece together after the fact, more or less what started it all, and how it played out. But…Jean didn't confide in me, then. Or anyone else, really, unless it was Scott. And since he never had the opportunity to write it all down for posterity…

No one really knows what was going on in Jean's head. What little things added up, what clues she might have dropped that things were growing worse and worse. I don't remember her ever having mentioned the FoH setting up at a table in the Union; was it because she wasn't there to see them? Or because she just never mentioned it to me? Was it an important event in the greater scheme of things? An irritation? Or…nothing at all?

Did I change the future today by inviting her to lunch? Did I change it by leaving the Union with her? Or by helping her relax afterwards? And if I did…was it for the better or worse?

I don't know.

In any case, my reaction to their presence was enough to let Jean know that something was up. Or to confirm it; she knew something was odd yesterday, when she couldn't get through my shields. Or before that, considering I doubt she'd have tried if she hadn't realized there was something odd, though I have no idea what.

I told her I'm a mutant, and about my secondary mutation. It's risky; I'll manifest it sometime soon in this timeframe, and if she puts two and two together she might figure out the rest.

Part of me wants her to. I admit it. I want to hear her to call me by name again, one more time. I want to be able to talk with her without weighing what I say, to tell her…everything, I guess, though I know I can't. I can't quite rid myself of my teenage confidence that Jean has the answers to everything, however much it's been proven otherwise. I wish I could just dump it all on her shoulders, ask her what I should do, even though dumping eight years of nightmare on her isn't really likely to help the situation any.

The other part…

Bobby looked up from his notebook and stared up at the ceiling of the hotel room he'd be vacating the following day without seeing it, then sighed and tucked the pen into its holder. This wasn't about him, and whatever he might want or not want, he had a job to do.

He just hoped he was doing it right.