It was currently late spring.
She was in contact with Professor Xavier, his mind reaching further across the vast distance between them than hers was. The coordinates Cerebro had recognized had been changing constantly, and Jean assumed that the person they were tracking was running from whatever his mutation had revealed to less-than-friendly company.
Charles did not tell her the truth, his own readings from Cerebro pledging otherwise, but he did not mention this to her...still, even he was not looking for the girl accompanying the mutant that had caught his eye.
Storm was content to monitor the progress of the Blackbird for now, her blue eyes occasionally flicking over to meet Jean's chocolate brown ones. The redhead would tell her when and where to land, but Ororo could see that the shifting location would be a problem. It wasn't odd for a retrieval team to run into trouble like this, but it was still an irritation.
Storm didn't dwell on that.
A cut of black shadows up ahead marked a road; Jean followed it keenly, and when the womens' eyes met again the redhead nodded. Ororo circled around until she was following the highway that sliced its way through the wilderness. A clearing made itself obvious within a few minutes, just big enough to land in, and Storm guided the Blackbird to earth with slow but practiced hands.
The two women got out and started walking, the highway slowly guiding them to the northeast. The moonlight easily lit their way as they chattered about men and classes and that restaurant in Salem they liked. The wreck of two pickup trucks came into view within fifteen minutes.
Jean's gasp of shock was loud in the snowy silence, her green eyes wide and now scarred with the destruction before her. Ororo's lips came together in a hard line, her expression unreadable. One thing was clear to both women...there was death here.
A man was watching them from down the road a ways, still as a statue, too far away for either woman to notice any details. A girl stood at his side. Jean could sense the man's tension at this distance, but just barely; she started walking towards the strangers and Storm's irises lightened imperceptibly in anticipation. Her worry was for the girl, not for herself or her partner. Xavier would approve.
The man cocked his head as the two women came nearer; Storm was close enough to see his eyes now, and they unsettled her. There was something black in there, a cold, calculating sureness she'd never seen before...even in Magneto. He glanced at her then and met her stare, the moonlight reflecting off the irises and painting them a luminescent gray. She broke off the contact with a little jerk. The girl stood to the side, not so far away, and Ororo found her to be a much friendlier sight. She looked as if she could use a good meal and a long rest, but the visage she painted was a hundred times better than those silver eyes...
Jean could feel the minds of the strangers becoming more potent as she got closer. The first thing she noticed was that they were almost exact opposites. The girl was shy and a little bit fearful, but the calm in her head increased as the two women came nearer. She'd been neglected as of late, her ratty hair and shadowed eyes making this fact painfully obvious, but she had a child's hope and these two people were a godsend in her opinion.
On the other hand, the man was suspicious. His mistrust went to a degree that was almost inconceivable. Jean was glad that she'd approached him slowly, aware that she could easily have been overloaded by his thoughts. His emotions were so strong...and they shifted so fast! There was no mixture here; each feeling emanating from him was powerful and sure and easily identified. A sudden rush of anger came when Storm met his eyes, a demonstration of the raw energy he could express. Jean tried to dig deeper into his thoughts, to find where the fury came from or maybe what made it so potent, but she couldn't make it past his surface thoughts.
And then his eyes were on her, a minute shift of his head the only physical indication that he wasn't interested in Ororo any more. But Jean had felt the shift from anger to curiosity; it was a tidal wave flowing backwards up a river, and she mentally cringed away from the uncomfortable sensation. She quickly decided that she didn't want any part of those eyes, and looked down to smile at the teenager standing on the man's left.
"Hello," Jean said in a pleasant voice, her face cheerful. Storm offered a smile as well and introduced herself and the redhead. "I'm Ororo and this is Jean...we're here from Xavier's School for the Gifted." Somehow she did not trust the situation enough to give the strangers their last names; she gave only their first ones and offered her hand to the child. The teen took it and gave it a gentle shake; Storm then held it out to the man.
He didn't return the friendly greeting. Storm found that she was relieved...she could envision him ripping her arm out of its socket for trying to become his friend, and she didn't care for that image at all.
Jean subtly reached up to put a comforting hand on her friend's shoulder. The redhead could feel the man's mind, and he wasn't mad...in fact, he was intensely amused. Almost as if a handshake was against his religion, and he found it hilarious that they would try to lure him into doing something so blatantly wrong.
Well. This was going to be interesting.
The girl was glancing between the adults with a quiet interest, her own emotions so soft and muted that Jean hardly noticed them. There was guilt there, but also excitement, a teen's dispassion for the adult world and her curiosity about the exchange mixing together until they could hardly be seen as separate. The child looked over at her more intense friend, almost as if she was asking for permission, and then gave the two X-Men a small smile that happily spoke her trust. "I'm Marie," she said in a quiet voice, a subtle southern accent making itself known.
But the peace was shattered as Jean caught another wave of emotion from the man. It was a protective instinct strong enough to make her take a small step back, a jolt of adrenaline shooting through her veins; she felt him recognize her distress, his attention flicking back to her, and then the ferocious defensiveness snapped back into a milder irritation. Jean couldn't understand the feelings and the thoughts that followed them, his words slicing through her mind like a scalpel. Shouldn't care anyways. Why did he feel so horrible about caring for the girl? His worry was the kind a father would have for his daughter, or perhaps more accurately an uncle for his niece, and there was nothing so bad about it that Jean could see; still, his self-hatred was absolutely crippling.
Then his thoughts shifted again, a sudden realization coming over him. His eyes narrowed in suspicion and Jean cowered under the weight of his glare, or more accurately under the weight of his thoughts. Even the girl was now watching her companion with concern.
"You readin' my mind?" he asked Jean, his voice low and gravelly and dangerously cold. Jean realized her mistake...her body had given her away, her heart responding to his intensely strong emotions before she'd gotten the chance to cover it up. He'd responded to her distress, she remembered with a start...and now he'd noticed the connection between his actions and hers. The oddity of him noticing her reaction never occurred to the redhead; Jean had seen plenty of odd things in her life.
She found herself jerking her head from side to side in response to his question, denying everything in a quivering voice. "No...it's not like that, I-"
"I c'n smell a liar," he growled, silencing her immediately. Ororo noticed his fists quivering at his sides, held away from himself at odd angles. She was taller than him, but the threat those hands presented made her suddenly begin to think seriously of slinking back to the jet with her tail between her legs. Something was very wrong here, and the situation was threatening to become dangerous. Ororo's eyes whitened even more, anticipation rising like bile in her throat.
She didn't like using her powers in self-defense, but she'd do what she had to...and her lightning was still a hundred times faster than he could ever be.