It's not like her feign toughness so he'll take her word for it, but it leaves him wondering what kind of help she thinks he's good for if not something like that.
He smiles at the offering, but shakes his head as she hands them over. "You didn't hafta do that. You don't need to buy my company, darlin'." She probably knows that too but he can't help but feel compelled to the reminder.
"C'mon. I'm just stackin' wood," The back lot her leads her to is scattered with quartered logs he's halfway through dutifully piling near the cabin. And a swing made from two sun bleached ropes and a plank of wood hangs from maple tree branch. With a wave of his hand he invites her to sit while he returns to stacking wood.
"Yuh know, you should meet Foley if you haven't yet," he says. "I think you're more the type of familiar face he's been lookin' for."
Logan chopping and stacking wood. It's not exactly anything she's seen herself back home (or has she? timelines are strange) but it suits him, she thinks, and almost feels like a sort of comfort in some strange way. But the swing gets her to smile, if even just a little, and she goes to take a seat for herself onto it, bag set on her lap.
If Logan isn't going to help himself to one, then she is. Fishing around in the crinkling of the bag, she gives him a knowing look as she pulls back the tab with a finger looped through and cracks it open.
"I'll remember that the next time I'm feeling generous to a friend," pointed look aside, she indulges in a sip as she sits there on the swing and falls silent when he brings up Foley. She doesn't know him, figures he's not from 'her world' and she still hates thinking about that. Points in time, differing realities, futures that she won't ever get to see. It's with fingers gently wrapping around the can that she stares down to her lap. a breath taken as she tilts her head, yet can't quite come to look to him just yet.
The fact that she helps her self to one does make it feel less like some kind of peace offering he's probably undeserving of, but for now he keeps to the work that he busies his hands with rather than tuck into a drink himself. Later maybe. Depending on where this conversation goes.
Her silence on the subject of other mutants. Kids no less, makes him leery. Whether her version of the boy isn't something she's keen on remembering or just doesn't exist at all, he's not sure. But the fact that it makes her uneasy isn't hard to tell.
And that question wasn't something he was suspecting at all. He looks at her a long moment wondering the same thing about her. "More than I'd like to," he tries with an uneasy smile. "Why d'you ask?"
The silence from her lingers for another moment as she indulges in another sip and is slow to swallow it all down. She still can't seem to look over to him and, instead, looks down to the ground around her, only ever-so-gently rocking a bit on the swing she sits upon.
"Kurt told me what happens..." she trails off for a moment. "...what happened where you and him are from."
He hadn't gone into explicit detail but he'd more or less given her the footnotes of The Phoenix and what it did to her and others when Mystique had inquired whether or not she needed to be worried about her 'losing control and killing people she loves' here. Sure, one could chalk that up to different reality, different world, doesn't have to really mean anything. Except she'd ended up seeing what happens when she leaves here herself. What she ends up doing... who she ends up killing. What ends up happening to her.
"I'm sorry," she looks over to him then, letting her gaze drop a moment later. "For putting you all through that."
"Kurt told you?" the longer she lets that statement hang the more he feels a lump in his throat growing. Just what story did his partner tell and what kind of details he might have left out makes him wish for a fleeting moment he had powers more like her own.
Some of that tension leaves him when those details, whatever they are, have her apologizing. She's always felt responsible for things beyond her control, but still that's not what he was expecting. The way he remembers things wouldn't warrant that.
"S'not your fault, darlin'." And not just because she's not even the Jean from their world. "It's not... a thing you can control. Or at least. It wasn't always."
She's heard this before. How it's not her fault or that she just loses control. Both from Kurt and the Logan she knows and now... Logan here. It's as if they're trying to make excuses for her, trying to protect her. As if trying to soften the blow that she feels with what she's done, what she will do... what she's capable of so as not to carry some sort of guilt around with her. She can't speak for the other her, but she'd like to think she probably feels the same way.
"So I've heard," she says that while a few strands of red hair fall over her shoulder; it's gotten longer now since she first woke here. "I saw what happens when I leave here."
Her jaw grows tight and she stares down to the can held on her knees. Something she... shouldn't have seen? She doesn't know. But it's not as if someone was going to tell her and she already got angry about that.
"I kill Scott and the Professor when I leave here. Others I don't even know. Because I lose control. Because whatever's inside me is too much for me to handle." She breathes that out and shakes her head, looking up towards the sky then. "Then there's what I do where you and Kurt are from." Do you see the pattern she's seeing here herself, Logan?
"It seems no matter what version of me I might be or what place I come from, I always end up hurting people, especially the people I care about. Who's to say here is going to be any different?" A shake of her head, she looks back down to her can and smiles albeit sadly. "I should have stayed dead, Logan."
It’s not the first time he’s had this conversation. Or one like it anyway. This time though, there are less people around to tell him how uneasy it makes them that it’s him she’s confiding in. No one likes to see the host of a fickle cosmic entity paling around with a guy with a reputation for poor self-control. But the fact that she’s here at all still feels like she must be out of options.
The lectures he gives himself seem an ill fit here. Being fated for something is not the same as having a predisposition for being a bad person. One of those things lies beyond personal responsibility and lands somewhere in the realm of bad luck.
“No one,” he says after a sigh. “No one’s t’say that. Not about you or any of us. For some of us. That’s a personal problem. It’s about choices. About which dog we feed the most. But you. Yer talkin’ about a force of nature, Jeannie. Some power older than the world that sets its sights on you. I don’t know how you can blame yourself for that.”
Folding his arms, he leans against that tree her swing hangs from. He’s guarded with her. But not in the way he usually is. Not in the way that makes it so easy for him to turn away from most people. “That’s how death usually works,” his smile is cautious for kind of a grim joke. “But I dunno what to tell you, Jeannie. We don’t get to control that either.”
Her gaze lingers on the ground before her and she feels... helpless. Because it's just as Logan said. She doesn't have any say or any control over any of this and that's the problem. She has no control. Not with being here, not with who she supposedly gets to be, not with the things that lay in wait for her in every single world and reality and timeline that she's a part of. It's just how the cookie crumbles for her and all she can really do is play the waiting game for when she, as a ticking time bomb, finally explodes here.
Silence is met with his words and she nods slowly to show that she hears him. But it's with a trembling hand coming up to brush fingers along her eye that her emotions gently show the heartbreak she feels in knowing that and she can't help the few tears that manage to slip out as a result; she's been holding those in for awhile. Because she's always fine, always wanting to help others, always being there for others. That's just how she is.
"Can you do something for me?" Even as she asks, she takes a breath, trying to reign in her emotions and not become a sobbing mess on Logan (he doesn't need that right now) here on the swing.
Reaching into her bag, she pulls out a small leather-bound pouch and holds it out to him. Inside being a small bottle filled with a black liquid and a syringe.
"I found this in my basket from Sodder. Kurt told me it's an antidote from here and is capable of suppressing abilities here."
Gently, she brushes her nose with the backs of her fingers.
"I need you to hold onto this for me. If I lose control, I would destroy it. I can't let that happen if it can subdue me."
That question strikes him like the toll of a bell and his heart sinks in his chest. She doesn’t have to ask for Logan to know what’s coming. It’s about the same thing they always ask of him. The same thing she always asks of him. Suddenly their universes don’t seem so far apart at all.
What’s left of that empathetic smile falls from his face like a sandcastle tipped over. Whatever’s in that pouch he doesn’t want to know let alone be the keeper of. The desire to meet that offering with a question is palpable. Where’s the other him? The old man she seems to know? Why can’t she trust him with these kinds of things?
Instead, the desire to be who she expects him to be eclipses the courage it would take to let her down.
He collects that little pouch and holds it like wilted flowers. “You know me, Jeannie. I won’t letchu down.”
Because it's always going to be him in one way or another, isn't it? The one who can always get just close enough to her to make it count, even with so many punches pulled. That's how it was- that's how it will be when she leaves and judging how so many things mirror one another despite differing worlds and realities, she can only assume the same can be said for where he's from and what he's probably already dealt with. So it's why she doesn't need to be a telepath to know what he's probably thinking when she asks this of him.
"He's not exactly well," she says then, lips pursed as she comes to look up and over to him. "You're the only one who can stand against me when it happens." She's not about to go into what's wrong with the Logan she knows because, it's not her place and maybe, Logan being Logan himself, he might just know what that means without her even needing to explain it. Not like either of them really do much in the way of sharing their personal problems with others to begin with, infuriating as that can be at times.
She lets the empty can drift away from her with a gentle push of her mind and crushes it then with a slow closing of her fist. She hates to have to involve him in this considering... well, they haven't exactly spoken much outside of fleeting here and there moments. But he still feels like someone she can trust with this. Someone who would do whatever it takes if she asked him. Someone who wouldn't just tell her it'll be ok when they both know it won't be.
"If I can stop myself, I will..." if I can kill myself she means. "But I need a just in case. Kurt made it sound like I wasn't really able to stop myself and from what I saw for myself... I'd believe that."
How much she struggled to try and take back control of something she barely understood herself. There's also the concern she has of the few times she's been dipping into that sort of power here and she hesitates for a moment before she looks back over to Logan.
"I'm a little scared... because the few times I've felt that sort of power... it felt really good."
“He?” Logan narrows his eyes as. Was he projecting or is she inviting herself in? You know better than to come in here without knocking, he thinks to himself. Not because he knows with any certainty she’s there, but just in case he’s not alone in his own head.
“A just in case,” he says it back to himself. Carefully dragging each word over his tongue until they leave a mark. Until it’s almost impossible to focus on all else. Wherever she’s from, he was no one to her or else she has to know what she’s saying. And maybe that’s a power she enjoys too. “I bet it did.”
He pulls himself off the tree and puts his cursed gift on the work bench covered in chipped wood and the stains of more than a few successful hunts. There’s nothing there he needs but the excuse to look away and pull a breath into his chest that won’t choke him on the dust of ancient conversations and regret that won’t stay buried.
“You want control, Jeannie?" he grumbles. "Kurt ever tell you what happens when you give yourself up to that thing enough? When you spend enough time with it? Learn to cooperate with it? Sooner or later that thing comes with all the power you could ever want. Then you wouldn’t need a damn thing with me.”
Looking up, she's silent as she watches him there from the swing, eyes trying to make sense of what he's saying. What he's implying. There's something within her that she feels shift in a sense. Something that stirs and pushes itself past her own guards up around her trembling heart and emotions. Trying to keep those at bay has always been a struggle for her at times.
"No," she says then, fingers curling tight around the swing ropes. "Because no one ever tells me anything." The air around her becomes warm, as if anger is bubbling up within her.
"Everyone just looks at me like I'm supposed to know. Like I'm a ghost. Like I'm not the Jean they love or know and I'm getting sick and tired of it, Logan." Her voice is heavy with trembling emotion. With frustration and heartbreak held hand in hand with one another. The warmth within the air around her lessens and she comes to stand, pushing away from the swing. It's then that she reaches out and pulls the pouch back to her, catching it within her hand.
“If you want people to be straight with you Jeannie, stop crawling’ around in their heads,” he warns, scarcely turning over his shoulder to look at her when he talks. “I didn’t ask you about the old man. I thought it. You even know you’re doin’ that? Peekin’ into people?”
When that gift pulls off the table and into her possession, he pays it little mind. His narrows eyes boring into her as she huffs. Her fit of pique rubbing raw a wound she doesn’t even seem to know she’s so casually opened up. “Are you kiddin’ me?” he growls. “Let me set you straight here, Jeannie. You won’t catch me upset you’re not the girl I knew. What’s so goddamned hard to take is just how the same you are.”
He throws his arms open and they drop to his sides under the weight of a decades worth of unspoken words and unrequited feelings that he’s worked hard not just to leave behind but stop trying to prove himself worthy of. “What do you want me to clear up for you? That I spent enough years followin’ you around like a goddamn dog to know what it’s like bein’ your just in case. That I know when you you say you trust me what you mean is you just trust me to do what I do best. Your dirty work. The shit you wouldn’t want to hand to anyone else. Anyone who matters.”
“I’d love to forget it. But there’s no goddamn forgetting what you keep me around for.”
"I wasn't looking into your head! You think I want to look in there?" She shouts that but in frustration, as if it's a constant struggle that telepaths are faced with when around people who know they can read a person's mind. "I was going off how you were and assumed you'd be wondering why I came to you about this and not him."
Honestly, regardless of whichever one she speaks to, just as he says about her, they're so alike. Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows but it could definitely drive a person crazy to think about.
But it's that next part there that really gets her blood both boiling and running cold simultaneously. Because she doesn't know about 'the other her' and what she's done, what relationships she's had or broken, the people she's hurt or loved. She knows none of that. Just as he doesn't about her and it's so jarring to be strangers and yet still know each other at the same time.
"How can you say that?" She sounds... not defeated but perhaps, at a loss. "You honestly think you don't matter?"
All she can do is just stare at him, a shake of her head before she starts to approach him. And it's with bringing a hand up that she goes to poke at his chest with a finger.
"You listen to me, Logan. I'm not her. Whatever she's asked of you or made you do or you chose to do yourself, that's between you and her. I needed to talk to someone. Someone who gets what it's like to feel like an outcast among your own friends because of something inside you that you can't control and I guess I was stupid to think you would get that."
Because things are always similar across universes, realities, worlds. Aren't they? But despite the frustration that's carried through her voice, she softens it some with another shake of her head.
"You were the first person I saw here when I woke up. I was happy to see you, even if you felt different in some way. Because as frustrating as you are to deal with at times, you care. I know you do. I don't need to read your mind to know that."
She lets her finger drop as well as her gaze and she sighs, rubbing the back of the pouch against her head.
"I didn't come here to argue with you or upset you. I'm sorry. For what she's done. How she's made you feel, how I've made you feel. I'm sorry."
The denial doesn’t sit right, but it’s the least of all this that eats at him. A lecture on his worth in the face of a request to volunteer for cannon fodder is an irony too jagged to swallow without scoffing it back up.
Each angry word jabs at him until her finger is doing the same, but he drinks it in like a wind-turbine taking in the gale and turning it into a slow, steady, mechanical rhythm. His bright blue eyes studying her frustration, revelling in the unintended warmth of her scorn like a child who’ll settle for admonishment in lieu of honest affection.
“Yer right,” his voice is soft and even, if not a little detached. Severing the connection between his tongue and his heart lest one lead the other to injury. “Yer not her. But here you are wantin’ the same thing of me. That’s what you’re here for, Jeannie. Maybe it’s ‘cause you’re scared or lonely or you just knew I’d say yes. But that’s really what you’re here for. To ask me to be the devil you know.”
He steps a little closer. Just enough crowd her when he brings up his hand. He doesn’t touch though. He turns his open palm up. Waiting for the return of the thing she came here intending to leave in his capable hands. “Don’t be. I know why you think of me when you’re plannin’ for the worst. And I've never let you down yet.”
It's only when he says what he does that she begins to find herself wondering: was Phoenix the one who led her here to him? Was this merely all some way to have some sort of history fall into place with the inevitable as it should be line of thinking? Her gaze grow distant and her heart sinks in her chest at that realization of such a possibility.
"No..." the word is soft, gentle. "...I'm not her." Fingers grip tighter around the pouch she holds and she stares to Logan with so many conflicting emotions in her eyes. "I won't do to you what she's done. What she's asked." She doesn't want to live up to any sort of expectations others may have of her. Not like that at least. "I won't think of you that way. I can't."
It dawns on her then that no one can really help her. She has to somehow do this on her own. She can't put the people she cares about in the position to do what she might be too scared to do herself. She doesn't want to hurt them with that decision - dirty work - no matter how 'simple' they think it might be to follow through with. So with a shake of her head, she puts her hand behind her back, guarding the pouch she had meant to give to him.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come here. Shouldn't have asked you to..." Be her just in case. Swallowing thickly, she shakes her head again. "You don't deserve that weight on your shoulders. Not with her and not with me. Not anymore."
The idea of going around again like they always do is like just now realizing he’s trying to outrun something he’s tied to. Something he’d foolishly let Kurt and Jean-Paul and Wes make him think they could leave behind so long as they never left this place. But sooner or later this place learns those things and lets them come creeping in.
What suffocates his resentment until it’s just a cooling ember isn’t the assurances so much as the unshakable belief that she’s trying to outrun something here too. Even if it ran her right down a path he’s already walked too many times before. Of course she’s trying. He can’t imagine any version of her, the golden child, ever doing anything less.
What’s harder to envision is what they ever were where she comes from if he wasn’t already all the things she so unwittingly summarized in those three poisonous words. The breath that passes through him does it’s best to leave him calm. Invoking some apathy to keep himself protected. “What am I to you, Jeannie? Wherever you’re from.”
The question is one that catches her off guard and it shows so blatantly in the way she stares to him with those shining eyes. Fingers come to tighten even more around the pouch held at the small of her back and she can both feel and hear her heart pounding in her chest as she tries to process that question. Because it's a complicated one. For a few reasons.
Lips purse and her gaze drifts off to the side. A gentle tilt of her head, strands of red fall in front of her face some before she comes to release a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding and she smiles a bit.
"I care about you," she says, gaze dropping down now. "A lot."
But she comes to shake her head and looks up to the sky for a moment before finally looking back to him, eyes a little more careful but still gentle.
It's a sweet sentiment and if he finds any comfort in it, it's only knowing she's still nothing short of an idealist.
"You care about everyone," he says, but the skepticism in his tone and the angle of his eyebrow isn't so much harsh as it is fond and knowing.
"What am I to you?" he tries again, pressing for something definitive and feeling like he's playing with fire for it. "A friend? A fantasy? A fixer-upper? Maybe just... a guy you knew for a while?" He shrugs. "You were gonna do it. You came here to do it. And I can't help think pissing off a stranger isn't enough to change your mind when it's made up. So maybe I wasn't such a stranger to you as you. Maybe you already know what things are like between us. Almost every time we meet. Tell me I'm wrong."
That first part right there gets her to look to him with a playful sort of annoyance written across her face. Because while she won't disagree with that, she doesn't really like how he just brushes off his own importance as typical Jeannie or whatever he's thinking.
"You're going to get a finger shoved in your chest again." It's not really a threat and not anything she'll really do, but she sighs then and shrugs her shoulders with an exasperated sort of look.
"Yes, ok? You're an X-Men, you're... a friend. You're... someone I wish would stay. Someone who, when you do finally come back around, you do that stupid grin of yours and I can't help but smile back at you because I'm happy you're around."
Eyes fall shut and she gently shakes her head before letting it bow, gaze then falling onto the ground.
"You're not a fantasy," looking up to him, she smiles a bit, another shrug given. "You're a wish that will never come true. Because you and I are complicated."
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no subject
He smiles at the offering, but shakes his head as she hands them over. "You didn't hafta do that. You don't need to buy my company, darlin'." She probably knows that too but he can't help but feel compelled to the reminder.
"C'mon. I'm just stackin' wood," The back lot her leads her to is scattered with quartered logs he's halfway through dutifully piling near the cabin. And a swing made from two sun bleached ropes and a plank of wood hangs from maple tree branch. With a wave of his hand he invites her to sit while he returns to stacking wood.
"Yuh know, you should meet Foley if you haven't yet," he says. "I think you're more the type of familiar face he's been lookin' for."
no subject
If Logan isn't going to help himself to one, then she is. Fishing around in the crinkling of the bag, she gives him a knowing look as she pulls back the tab with a finger looped through and cracks it open.
"I'll remember that the next time I'm feeling generous to a friend," pointed look aside, she indulges in a sip as she sits there on the swing and falls silent when he brings up Foley. She doesn't know him, figures he's not from 'her world' and she still hates thinking about that. Points in time, differing realities, futures that she won't ever get to see. It's with fingers gently wrapping around the can that she stares down to her lap. a breath taken as she tilts her head, yet can't quite come to look to him just yet.
"What do you know about Phoenix?"
no subject
Her silence on the subject of other mutants. Kids no less, makes him leery. Whether her version of the boy isn't something she's keen on remembering or just doesn't exist at all, he's not sure. But the fact that it makes her uneasy isn't hard to tell.
And that question wasn't something he was suspecting at all. He looks at her a long moment wondering the same thing about her. "More than I'd like to," he tries with an uneasy smile. "Why d'you ask?"
no subject
"Kurt told me what happens..." she trails off for a moment. "...what happened where you and him are from."
He hadn't gone into explicit detail but he'd more or less given her the footnotes of The Phoenix and what it did to her and others when Mystique had inquired whether or not she needed to be worried about her 'losing control and killing people she loves' here. Sure, one could chalk that up to different reality, different world, doesn't have to really mean anything. Except she'd ended up seeing what happens when she leaves here herself. What she ends up doing... who she ends up killing. What ends up happening to her.
"I'm sorry," she looks over to him then, letting her gaze drop a moment later. "For putting you all through that."
no subject
Some of that tension leaves him when those details, whatever they are, have her apologizing. She's always felt responsible for things beyond her control, but still that's not what he was expecting. The way he remembers things wouldn't warrant that.
"S'not your fault, darlin'." And not just because she's not even the Jean from their world. "It's not... a thing you can control. Or at least. It wasn't always."
no subject
"So I've heard," she says that while a few strands of red hair fall over her shoulder; it's gotten longer now since she first woke here. "I saw what happens when I leave here."
Her jaw grows tight and she stares down to the can held on her knees. Something she... shouldn't have seen? She doesn't know. But it's not as if someone was going to tell her and she already got angry about that.
"I kill Scott and the Professor when I leave here. Others I don't even know. Because I lose control. Because whatever's inside me is too much for me to handle." She breathes that out and shakes her head, looking up towards the sky then. "Then there's what I do where you and Kurt are from." Do you see the pattern she's seeing here herself, Logan?
"It seems no matter what version of me I might be or what place I come from, I always end up hurting people, especially the people I care about. Who's to say here is going to be any different?" A shake of her head, she looks back down to her can and smiles albeit sadly. "I should have stayed dead, Logan."
no subject
The lectures he gives himself seem an ill fit here. Being fated for something is not the same as having a predisposition for being a bad person. One of those things lies beyond personal responsibility and lands somewhere in the realm of bad luck.
“No one,” he says after a sigh. “No one’s t’say that. Not about you or any of us. For some of us. That’s a personal problem. It’s about choices. About which dog we feed the most. But you. Yer talkin’ about a force of nature, Jeannie. Some power older than the world that sets its sights on you. I don’t know how you can blame yourself for that.”
Folding his arms, he leans against that tree her swing hangs from. He’s guarded with her. But not in the way he usually is. Not in the way that makes it so easy for him to turn away from most people. “That’s how death usually works,” his smile is cautious for kind of a grim joke. “But I dunno what to tell you, Jeannie. We don’t get to control that either.”
no subject
Silence is met with his words and she nods slowly to show that she hears him. But it's with a trembling hand coming up to brush fingers along her eye that her emotions gently show the heartbreak she feels in knowing that and she can't help the few tears that manage to slip out as a result; she's been holding those in for awhile. Because she's always fine, always wanting to help others, always being there for others. That's just how she is.
"Can you do something for me?" Even as she asks, she takes a breath, trying to reign in her emotions and not become a sobbing mess on Logan (he doesn't need that right now) here on the swing.
Reaching into her bag, she pulls out a small leather-bound pouch and holds it out to him. Inside being a small bottle filled with a black liquid and a syringe.
"I found this in my basket from Sodder. Kurt told me it's an antidote from here and is capable of suppressing abilities here."
Gently, she brushes her nose with the backs of her fingers.
"I need you to hold onto this for me. If I lose control, I would destroy it. I can't let that happen if it can subdue me."
no subject
What’s left of that empathetic smile falls from his face like a sandcastle tipped over. Whatever’s in that pouch he doesn’t want to know let alone be the keeper of. The desire to meet that offering with a question is palpable. Where’s the other him? The old man she seems to know? Why can’t she trust him with these kinds of things?
Instead, the desire to be who she expects him to be eclipses the courage it would take to let her down.
He collects that little pouch and holds it like wilted flowers. “You know me, Jeannie. I won’t letchu down.”
no subject
"He's not exactly well," she says then, lips pursed as she comes to look up and over to him. "You're the only one who can stand against me when it happens." She's not about to go into what's wrong with the Logan she knows because, it's not her place and maybe, Logan being Logan himself, he might just know what that means without her even needing to explain it. Not like either of them really do much in the way of sharing their personal problems with others to begin with, infuriating as that can be at times.
She lets the empty can drift away from her with a gentle push of her mind and crushes it then with a slow closing of her fist. She hates to have to involve him in this considering... well, they haven't exactly spoken much outside of fleeting here and there moments. But he still feels like someone she can trust with this. Someone who would do whatever it takes if she asked him. Someone who wouldn't just tell her it'll be ok when they both know it won't be.
"If I can stop myself, I will..." if I can kill myself she means. "But I need a just in case. Kurt made it sound like I wasn't really able to stop myself and from what I saw for myself... I'd believe that."
How much she struggled to try and take back control of something she barely understood herself. There's also the concern she has of the few times she's been dipping into that sort of power here and she hesitates for a moment before she looks back over to Logan.
"I'm a little scared... because the few times I've felt that sort of power... it felt really good."
no subject
“A just in case,” he says it back to himself. Carefully dragging each word over his tongue until they leave a mark. Until it’s almost impossible to focus on all else. Wherever she’s from, he was no one to her or else she has to know what she’s saying. And maybe that’s a power she enjoys too. “I bet it did.”
He pulls himself off the tree and puts his cursed gift on the work bench covered in chipped wood and the stains of more than a few successful hunts. There’s nothing there he needs but the excuse to look away and pull a breath into his chest that won’t choke him on the dust of ancient conversations and regret that won’t stay buried.
“You want control, Jeannie?" he grumbles. "Kurt ever tell you what happens when you give yourself up to that thing enough? When you spend enough time with it? Learn to cooperate with it? Sooner or later that thing comes with all the power you could ever want. Then you wouldn’t need a damn thing with me.”
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"No," she says then, fingers curling tight around the swing ropes. "Because no one ever tells me anything." The air around her becomes warm, as if anger is bubbling up within her.
"Everyone just looks at me like I'm supposed to know. Like I'm a ghost. Like I'm not the Jean they love or know and I'm getting sick and tired of it, Logan." Her voice is heavy with trembling emotion. With frustration and heartbreak held hand in hand with one another. The warmth within the air around her lessens and she comes to stand, pushing away from the swing. It's then that she reaches out and pulls the pouch back to her, catching it within her hand.
"Just forget it."
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When that gift pulls off the table and into her possession, he pays it little mind. His narrows eyes boring into her as she huffs. Her fit of pique rubbing raw a wound she doesn’t even seem to know she’s so casually opened up. “Are you kiddin’ me?” he growls. “Let me set you straight here, Jeannie. You won’t catch me upset you’re not the girl I knew. What’s so goddamned hard to take is just how the same you are.”
He throws his arms open and they drop to his sides under the weight of a decades worth of unspoken words and unrequited feelings that he’s worked hard not just to leave behind but stop trying to prove himself worthy of. “What do you want me to clear up for you? That I spent enough years followin’ you around like a goddamn dog to know what it’s like bein’ your just in case. That I know when you you say you trust me what you mean is you just trust me to do what I do best. Your dirty work. The shit you wouldn’t want to hand to anyone else. Anyone who matters.”
“I’d love to forget it. But there’s no goddamn forgetting what you keep me around for.”
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Honestly, regardless of whichever one she speaks to, just as he says about her, they're so alike. Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows but it could definitely drive a person crazy to think about.
But it's that next part there that really gets her blood both boiling and running cold simultaneously. Because she doesn't know about 'the other her' and what she's done, what relationships she's had or broken, the people she's hurt or loved. She knows none of that. Just as he doesn't about her and it's so jarring to be strangers and yet still know each other at the same time.
"How can you say that?" She sounds... not defeated but perhaps, at a loss. "You honestly think you don't matter?"
All she can do is just stare at him, a shake of her head before she starts to approach him. And it's with bringing a hand up that she goes to poke at his chest with a finger.
"You listen to me, Logan. I'm not her. Whatever she's asked of you or made you do or you chose to do yourself, that's between you and her. I needed to talk to someone. Someone who gets what it's like to feel like an outcast among your own friends because of something inside you that you can't control and I guess I was stupid to think you would get that."
Because things are always similar across universes, realities, worlds. Aren't they? But despite the frustration that's carried through her voice, she softens it some with another shake of her head.
"You were the first person I saw here when I woke up. I was happy to see you, even if you felt different in some way. Because as frustrating as you are to deal with at times, you care. I know you do. I don't need to read your mind to know that."
She lets her finger drop as well as her gaze and she sighs, rubbing the back of the pouch against her head.
"I didn't come here to argue with you or upset you. I'm sorry. For what she's done. How she's made you feel, how I've made you feel. I'm sorry."
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Each angry word jabs at him until her finger is doing the same, but he drinks it in like a wind-turbine taking in the gale and turning it into a slow, steady, mechanical rhythm. His bright blue eyes studying her frustration, revelling in the unintended warmth of her scorn like a child who’ll settle for admonishment in lieu of honest affection.
“Yer right,” his voice is soft and even, if not a little detached. Severing the connection between his tongue and his heart lest one lead the other to injury. “Yer not her. But here you are wantin’ the same thing of me. That’s what you’re here for, Jeannie. Maybe it’s ‘cause you’re scared or lonely or you just knew I’d say yes. But that’s really what you’re here for. To ask me to be the devil you know.”
He steps a little closer. Just enough crowd her when he brings up his hand. He doesn’t touch though. He turns his open palm up. Waiting for the return of the thing she came here intending to leave in his capable hands. “Don’t be. I know why you think of me when you’re plannin’ for the worst. And I've never let you down yet.”
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"No..." the word is soft, gentle. "...I'm not her." Fingers grip tighter around the pouch she holds and she stares to Logan with so many conflicting emotions in her eyes. "I won't do to you what she's done. What she's asked." She doesn't want to live up to any sort of expectations others may have of her. Not like that at least. "I won't think of you that way. I can't."
It dawns on her then that no one can really help her. She has to somehow do this on her own. She can't put the people she cares about in the position to do what she might be too scared to do herself. She doesn't want to hurt them with that decision - dirty work - no matter how 'simple' they think it might be to follow through with. So with a shake of her head, she puts her hand behind her back, guarding the pouch she had meant to give to him.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come here. Shouldn't have asked you to..." Be her just in case. Swallowing thickly, she shakes her head again. "You don't deserve that weight on your shoulders. Not with her and not with me. Not anymore."
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What suffocates his resentment until it’s just a cooling ember isn’t the assurances so much as the unshakable belief that she’s trying to outrun something here too. Even if it ran her right down a path he’s already walked too many times before. Of course she’s trying. He can’t imagine any version of her, the golden child, ever doing anything less.
What’s harder to envision is what they ever were where she comes from if he wasn’t already all the things she so unwittingly summarized in those three poisonous words. The breath that passes through him does it’s best to leave him calm. Invoking some apathy to keep himself protected. “What am I to you, Jeannie? Wherever you’re from.”
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Lips purse and her gaze drifts off to the side. A gentle tilt of her head, strands of red fall in front of her face some before she comes to release a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding and she smiles a bit.
"I care about you," she says, gaze dropping down now. "A lot."
But she comes to shake her head and looks up to the sky for a moment before finally looking back to him, eyes a little more careful but still gentle.
"That's why I can't do this to you."
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"You care about everyone," he says, but the skepticism in his tone and the angle of his eyebrow isn't so much harsh as it is fond and knowing.
"What am I to you?" he tries again, pressing for something definitive and feeling like he's playing with fire for it. "A friend? A fantasy? A fixer-upper? Maybe just... a guy you knew for a while?" He shrugs. "You were gonna do it. You came here to do it. And I can't help think pissing off a stranger isn't enough to change your mind when it's made up. So maybe I wasn't such a stranger to you as you. Maybe you already know what things are like between us. Almost every time we meet. Tell me I'm wrong."
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"You're going to get a finger shoved in your chest again." It's not really a threat and not anything she'll really do, but she sighs then and shrugs her shoulders with an exasperated sort of look.
"Yes, ok? You're an X-Men, you're... a friend. You're... someone I wish would stay. Someone who, when you do finally come back around, you do that stupid grin of yours and I can't help but smile back at you because I'm happy you're around."
Eyes fall shut and she gently shakes her head before letting it bow, gaze then falling onto the ground.
"You're not a fantasy," looking up to him, she smiles a bit, another shrug given. "You're a wish that will never come true. Because you and I are complicated."