“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."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
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.”
no subject
"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."
no subject
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.”
no subject
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."
no subject
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.”
no subject
"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."
no subject
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.”
no subject
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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
"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."