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whiskeycoffeeTitle: In Your Own Blood
Author: m.jules
Rating: R for Mature Themes, drug use, violence, etc.
Summary: “I passed by and I saw you, squirming in your own blood, and I said to you, ‘Live!’”
Series: Time For Love
Disclaimer: For love, not money.
Archive: WRFA; anywhere else, please ask.
Continuity: Alternate Universe
Feedback: More than ever. I want to know if this is actually connecting with an audience, because it’s kind of unusual. Feel free to let me know if it isn’t.
Author’s Notes: This series is based on the allegorical story told in Ezekiel chapter sixteen, meant to have a story take place every three and a half years. If all goes according to plan, there will be seven stories to this series, of which this is the first. My thanks extend to Heather, Taryn, and Terri, who encouraged this first chapter back when I first started writing it; tinhutlady who gave it a chance despite her initial misgivings and offered suggestions; and Beth, who beta'd.
Logan powered off his phone and tossed it into the passenger’s seat of the rental car. He was on his way to racking up the mileage on this little sedan, he reflected wryly. It wasn’t his preferred mode of travel, but he’d known that Raven would probably be in no condition to ride on the back of the motorcycle all the way to New York, even if he could convince her to come home. Now, he had an extra reason to be grateful for his foresight in renting a car -- a wail from the backseat drove home the point that some passengers just weren’t bikers.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, slightly frustrated at not being able to see the infant’s face. The sales lady at the baby store had told him that the safest way for the child to travel was to turn the car seat around backwards, so that the baby was facing the rear window. This was fine, other than the fact that he had no way of monitoring her expressions. She had been fussy for the entire trip so far, sleeping only for short stretches, and Logan cringed at the knowledge that Westchester was still another two hours away. He had bought her some ready-made formula and a bottle, but she hadn’t drunk very much of it, and he wasn’t sure if that was his fault or hers. He suspected she was afflicted by at least one disease and was possibly bearing consequences of Raven’s drug use. Her body chemistry smelled a little off, but then, he didn't know what she would smell like otherwise.
That was another reason he was eager to get her to New York -- she needed a doctor to check her and treat whatever was wrong, and he couldn’t think of anyone he trusted half so much as Hank McCoy. He only hoped the hyper-intelligent mutant wasn’t on one of his frequent trips to western Canada; that would leave Logan and the baby in the hands of McCoy’s intern, which was not an idea Logan particularly relished.
It wasn’t that Jean Grey was incompetent; she was incredibly intelligent and had nearly memorized all of McCoy’s textbooks, encyclopedias, and hand-written personal notes. It was simply that she was young and inexperienced and easily flustered, and Logan desperately wanted Hank’s vast store of first-hand knowledge and practiced, gentle touch for the child, no matter how promising the sixteen-year-old redhead was. He wished he’d thought to ask Charles to make sure Hank was around.
The infant was still whimpering, sounding like she was genuinely distressed by something, and Logan suspected that physical contact might soothe her. He reached into the backseat with his right hand, but couldn’t quite touch her. Replacing his hand on the steering wheel, he wracked his brain for something that might help. At least I could let her know I’m here, he mused, and began chatting about anything that came to mind.
As his voice got stronger, the baby’s cries softened. Encouraged, he kept it up until he just couldn’t think of anything else to talk about. He wasn’t a talkative person by nature, and she’d simply exhausted him. He fished through his head for anything that might work. Finally, he simply started reciting the lyrics to classic rock songs, as much as he could remember. When he couldn’t remember the words, he made something up.
Almost an hour later, he hit his third Van Morrison song and something clicked in his head. He stopped for a minute, looking in his rearview mirror to check what he could see of the now-sleeping baby. He ran over the song again in his head, and then smiled, murmuring the words softly.
“Red her cheeks as rowans are; bright her eyes as any star; fairest of them all by far is our darlin’ Marie.” He smiled to himself. “Marie,” he tried aloud. “Whatcha say, Kid?” he tossed toward the backseat. “Marie an okay name for ya?” The infant hiccupped in her sleep and Logan chuckled softly. “Glad you like it.”
Pleased with himself for finally having a name to call the child and for putting her to sleep so he wouldn’t have to talk anymore, he settled back into his seat and prayed for the remaining miles to pass quickly. Clouds were beginning to gather and he could smell snow in the air. Being caught in a snowstorm with a newborn was not his idea of fun, especially not when he had such a talent for running into unsavory characters. Heavy snow could draw out the remaining
sixty minutes of their journey to two, three, or -- God forbid -- even more hours. For once, he found himself fervently hoping for an uneventful trip.
***
“For I will restore you to health and I will heal you of your wounds,” declares the Lord, “Because they have called you forsaken and an outcast, saying, ‘It is Zion; no one cares for her.’” -- Jeremiah 30
“Dr. McCoy? Is that you?”
Hank let his briefcase drop to the floor, the leather making a wet sound against the floor. “Hello, Miss Grey; you are correct -- it is I.”
Jean Grey showed up in the door of the lab, her glasses perched on her nose and a thick, heavy textbook in her hands. “I thought you were headed to Winnipeg for the leukemia conference. Doesn’t your plane leave this afternoon?”
“My travel arrangements have been canceled,” he informed her in a grave tone. “An unexpectedly abundant precipitation of snow brought our progress to a halt on the runway. They returned us to the terminal, where Ororo contacted me on my cellular phone and requested that I return home, as there will presently be a matter that requires my attention.”
Jean nodded and pushed her glasses up a little to keep them from falling off the end of her nose. “All right,” she said. “Is there anything you need me to do?”
Hank glanced at the open textbook she was balancing in her hands and hid a frown. He wanted Jean to have a little more experience to balance out her knowledge, but there was no real opportunity for that. He merely wanted to be sure that her human compassion was not lost in the middle of all her technical savoir-faire. Neither the classroom nor the lab was an adequate preparation for work outside the walls of Charles’s institution.
“I have no duties for you at the moment, Miss Grey,” he said. “However, I would suggest that a walk outside or a visit with some of the other students might be beneficial. How long have you been laboring at your studies today?”
“Not long,” she muttered, her lowered eyes and the flush in her cheeks giving away the lie. Jean loved the books, the hard facts and irrefutable science of textual problems where the unexpected did not happen, and if it did, a solution could be found in some concordance or encyclopedia. Interacting with other people, particularly her peers, made her nervous, almost painfully so. She often felt shunned by her classmates’ reluctance to open up to her. They were all afraid that she would read their minds, whether on purpose or by accident, and were uncomfortable around her. She preferred the safety of equation-solving in the lab where no one was around to make cutting remarks or project mean-spirited thoughts about her.
“I see,” Hank mused. “Perhaps you would like to do me a favor? One of the younger children, Katherine, was complaining of a rather low-grade fever this morning before I departed. I administered an analgesic for the discomfort and in an attempt to lower her temperature. Would you mind seeing how she is? I believe she is still in her room.”
“Of course,” Jean answered easily. The young children were not afraid of her and she was not afraid of them. If she ever did slip and accidentally read their minds, their thoughts were rarely different than their words and actions, nor were they usually of an embarrassing personal nature, so there was no awkward confusion for her and no offensive invasion of privacy for them.
As Jean turned to go back into the lab, fumbling for a bookmark to hold her place in the text she was reading before she put it away, Hank suddenly remembered the envelope that had been waiting for him when he returned from the airport.
“Oh, Miss Grey,” he called after her, and she paused, facing him. “Would you mind terribly if I requested yet another favor of you?”
“Of course not, Dr. McCoy,” she smiled. “What do you need?”
“Just a simple errand,” he assured her. “I have in my possession the results of a study I was conducting on behalf of a student, and I promised him that I would share the information with him immediately upon receipt. If you would be so kind as to deliver this–” he held out a large manila envelope – “to young Mr. Summers on your way to see Katherine, I would be most obliged.”
Jean’s eyes narrowed marginally, and Hank remembered with a start the conflict that lay between his intern and the bright twelve-year-old boy that Ororo had rescued from a plane crash. “Or -- or I could simply handle the matter myself, now that I consider it.”
“No, that’s all right,” Jean said steadily. “I’ll just drop it off at his room. I think his class is on a field trip today.”
Hank observed her carefully for a moment to be sure she wasn’t lying, then nodded. “All right, Miss Grey. Thank you.” She smiled and took the envelope from him, then left through the lab to take care of her two assignments. Hank sat at his desk and allowed himself an amused smile as he thought about Scott Summers.
Jean had been working in the lab the day that Hank had finished the ruby quartz glasses that would allow the boy to open his eyes without blasting everything in his line of vision. Scott had cracked his eyelids open a millimeter at a time, his hand held in front of the glasses to block the ray just in case the experiment failed.
When he found that he could, in fact, open his eyes safely, he’d caught his breath and dropped his hand, able to observe his surroundings for the first time in months. Since Hank was standing behind him, the first thing his gaze fell upon was the lovely young intern who had just walked into the lab holding a stack of papers and desperately trying to keep her reading glasses from falling off her nose.
Since then, the boy had become rather smitten with Jean, who in turn was slightly, as she put it, “creeped out” by the romantic attentions of a pre-teen, no matter how grown-up for his age he acted. He was still only twelve and she, sixteen. Hank shook his head and turned back to the work at hand. Ororo had told him Logan was bringing an infant and to be prepared for anything, and he wanted to brush up on his early childhood medicine.
***
Jean kept her head down as she walked the hallway towards the boys’ dormitory wing, her eyes steadfastly fixed on her shoes. There was a general commotion around her, and the rushing bodies were jostling her, but she barely felt it. Everyone was excited about something, and their thoughts were clamoring at her brain, trying to get in. She was so concerned about trying to maintain her mental shields that she didn’t even consider trying to find out what all the hubbub was about. It turned out that she didn’t have to.
The room where Scott Summers lived with two older boys was the first door in the hallway, barely two feet from the landing on the stairs that led down to the classrooms, and the exclamations from the students below carried easily. Jean froze in front of the boy’s door and whirled toward the massive window in front of the stairs when a voice from downstairs squealed loudly, “It IS him! It’s Logan! And he’s got a baby!”
There was a queer plummeting sensation in the pit of her stomach at the sight of Logan striding across the yard toward the front door with a baby carrier in his hand. She knew she had a crush on the older man; she also knew that every female student in the school, even those who didn’t live in the dormitory, felt the same way.
Shaken and suddenly very self-conscious, she dropped her mental shields for just a moment, just enough to scout out the surrounding area and make sure no one was nearby who would see her flushed face. With no mental buffer, the unexpected force of the thought hit her mind with such velocity that she physically swayed from the impact: You’re beautiful.
Gasping, she whirled to see Scott Summers standing in the open door to his room, leaning lightly on a crutch, his ruby sunglasses perched awkwardly on his thin face. His bangs fell crookedly across his forehead and she clinically noted the small white scars high on his temple from the emergency surgery Hank had performed after the plane crash. He didn’t seem alarmed at her reaction, and she wondered if he even suspected that she had overheard his thought.
“I – I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t...” She stopped before she could explain any further and give away her slip. “Here,” she said, her voice steady again as she held the manila envelope out to him. “Dr. McCoy asked me to give you this.”
“Thank you,” he said in a soft, youthful voice that belied the aged, serious look on his face. He took the envelope from her but otherwise remained motionless, staring, she could only assume, at her. It was a bit unnerving to see her reflection in the red lenses of his glasses, and she began to back away from him when she remembered the crutch and the bandage on his ankle. That must be why he isn’t on the field trip, she realized.
“How were you injured?” she asked, real compassion vaguely coloring her attempt at politeness.
He shrugged. “Was playing football with some of the other boys yesterday and stepped in a hole,” he explained. “It’s not bad; just twisted it. But I can’t walk on it for a day or two.”
If Jean hadn’t known how distracted Dr. McCoy became when he had work to do, she might have held him in suspicion for not telling her that Scott wouldn’t be on the field trip with the rest of his class – he had to have known; he would’ve been the one to treat the boy’s ankle. But she’d been helping the doctor since she was thirteen and had been his intern for the past year, so she was well aware of his ability to focus on his work to the exclusion of all else, even eating. She suspected at times that he would neglect to breathe were it not an automatic function of his body.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she told Scott, her eyes darting around the hallway, seeking to avoid his unnerving stare. “Well, I hope you’re feeling better soon; I need to see about another student,” she excused herself after a pause, beginning to walk backwards down the hall.
He nodded and retreated into his room, hopping a little on his uninjured foot and using the crutch to balance himself. “Thank you,” he said again, and she muttered something that passed for “You’re welcome” as she turned and walked quickly to the girls’ dormitory wing, away from the oddly serious boy with the ruby-red glasses.
***
“Logan, welcome home.”
Ororo’s warm greeting met him at the door, and Logan almost smiled. It had been too long since he’d been here, he thought. The sound of her voice was home in itself, in the same way that the smell of warm gingerbread was the essence of Christmas.
“Thanks,” he answered, shifting his grip on the handle of the baby carrier and hefting it slightly. “Is Hank here?”
Ororo froze momentarily, her eyes fixed on the carrier and the hint of soft pink flesh that was visible over the edge. “Yes, he is,” she nodded slowly. “I believe he is in his office, or perhaps the lab.”
Logan noticed the way she watched the baby and offered quietly, “Would you like to see her?” Something he didn’t recognize - hope? - flared brightly in her eyes for a moment, and she nodded, stepping forward on silent feet to peer at the sleeping infant.
“She’s so....”
“Small?” Logan offered helpfully.
“Mmm,” Ororo nodded. “She’s lovely. Does she have a name?”
Logan hesitated. “Well, Raven didn’t mention one, if that’s whatcha mean. I’ve been callin’ her Marie.”
“Marie?” Ororo questioned, arching her eyebrows slightly and looking at Logan for the first time since her eyes had lit on the carrier.
He shrugged. “Dunno. Just what I’ve been callin’ her.”
Ororo smiled and looked back at the child. “Marie,” she said softly. “I’ll tell Charles you’re here.” She touched the baby’s face gently before she turned and left. Logan looked down at the slumbering infant and was surprised to see the hint of a smile twitching on her rosebud lips. Even in sleep, she had been uneasy, her forehead wrinkled in a frown and her small body wracked with shudderings and deep sighs.
“So you like her already, huh?” he asked quietly as he strode toward the elevators that would take him down to Hank’s lab and office. “Good.” He pressed the button for the elevator and rocked back on his heels, repeating to himself, “Good.”
***
[END 2 of 3]
Author: m.jules
Rating: R for Mature Themes, drug use, violence, etc.
Summary: “I passed by and I saw you, squirming in your own blood, and I said to you, ‘Live!’”
Series: Time For Love
Disclaimer: For love, not money.
Archive: WRFA; anywhere else, please ask.
Continuity: Alternate Universe
Feedback: More than ever. I want to know if this is actually connecting with an audience, because it’s kind of unusual. Feel free to let me know if it isn’t.
Author’s Notes: This series is based on the allegorical story told in Ezekiel chapter sixteen, meant to have a story take place every three and a half years. If all goes according to plan, there will be seven stories to this series, of which this is the first. My thanks extend to Heather, Taryn, and Terri, who encouraged this first chapter back when I first started writing it; tinhutlady who gave it a chance despite her initial misgivings and offered suggestions; and Beth, who beta'd.
Logan powered off his phone and tossed it into the passenger’s seat of the rental car. He was on his way to racking up the mileage on this little sedan, he reflected wryly. It wasn’t his preferred mode of travel, but he’d known that Raven would probably be in no condition to ride on the back of the motorcycle all the way to New York, even if he could convince her to come home. Now, he had an extra reason to be grateful for his foresight in renting a car -- a wail from the backseat drove home the point that some passengers just weren’t bikers.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, slightly frustrated at not being able to see the infant’s face. The sales lady at the baby store had told him that the safest way for the child to travel was to turn the car seat around backwards, so that the baby was facing the rear window. This was fine, other than the fact that he had no way of monitoring her expressions. She had been fussy for the entire trip so far, sleeping only for short stretches, and Logan cringed at the knowledge that Westchester was still another two hours away. He had bought her some ready-made formula and a bottle, but she hadn’t drunk very much of it, and he wasn’t sure if that was his fault or hers. He suspected she was afflicted by at least one disease and was possibly bearing consequences of Raven’s drug use. Her body chemistry smelled a little off, but then, he didn't know what she would smell like otherwise.
That was another reason he was eager to get her to New York -- she needed a doctor to check her and treat whatever was wrong, and he couldn’t think of anyone he trusted half so much as Hank McCoy. He only hoped the hyper-intelligent mutant wasn’t on one of his frequent trips to western Canada; that would leave Logan and the baby in the hands of McCoy’s intern, which was not an idea Logan particularly relished.
It wasn’t that Jean Grey was incompetent; she was incredibly intelligent and had nearly memorized all of McCoy’s textbooks, encyclopedias, and hand-written personal notes. It was simply that she was young and inexperienced and easily flustered, and Logan desperately wanted Hank’s vast store of first-hand knowledge and practiced, gentle touch for the child, no matter how promising the sixteen-year-old redhead was. He wished he’d thought to ask Charles to make sure Hank was around.
The infant was still whimpering, sounding like she was genuinely distressed by something, and Logan suspected that physical contact might soothe her. He reached into the backseat with his right hand, but couldn’t quite touch her. Replacing his hand on the steering wheel, he wracked his brain for something that might help. At least I could let her know I’m here, he mused, and began chatting about anything that came to mind.
As his voice got stronger, the baby’s cries softened. Encouraged, he kept it up until he just couldn’t think of anything else to talk about. He wasn’t a talkative person by nature, and she’d simply exhausted him. He fished through his head for anything that might work. Finally, he simply started reciting the lyrics to classic rock songs, as much as he could remember. When he couldn’t remember the words, he made something up.
Almost an hour later, he hit his third Van Morrison song and something clicked in his head. He stopped for a minute, looking in his rearview mirror to check what he could see of the now-sleeping baby. He ran over the song again in his head, and then smiled, murmuring the words softly.
“Red her cheeks as rowans are; bright her eyes as any star; fairest of them all by far is our darlin’ Marie.” He smiled to himself. “Marie,” he tried aloud. “Whatcha say, Kid?” he tossed toward the backseat. “Marie an okay name for ya?” The infant hiccupped in her sleep and Logan chuckled softly. “Glad you like it.”
Pleased with himself for finally having a name to call the child and for putting her to sleep so he wouldn’t have to talk anymore, he settled back into his seat and prayed for the remaining miles to pass quickly. Clouds were beginning to gather and he could smell snow in the air. Being caught in a snowstorm with a newborn was not his idea of fun, especially not when he had such a talent for running into unsavory characters. Heavy snow could draw out the remaining
sixty minutes of their journey to two, three, or -- God forbid -- even more hours. For once, he found himself fervently hoping for an uneventful trip.
***
“For I will restore you to health and I will heal you of your wounds,” declares the Lord, “Because they have called you forsaken and an outcast, saying, ‘It is Zion; no one cares for her.’” -- Jeremiah 30
“Dr. McCoy? Is that you?”
Hank let his briefcase drop to the floor, the leather making a wet sound against the floor. “Hello, Miss Grey; you are correct -- it is I.”
Jean Grey showed up in the door of the lab, her glasses perched on her nose and a thick, heavy textbook in her hands. “I thought you were headed to Winnipeg for the leukemia conference. Doesn’t your plane leave this afternoon?”
“My travel arrangements have been canceled,” he informed her in a grave tone. “An unexpectedly abundant precipitation of snow brought our progress to a halt on the runway. They returned us to the terminal, where Ororo contacted me on my cellular phone and requested that I return home, as there will presently be a matter that requires my attention.”
Jean nodded and pushed her glasses up a little to keep them from falling off the end of her nose. “All right,” she said. “Is there anything you need me to do?”
Hank glanced at the open textbook she was balancing in her hands and hid a frown. He wanted Jean to have a little more experience to balance out her knowledge, but there was no real opportunity for that. He merely wanted to be sure that her human compassion was not lost in the middle of all her technical savoir-faire. Neither the classroom nor the lab was an adequate preparation for work outside the walls of Charles’s institution.
“I have no duties for you at the moment, Miss Grey,” he said. “However, I would suggest that a walk outside or a visit with some of the other students might be beneficial. How long have you been laboring at your studies today?”
“Not long,” she muttered, her lowered eyes and the flush in her cheeks giving away the lie. Jean loved the books, the hard facts and irrefutable science of textual problems where the unexpected did not happen, and if it did, a solution could be found in some concordance or encyclopedia. Interacting with other people, particularly her peers, made her nervous, almost painfully so. She often felt shunned by her classmates’ reluctance to open up to her. They were all afraid that she would read their minds, whether on purpose or by accident, and were uncomfortable around her. She preferred the safety of equation-solving in the lab where no one was around to make cutting remarks or project mean-spirited thoughts about her.
“I see,” Hank mused. “Perhaps you would like to do me a favor? One of the younger children, Katherine, was complaining of a rather low-grade fever this morning before I departed. I administered an analgesic for the discomfort and in an attempt to lower her temperature. Would you mind seeing how she is? I believe she is still in her room.”
“Of course,” Jean answered easily. The young children were not afraid of her and she was not afraid of them. If she ever did slip and accidentally read their minds, their thoughts were rarely different than their words and actions, nor were they usually of an embarrassing personal nature, so there was no awkward confusion for her and no offensive invasion of privacy for them.
As Jean turned to go back into the lab, fumbling for a bookmark to hold her place in the text she was reading before she put it away, Hank suddenly remembered the envelope that had been waiting for him when he returned from the airport.
“Oh, Miss Grey,” he called after her, and she paused, facing him. “Would you mind terribly if I requested yet another favor of you?”
“Of course not, Dr. McCoy,” she smiled. “What do you need?”
“Just a simple errand,” he assured her. “I have in my possession the results of a study I was conducting on behalf of a student, and I promised him that I would share the information with him immediately upon receipt. If you would be so kind as to deliver this–” he held out a large manila envelope – “to young Mr. Summers on your way to see Katherine, I would be most obliged.”
Jean’s eyes narrowed marginally, and Hank remembered with a start the conflict that lay between his intern and the bright twelve-year-old boy that Ororo had rescued from a plane crash. “Or -- or I could simply handle the matter myself, now that I consider it.”
“No, that’s all right,” Jean said steadily. “I’ll just drop it off at his room. I think his class is on a field trip today.”
Hank observed her carefully for a moment to be sure she wasn’t lying, then nodded. “All right, Miss Grey. Thank you.” She smiled and took the envelope from him, then left through the lab to take care of her two assignments. Hank sat at his desk and allowed himself an amused smile as he thought about Scott Summers.
Jean had been working in the lab the day that Hank had finished the ruby quartz glasses that would allow the boy to open his eyes without blasting everything in his line of vision. Scott had cracked his eyelids open a millimeter at a time, his hand held in front of the glasses to block the ray just in case the experiment failed.
When he found that he could, in fact, open his eyes safely, he’d caught his breath and dropped his hand, able to observe his surroundings for the first time in months. Since Hank was standing behind him, the first thing his gaze fell upon was the lovely young intern who had just walked into the lab holding a stack of papers and desperately trying to keep her reading glasses from falling off her nose.
Since then, the boy had become rather smitten with Jean, who in turn was slightly, as she put it, “creeped out” by the romantic attentions of a pre-teen, no matter how grown-up for his age he acted. He was still only twelve and she, sixteen. Hank shook his head and turned back to the work at hand. Ororo had told him Logan was bringing an infant and to be prepared for anything, and he wanted to brush up on his early childhood medicine.
***
Jean kept her head down as she walked the hallway towards the boys’ dormitory wing, her eyes steadfastly fixed on her shoes. There was a general commotion around her, and the rushing bodies were jostling her, but she barely felt it. Everyone was excited about something, and their thoughts were clamoring at her brain, trying to get in. She was so concerned about trying to maintain her mental shields that she didn’t even consider trying to find out what all the hubbub was about. It turned out that she didn’t have to.
The room where Scott Summers lived with two older boys was the first door in the hallway, barely two feet from the landing on the stairs that led down to the classrooms, and the exclamations from the students below carried easily. Jean froze in front of the boy’s door and whirled toward the massive window in front of the stairs when a voice from downstairs squealed loudly, “It IS him! It’s Logan! And he’s got a baby!”
There was a queer plummeting sensation in the pit of her stomach at the sight of Logan striding across the yard toward the front door with a baby carrier in his hand. She knew she had a crush on the older man; she also knew that every female student in the school, even those who didn’t live in the dormitory, felt the same way.
Shaken and suddenly very self-conscious, she dropped her mental shields for just a moment, just enough to scout out the surrounding area and make sure no one was nearby who would see her flushed face. With no mental buffer, the unexpected force of the thought hit her mind with such velocity that she physically swayed from the impact: You’re beautiful.
Gasping, she whirled to see Scott Summers standing in the open door to his room, leaning lightly on a crutch, his ruby sunglasses perched awkwardly on his thin face. His bangs fell crookedly across his forehead and she clinically noted the small white scars high on his temple from the emergency surgery Hank had performed after the plane crash. He didn’t seem alarmed at her reaction, and she wondered if he even suspected that she had overheard his thought.
“I – I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t...” She stopped before she could explain any further and give away her slip. “Here,” she said, her voice steady again as she held the manila envelope out to him. “Dr. McCoy asked me to give you this.”
“Thank you,” he said in a soft, youthful voice that belied the aged, serious look on his face. He took the envelope from her but otherwise remained motionless, staring, she could only assume, at her. It was a bit unnerving to see her reflection in the red lenses of his glasses, and she began to back away from him when she remembered the crutch and the bandage on his ankle. That must be why he isn’t on the field trip, she realized.
“How were you injured?” she asked, real compassion vaguely coloring her attempt at politeness.
He shrugged. “Was playing football with some of the other boys yesterday and stepped in a hole,” he explained. “It’s not bad; just twisted it. But I can’t walk on it for a day or two.”
If Jean hadn’t known how distracted Dr. McCoy became when he had work to do, she might have held him in suspicion for not telling her that Scott wouldn’t be on the field trip with the rest of his class – he had to have known; he would’ve been the one to treat the boy’s ankle. But she’d been helping the doctor since she was thirteen and had been his intern for the past year, so she was well aware of his ability to focus on his work to the exclusion of all else, even eating. She suspected at times that he would neglect to breathe were it not an automatic function of his body.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she told Scott, her eyes darting around the hallway, seeking to avoid his unnerving stare. “Well, I hope you’re feeling better soon; I need to see about another student,” she excused herself after a pause, beginning to walk backwards down the hall.
He nodded and retreated into his room, hopping a little on his uninjured foot and using the crutch to balance himself. “Thank you,” he said again, and she muttered something that passed for “You’re welcome” as she turned and walked quickly to the girls’ dormitory wing, away from the oddly serious boy with the ruby-red glasses.
***
“Logan, welcome home.”
Ororo’s warm greeting met him at the door, and Logan almost smiled. It had been too long since he’d been here, he thought. The sound of her voice was home in itself, in the same way that the smell of warm gingerbread was the essence of Christmas.
“Thanks,” he answered, shifting his grip on the handle of the baby carrier and hefting it slightly. “Is Hank here?”
Ororo froze momentarily, her eyes fixed on the carrier and the hint of soft pink flesh that was visible over the edge. “Yes, he is,” she nodded slowly. “I believe he is in his office, or perhaps the lab.”
Logan noticed the way she watched the baby and offered quietly, “Would you like to see her?” Something he didn’t recognize - hope? - flared brightly in her eyes for a moment, and she nodded, stepping forward on silent feet to peer at the sleeping infant.
“She’s so....”
“Small?” Logan offered helpfully.
“Mmm,” Ororo nodded. “She’s lovely. Does she have a name?”
Logan hesitated. “Well, Raven didn’t mention one, if that’s whatcha mean. I’ve been callin’ her Marie.”
“Marie?” Ororo questioned, arching her eyebrows slightly and looking at Logan for the first time since her eyes had lit on the carrier.
He shrugged. “Dunno. Just what I’ve been callin’ her.”
Ororo smiled and looked back at the child. “Marie,” she said softly. “I’ll tell Charles you’re here.” She touched the baby’s face gently before she turned and left. Logan looked down at the slumbering infant and was surprised to see the hint of a smile twitching on her rosebud lips. Even in sleep, she had been uneasy, her forehead wrinkled in a frown and her small body wracked with shudderings and deep sighs.
“So you like her already, huh?” he asked quietly as he strode toward the elevators that would take him down to Hank’s lab and office. “Good.” He pressed the button for the elevator and rocked back on his heels, repeating to himself, “Good.”
***
[END 2 of 3]
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