Title: The Box Room
Author: Kat
Part: 1/1
Rating: R
Coding: Jean, Logan/Jean, Scott/Jean, A/U, Movieverse.
E mail: Bishclone@ntlworld.com
Summary: An A/U tale. Jean POV (mostly.) What might have happened
had the movie not ended so nicely.
Archives: Want. Take. Have. Kielle's archive and the rest.
Feedback: Yes. Please. I don't bruise easy. Bad or Good.
Dedication: Spyke Raven, she of the cool epics. Naomi, for being a
damn good beta reader for "November Dawn" that is proving a nightmare
to edit.
Author's Notes: Everything in {brackets} should be in italics and
denotes a flashback.
 
~~
 
They kept her in a box room. A box room in New Haven.
 
Once a week she was visited by a priest and a woman who nobody ever
quite 'caught' the name of. It was Spanish, this name, and rushed
whenever she was asked to give it. And it was obvious this woman
hadn't-been-born-in-the-states and geez, weren't there more and more
of them now, and didn't these nurses despair...
 
The box room, which was nice enough, had a good view of the teaching
grounds, and more importantly the young doctors who traversed them
daily. She liked to watch them, imagine what their lives must be
like, imagine what was out there, beyond the box room, and New Haven,
and the faint imprint of New York that she was sure she could see if
she squinted.
 
They fed her food that had no discernible shape. They told her she
was pretty when she was no such thing. They took her out of her room
to shit and for tests and to tell her, sternly, almost matronly, that
all the other patients were having a good time being braindead on the
ward, and why the fuck did she have to be so different and be
braindead in her own little box room...
 
Or something else that the woman with the low and thick Brooklyn
accent used to bark at her as she was wheeled to the elevator.
 
She got an elevator ride on Tuesdays and Thursdays and one Sunday,
that she remembered distantly, when some terrorist faction (that
probably had all the good reasons Jean could list to blast New Haven
from the Earth) had said they'd infected the water with some ultra-
new, ultra-bought-from-China, ultra-lethal poison and that everyone
would -like- die if they didn't free some people in Outer Mongolia.
 
To Jean's immense dissatisfaction, it had been a hoax and a lousy
hoax at that, changing one thing, and one thing only from Jean's
daily routine: she now drank her water with an unhealthy
ferociousness, in the vain hope that this was the one cubit of water
they got around to poisoning. It never was, and so her days tumbled
on.
 
The calendar in the box room still read October 2010, but she knew
it was later than that. She had no mirror, because she'd thrown it
out of the window an autumn ago, or maybe a spring ago, and judged
her age by the rough and lined hands that she would stare at as they
tried to grip at her fork and knife.
 
She asked her nurses which year it was, but they never told her.
 
And then one day, as if out of the blue (although which blue she'd
never decided, as she always imagined the blue water they kept in the
staff toilets, where she'd hidden last time she'd escaped, and she
didn't think toilet water was an acceptable blue) someone other than
the priest and the Spanish woman, who was growing rounder by the
Christmas but still had no name, came to visit her.
 
And he was called Logan. And he had come once before, maybe years
ago, and they'd asked him if it was okay, "Mr Logan..."
 
And he'd said, "Just Logan."
 
And the frumpy little nurse (who had long since married and
disappeared) blushed a scarlet and tried to hide the fact that she
would have liked very much to have kept him this close to her greasy
little desires for the rest of her overly-drawn-out life.
 
He'd walked out of Nurse Grogan's life (Jean was not so braindead as
to neglect learning her captors' names) as well as he had Jean's and
it was odd to see him back, what must have been years later, staring
at her blankly from the edge of her bed.
 
She wondered if he was married. She'd been married. She saw the
ring on her dresser, where they'd made her leave it because she'd
twisted it so incessantly around her finger that she'd made the skin
break and bleed. Hooper, who was fat yet jolly and made inane jokes
about Monday's Jell-O pots, had said that she imagined Jean's husband
was a very handsome man. She'd said, with a smile in her eyes, that
she would not be surprised if he was an astronaut, or a motor racing
driver, or, and this was the funny one, a chartered surveyor. Jean
wondered if Hooper had once been in love with a chartered surveyor
and he had not returned her affections.
 
Jean had been close, yet unable to get her mouth around, telling
Hooper that had Jean been her chartered surveyor and the object of
Hooper's no-doubt suffocating affections, then she would have married
the plump dietician in a second, maybe even half that. And maybe if
she had gotten these words out, Hooper would have smiled. But the
words were mumbled, and then stopped mid sentence and then Jean had
refused her Jell-O pot for what Hooper marked as the eighth time on
her pedantic little clipboard.
 
By the time Logan appeared on the edge of her bed, Jean had refused
her Jell-O pot for twenty-six times straight. A record she was
immensely proud of.
 
"How are you?" he asked her.
 
She wondered if he was so naïve as to think that she could answer
him. She smiled enigmatically, as Rollings had told her that was her
best smile and played with some of her hair.
 
"Silly question," he said glumly, proving to her satisfaction that
he was not so naïve.
 
There was a pause and his look disappeared out of her window, onto
those nice medical students and their nice Yale educated lives, all
wrapped up in their nice Sears-bought coats. "Good view," he said
awkwardly, proving Jean's assumption that this was not a talkative
man.
 
She noticed that he didn't look any different from the man of years
ago, the way she remembered him. And she found it slightly
perplexing that he hadn't aged. Everything aged. She knew that she
had. She knew she had lines on her face, and viewed the world from
beneath a sunken profile, deep set eyes and flat lips. And sunken.
Didn't that feel like such a great word for everything? Sunken.
 
"They told us you'd died." His look was still fixed on some far off
horizon. She wondered if he could see NYC, the tall towers, the
fairytale penthouse lofts. "They said you'd died and they wanted to
know what to do with the body...they said we'd neglected you, not
coming and all, they said..."
 
His look turned back towards her and his eyes narrowed, a small
smile curled his lips. "They said you were lonely. You lonely,
Jeannie?"
 
She shook her head and let him have the small, calculated 'I'm
fine!' smile she'd been practising for her meeting with entities
known only, and fearfully to Jean as 'THE BOARD.' She pointed to the
row of videotapes that sat beneath her television - period drama and
romantic comedy, Sleepless in Seattle, Casablanca, Taxi Driver - and
the books that sat on the window sill near her bed - Austen, Dickens,
Catcher in the Rye, a Gideon's bible, a journal. She almost felt
compelled to jump from her bed, all slippers and terry cloth robe,
and show him the day room. Maybe he'd be just as excited by the
elevator! Would he like to see it? Maybe Hooper was around...was it
a Monday...was it a Monday...was it...?
 
"Monday?" she asked him, blinking, sitting up in her bed now and
grinning at him. "Monday?"
 
He gave her a short look before shrugging his shoulders and looking
away. "Friday," he said.
 
"Ah," she replied, dejected. "Always Friday." She gave him a
small, spoilt look before descending back into the fluffed cushions
of her bed.
 
He edged closer to her and she felt her skin begin to tingle and the
tips of her fingers hum a little. She realised he smelled different.
Not like everyone else. Different. And then admonished herself for
her lack of descriptive function.
 
He smelt of outside. Shit! He'd probably even been to New York.
Sears. Broadway. Brooklyn Bridge. Hot dogs outside of the World
Trade Centre. She had a book with the pictures...what was it called?
What the hell was it called?
 
He scratched the back of his head. "Well...this I could have done
without." He smiled naturally at her. "You're looking...good."
 
She rolled her eyes at him, an action that felt far more familiar,
more right, than the usual juvenile wailing she subjected her nurses
to, her pouting and her adolescent sneering. She imagined, before
the accident, she had been beautiful.
 
He looked at her as though she had been beautiful once. When his
view snapped back from whichever horizon it had been fixed upon, and
it touched her features, her old, sunken features, disappointment
would twitch across his face. She was not, nor ever would be, the
woman he remembered.
 
Had he been in love with her? He reached out and grabbed her hand
like he had cared for her once.
She had let him grab her hand, and as he did so she'd remembered,
distantly, in a time before elevators, and Yale doctors, and the
sunkenness of everything, she had kissed this man.
 
But he did grab her hand. He didn't hold it. Gripped it in a way
you would the hand of a child, as though you were afraid the grasp
would be broken and the person would run from you, out of dangerous
curiosity, or a pointless need to be free. But free of what? Free
of everything.
 
"We missed you, Jeannie," he whispered.
 
"Nice," she said caustically, before bringing his hand, clasped in
hers, upwards, so she could see it. He had strong hands. But he
clipped his nails.
 
He nodded his head, held down a smile. "Well, that's one word for
it."
 
She examined his hand, the mottled skin touched by sunlight. He had
been somewhere hot recently. She brought the hand closer, angled it
a certain way as though viewing an antique treasure. She kissed the
knuckles and tasted the slightest hint of metal...
 
{Santa Monica Detention Centre. Protecting American Citizens into
the new Millennium! Funded by the State Lottery of CA. It could be
you!}
 
He looked at her, worried. He didn't strike her as a man who scared
easily. "Santa Monica," she said, asking for a reply as she pinned
him with her dark, green eyes. ("Jeannie has the best eyes, mom!"
"You know, you could have been a model...if you didn't do the weird
mind things." "Gee, Jeannie, you're getting married and you don't
even know the colour of his eyes!"} She rarely looked people in the
eyes anymore.
 
"Santa Monica," he replied, letting out a long whistle like she'd
heard people do in her movies. "They said you didn't talk..."
 
She dropped his hand, and he was so surprised by the action that it
fell before he realised and landed on her knees. Then stayed on her
knees. "Talk," she ordered.
 
"I..."
 
She moved closer to him, and reached out a hand, ran it along his
cheek, against the bristle of stubble that he was definitely not the
kind of man to bother about shaving off and kissed his cheek. He let
out a small gasp and caught her slim hips, underfed slim hips clothed
in the long white night-gown that had always been hers. In her
weakness, she fell into him, head against his chest, breathing to his
time. He wrapped his arms around her. They stayed like that for a
while.
 
It was comforting to be touched. They never touched her here.
Barely even looked at her. And she didn't like their hands, their
smell, their dirty emotions...because, oh God, they hurt so much....
 
The Nurse on 10B. Her father had died. Not that she'd ever known
her father - except for missed birthday bunches of flowers (how many
four-year-olds liked flowers?) and the odd postcard from Reno,
Boston, fucking London, England. But it hurt that he'd died...and
her own children, her own fatherless children would grow up
lost...losing...lost...
 
Jean had never seen the Nurse on 10B - but knew her intimately,
against her will, as though she was another part of her character.
That wasn't natural. It wasn't natural that he hadn't aged. It
wasn't natural that they didn't turn the calendar over in her room.
 
She hugged him closer. "Tell me. Tell me about Santa Monica."
 
He stroked her hair, lopping the red curls around his fingers, the
metal tainted knuckles. "I'm glad you grew it long," he said softly.
"Suits you."
 
She hadn't grown it. It was more of a matter of not having it cut.
 
He had been in love with her. And, though she could barely remember
the sensation, she had loved him back, he had completed her, she had
woken up to his touch every morning and he had smiled at her.
 
He let out a long sigh. "Santa Monica, huh? There are some thing
we'd rather forget."
 
The only thing she'd like to forget was that she had lost her
memory. Everything else she wanted back. All of it. Even the shitty
stuff. No, especially the shitty stuff. Someone had once told her
that the bad times reminded you that you were still breathing. She
wanted to be reminded of that.
 
She clutched at his old shirt with her hand. Checked. Real, red
and black and blue and smelling of fire and smoke. He had lost a
button at one of the cuffs. She wondered if her hands were steady
enough to sew it back on. She almost didn't remember when he started
talking...
 
"...you and me, Jeannie, we're not like other people. Not at all.
We're different, 'gifted' is the word they use now on the television.
Like it's gonna make us feel any better, right?" He looked down at
her for confirmation and received only a wide-eyed smile. He
shrugged. "Anyway, mutant powers and shit although I'm guessing
you've figured that out by now..."
 
{A girl standing, her hair in braids, tears running down her cheeks.
There are children laughing. Why are they laughing? Maybe they'll
take her away...that's what they're saying. Chanting. No. Taunting.}
 
{'Mutie! Mutie! Mutie!'}
 
"...and there's this one great guy." He sniggered to himself.
"Let's call him Chuck..."
 
{He was a very beautiful man. And she wondered, standing all gawky
and awkward and chewing her bubble gum, if he realised how beautiful
he was. His profile was classic, defined, and regal almost.}
 
{'Hello Jean, my name is Charles Xavier.'}
 
"...and he started a school. Called it Xavier Academy. Set it up
in this nice area, Westchester, New York and tried to help others of
his kind, our kind, get on in life you know...like some big school
teacher guy, all set up to save the world from itself. Noble,
y'know?" He stroked her hair again. "Then one day, the government
threatens that all these different people, these 'mutants'-"
 
{And the children chanted on. 'Mutie! Mutie! Mutie!'}
 
{Then came a woman, and she was wearing blue, and her name was Mrs
Gildmore. She said magical things to Jean, things like, 'I love two
things in life Jean, my roses and my science.' 'Look at this, Jean.
I wonder what Gallileo would have made of the Milky Way. You think
he could have believed something we didn't make could have been so
beautiful?' 'Have you ever seen anything more wonderful than a
snowdrop, Jean? Millions of snowdrops, like blankets tossed over the
ground. Just gotta be in awe of the precision of nature!'}
 
{Mrs Gildmore didn't say Jean's name like it was a curse, a dirty
word only broadcastable after nine.}
 
{When Mrs Gildmore came, the children stopped. their taunts.}
 
"-they're saying that they're going to put them all on this huge
list. All the names, all the powers, everything. So the fucking FBI
can track us or something...and there's this guy, and, yeah, his name
was Kelly and he was fighting in the Senate to have us all listed
neatly. And you were there Jeannie, not taking any bull -"
 
{' For reasons still not known to us, we are seeing what some are
calling the beginnings of another stage of evolution -'}
 
{The Senate was like that playground. They taunted. They laughed.
Their ring leader paraded and preened.}
 
'...But then this other guy shows up. One of Chuck's friends from
way back. And he's pissed off about this list and goes on this
rampage. Things get blown up. And then he kidnaps this girl, and
she's called Marie, sweet kid, and he uses her for this
machine...this huge, serious machine, up in the Statue of Liberty...'
 
Maybe she'd seen more than pictures of the Statue of Liberty. Maybe
she'd been there.
 
"Was I...?" she began, but her words were swept away in his story.
 
"...he wants to use her to turn the world leaders to mush. We
fought, damn, we fought hard but it wasn't enough and..."
 
He stopped. Why had he stopped? Why had he...?
 
He looked down at her. "Jeannie, maybe this isn't the right bedtime
story..." His voice was full of something misplaced, some emotion he
was trying to hide.
 
"Santa Monica?" she asked, her eyes wide but dry, and her mouth a
small shape, quivering as she hung onto him. She felt that if she
let go she'd really fall this time. Fall and land hard. Real hard.
 
"After that, the bill was passed. And we, you, me and everyone
else, we were labelled 'dangerous' by this list and they put us in
Santa Monica and..."
 
That was enough.
 
The room was dark. Cold. And she was close to someone, and he was
rubbing her back, telling her it'd be okay, that she'd be okay.
 
And God she loved this man. Loved him from the very moment she'd
met him, but was too damn stupid to realise it. For the rest of her
life she'd never love anyone as much as she loved him. As much as he
loved her.
 
She couldn't remember what he looked like. But she could remember
the damp walls, the grey suit she wore, the dry desert air that
seemed to clog up her lungs. Yes, she could remember that. But not
him.
 
She could feel his pain, edging onto hers, taking her over and
almost, to the point of pain, she could hear his voice and not his
words, his timbre and not his message. He was like a ghost, nothing
for her to grasp, to call her own.
 
She remembered roll call. She remembered standing in line and being
barked at. She remembered the tests...she remembered...
 
"...and that was the seventh year, and then we were edging into the
eighth..."
 
Around her the wall of her prison, her cell, her bunk-bed and toilet
and exercise yard began to disappear, and the Box Room filtered back
into life, as though someone were opening the shades...
 
"You, Scott, the Professor...fuck me if I ever see anything like it
again. I don't know how you did it. Some telepathy mind thing - I
mean, obviously, they had you and the Prof. in collars, dampen your
psy force y'know, and you used one-eye as this kind of anchor...and
you blasted us out of there. Had enough. Got us out. It was all in
the papers. Everywhere. 'Bad treatment of mutants! The liberals
screamed, as though they weren't the exact ones, eight years ago,
who'd called us murderers and gone on talk shows with their little
suburban horror stories."
 
She looked at him when he finished. The pause that formed didn't
sit well between them. Did she love this man? There had been a man.
A husband.
 
"Do you love me?"
 
The question put him off guard. He looked up at her, eyes as
innocent and neglected and open as she'd ever seen them, or ever
remembered seeing them.
 
He reached out to her, and cupped her head, bringing her closer to
him. She almost wasn't surprised when he kissed her. Pressing his
lips to hers.
 
She kissed him back. She imagined, before the accident, she was a
woman to be kissed.
 
{"God, I love you Jean Grey.}
 
It was surreal, dazzling, to be held so tenderly again - to feel the
brush of lips against her own, that simple and familiar caress that
had always been, for her, sickeningly like the storybooks. She had
fallen in love, and it would be forever.
 
She kissed him again and he pulled her a little roughly towards her,
pressed his mouth to her own. He tasted of the outside. Hot Dogs at
the World Trade Centre.
 
{"You're making me blush."}
 
{"Then blush."}
 
He had found her. He was rescuing her. He would take her away,
this Logan, from her Box Room, steal her away and keep her safe.
 
{"God, I love you Jean Grey."}
 
{"And I love you, Scott Summers."}
 
She kissed him just below his ear. "And, I love you, Scott Summers."
 
He dropped her, and blinked. And each time the lids closed for the
briefest of seconds, she couldn't help but wonder if his view of her
was changing. Beautiful, talented Jean Grey. Blink. Tired, ill, but
fighting Jean Grey. Blink. Depressed, Jean Grey. Blink. Scarred
Jean Grey. Blink. Sunken Jean Grey. Blink.
 
Brainddead Jean Grey.
 
It was hard to tell if he was upset, or angry, or neither. He just
stared at her, stared and blinked. "I'm not Scott, Jeannie," he said
at last, looking into her eyes and nodding as if trying to teach her,
as one would an animal, that this was the 'way' of things.
 
"No," she nodded her head, her brow knitting.
 
Because if he wasn't Scott, and he made her feel like that, then who
the fuck was Scott? And more importantly, where was Scott? Her eyes
flickered to the gold band on her bedside table. No, it didn't look
like Logan's style.
 
Night had come and her world was dampening, turning the light many
shades of grey. "But you do love me?"
 
He grinned, not a smile - more callous, calculated, just like the
man at the head of 'THE BOARD.' "I don't think I ever loved you like
Scott loved you." He paused, as if he had more to say, something
else to quantify the statement, but eventually he just shook his head
and stood, making his first move away from her in what felt like
hours.
 
She wanted his sun-mottled hands on her skin again. She wanted to
make jokes about his glasses. But then, tough breaks, he didn't wear
glasses.
 
"It hurt me. This mind thing. It hurt me, didn't it? It put me in
here."
 
His nod was solemn, but brusque, not unlike a manner he would assume
while attending the funeral of someone he didn't really care for.
She had seen him at a funeral. That was a memory that struck her.
And he hadn't been wearing black. "Yeah," he said, "and then the
voices wouldn't let you rest...you had no control. You're here..."
 
"...for my own safety?" She'd heard those words before. Barked at
her from all corners, all sides, as if the words made sense to her.
 
"Yes," some kind of emotion leaked onto his tone, but she had no way
of telling which. "You want to go home? Leave here?"
 
She looked around her room. The VHS cases smiling at her, the sun
setting behind the New York smudge on the horizon, her books, the
white nightdress that had always been hers.
 
Did he even have to ask the question?
 
"Yes," she said, nodding emphatically. "Take me away."
 
~~
 
They kept him in a box room in Manhattan.
 
He'd been there so long they'd painted the name onto his door in
white. The Nurses had given him nicknames. The machines in his room
blinked in rhythm. He could see the Statue of Liberty - or what was
left of it - from his bedroom window.
 
She'd fallen asleep in his car and he'd carried her into the
hospital. Made up some lie about 'jetlag' so the nurses wouldn't
worry. Held her in the elevator. He didn't have the heart to wake
he up. But then, he'd once been told he didn't have much of a heart
to begin with. Didn't have much of a body that wasn't made of metal
either...
 
He laid her onto the bed next to him, and reflexively she curled
against his body. Looking at that, he berated himself for being a
stupid fucking leader of the X Men and not doing this earlier. Chuck
had died, and that's when Jeannie had been admitted.
 
Him? Well, he'd been asleep for a very long time.
 
He kissed Jeannie's hair. Looked down at Scott and smirked, mouthed
'Lucky bastard' before turning to leave.
 
And just as long as no one told, he'd keep his reputation as an
emotionally deficient hardman.
 
~~
 
They kept them in a boxroom in Westchester.
 
She could still see the city. Make jokes about his glasses. Live
in his dreams.
 
The Spanish woman came. The Spanish woman went.
 
The Spanish woman transformed into a tall, blue mutant with red hair.
 
The Spanish woman still didn't have a name.
 
Fin~