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jaywhere · 8 days ago

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okay sorry for that rant i offer this as penance. from the fic ive been working on, beginning of chapter four. scene wherein scott summers cites the patriot act as a reason he can't have phone sex with his girlfriend. pg-13ish, i think (?) and severely unbeta'd, but such is life. enjoy.

“I mean, it’s going well enough.”

Jean’s voice crackles over the line. Scott grunts.

“Bush is — you know.”

The empty silence which follows does all the talking.

“Yeah,” Scott agrees.

He doesn’t elaborate. His thoughts aren’t something that should be elaborated on, given Jean’s current location. And the legislation which had been pushed through a few months back. And for the sake of brevity — a year out, Scott is still bitter about the election.

“Charles was worried about how this would go, which — “ She pauses.

Scott stares down at his chessboard. The pieces refuse to stay in place, bouncing from square to square in his mind’s eye.

“But honestly, everyone’s more worried about weapons of mass destruction. Or anthrax. Which is…both expected and unexpected, I guess.”

Scott understands. He’s shaped his life around mitigating the destruction that could be caused by his own power. Scott struggles to imagine himself in the Professor’s shoes — or even Jean’s.

“Yeah,” he says.

“But the reminder that we’re not a threat, you know. Across the board. That’s helpful, I think.”

Scott nods. He appreciates her optimism, just as he appreciates the speed and fluidity with which public ire shifts from one scapegoat to another. The Professor isn’t a fool. An unnamed emotion fizzes in Scott’s gut, pressurized and threatening to explode.

Lost in himself, by the time it occurs to Scott that Jean can’t see him, she’s already overtaken him with a sigh. “I suppose the X-Men are domestic, if nothing else.”

“Logan’s Canadian,” Scott replies.

A pause follows. Scott taps his foot. He has things he’ll need to do after this, but Jean hates it when he rushes her on the phone.

“And Ororo, Piotr, Kurt…” Jean trails off. “I meant the organization.”

“The Professor’s British.”

Another long pause follows. The kids are watching a movie in the lounge, Scott can hear, and he doesn’t think anyone has bothered to check whether or not it was appropriate. And he’d offered to cover Jean’s class tomorrow — art, of all the useless things — which Scott still needs to prepare for, although the longer he thinks about it the more he comes to believe that his attempts to lead the painting lesson Jean had left may be far worse than no lesson at all.

“Touche,” Jean says. “I think he does just end up feeling like fancy American, though.”

Scott says nothing. It’s a ridiculous sentiment, but he recognizes that Jean is trying to make a joke.

“Speaking of, did you hear about George Harrison?”

Those things have nothing to do with each other. But Scott doesn’t say that, and from nearly three hundred miles away, Jean couldn’t lift the information from his mind if she wanted to.

“Yes,” Scott answers. He taps his foot.

Perhaps that’s why he hates talking on the phone with her.

“It was sad.”

Scott says nothing. An anxious storm brews in his chest. “Yeah.”

A slow, crackled sigh. “I miss you.”

Static vulnerability leaves Scott’s arm hair standing straight up. The clouds dissipate. “I miss you, too.”

“Do you like hearing about your fiance’s exploits as a lobbyist?”

Scott’s lips part. He furrows his brow.

“Yes?” he answers, a futile guess that it’s the correct answer. He doesn’t understand what Jean is even asking him.

Jean laughs. “Not really what I imagined doing with my life when Chuck showed up at my parents’ house. Telling me we’d use our powers to save the world.”

A flinch. Scott hates when she refers to the Professor like that, a habit she’s certainly picked up from Logan. But Scott doesn’t want to think about Logan.

Eyes screwed shut, he plucks at each of her words one-by-one, and conjures the image of her in 1985. With two years on Scott’s twelve, cradled in broad-shouldered blazers and elevated a half-head above him by blocky heeled boots, she’d come across as nothing short of mature. His heartbeat still stutters in sympathy with the memory, shy smiles and the ozone scent of hairspray.

The ensuing months had been the first time Scott had ever cared about what he wore. The Professor’s adoption had marked the first time Scott had ever been allowed to care about what he wore. He still remembers walking into that department store in Moira’s tow, shades of red under glaring lights and blaring music, perfume vapors sticking in his sinuses. Denim jackets, striped polos, and thigh-hugging shorts had hunted Scott, hot on his heels, as he’d locked himself in the changing room. Moira’s stern Irish tone had sliced through the door. Scott had never so thoroughly understood the cage of freedom.

“Yeah.”

Jean waits. Fabric rustles on the other end of the line. Panic brewing in his chest, Scott had refused to emerge from the dressing room. Moira had brought him pieces one-by-one in a huff, and slowly, Scott had exchanged a wardrobe of ratty jeans and pill-ridden pull-overs for acid-washed denim and tennis cardigans.

The look hadn’t impressed Jean. He’d looked frumpy.

“Awful quiet over there. Wha’cha thinking about?”

Surprised, the novelty of the question rolls over Scott. A beat passes, thoughts refusing to coalesce. Eventually, he simply says, “1985.”

Jean laughs. “What?”

Mouth dry, Scott swallows. This isn’t usually the kind of thing he has to put into words. “Remember when, after you moved in, and you took me shopping. For clothes.”

A long hum. “I do. You’d only wear the stuff that Moira bought you.”

Scott nods. He remembers staring at the tips of Jean’s boots through the gap in bottom of the changing room door as he’d stripped off his shirt and pants. Despite his best efforts, at thirteen he’d been almost completely unable to reign in his own thoughts.

Three hundred miles away, Jean reads him like a book. “You had such a big crush on me.”

“Jean.”

“What?”

Scott’s cell threatens to slip through sweaty fingers. The memory is equal parts humiliating and exhilarating. At thirteen, Scott barely knew what sex was. He hadn’t even figured out how to masturbate. His desires had been a jumbled mess with neither a shape nor an outlet, and Jean’s involuntary voyeurism only made things worse. His entire body had burned red when, from the other side of bolted sheet of plastic, Jean had giggled and muttered, cute.

“Are you trying to say you didn’t have a crush on me? Because we both know that’s not true.”

“No,” Scott says.

A lump twists in his throat. He’d always had a crush on Jean.

“You were so cute. Just this handsome little guy who couldn’t stop thinking about —

“Jean,” Scott cuts her off. “You’re embarrassing me.”

More laughter. It’s not mean-spirited. Regardless, his cheeks burn.

“Why?” she asks. Scott’s chest puffs up, preparing to respond with a biting comment about how having your fiance laugh at you isn’t exactly reassuring, when she finishes her thought. “It’s true.”

Scott doesn’t know exactly what it is. Whether it’s her tone, or his knowledge of her, or his own memory of himself as a teen, Scott realizes with a jolt of surprise that she’s being flirtatious.

“It was rude,” Scott says. “I was, I mean.”

“I liked it.”

Scott blinks. He distinctly remembers sitting on the little bench in Ororo’s greenhouse after they’d already started dating. Scott had carefully laid his hand on top of Jean’s. At the time, it had been the kind of contact that made his heart race and stomach twist itself into knots. Unable to handle it, Scott’s thoughts had run amok. And Jean had slowly, deliberately turned to Scott, and asked, Scott, do you want to have sex?

When, after an excruciating minute, Scott had finally finished rambling about how they were teenagers and that was not appropriate, she had smiled woodenly at him and continued, Then please stop thinking about my breasts.

In the present, a gravelly creaking reverberates through Scott’s skull. He’s grinding his teeth. “You definitely didn’t.”

Jean hums. “I mostly liked it.”

“It was embarrassing.” He hadn’t been able to look Jean in the eye for nearly a week after that. Ironically, she’s essentially the only person who would’ve ever noticed. “I had no self-control.”

“Maybe I like that.”

The maybe isn’t necessary. Scott already knows that she does. He’s seen it, in the twisting thread-thin caves of her mind. The same darkness that colors her voice creeps its way into Scott’s.

“You don’t want to see me with no self-control,” he says.

Jean laughs. “Oh, don’t I?”

The bottom of Scott’s stomach drops out.

The terminal velocity of an adult man is about one hundred twenty miles per hour. An aloof problem presented in a physics text given to him by the Professor, the maximum speed of a freely falling object in relationship to the drag of the medium it falls through.

Scott’s eyes burn. There’s nothing so uncontrollable as death.

Jean sighs. “I’m curled up in bed. In my nightgown.”

It takes Scott a long moment to snap back to reality. The memory slips through his fingers, leaving his

“Where are you?”

“Uh, in our room. At the table.”

Scott answers simply. It isn’t until a breathy silence encroaches that Scott begins to consider the question had been rhetorical. Only a few moments had passed, he thought, but perhaps it had been longer —

“What if I told you I was wearing those panties you got me for my birthday last year.”

Jean doesn’t sound frustrated. She hums, her tone light, and allows the call to lapse back into unworried silence. Like she’s waiting for Scott to think through his response.

Dumbfounded, his jaw flaps open like a fish. He would say she’s happy that she’s getting some use out of them — except that can’t possibly be what she’s looking for. She wouldn’t have brought it up if that’s all she had wanted to hear. He’s supposed to say that she’s beautiful. He can’t see her. He’s supposed to ask her why she’d brought those on a trip without him. She’s trying to start a fight. Ororo had been the one to suggest Scott buy her something other than jewelry for her birthday, and that the joy of such a gift was that it was pleasurable for both of them even if it wasn’t really within the bounds of Scott’s character. Jean is about to tell him that it was a stupid idea, and Ororo knows nothing about their relationship. Except Jean would never say that so directly, as much as Scott sometimes wishes that she would, his feelings be damned —

A soft, breathy noise sputters over the line. “You’re so handsome, Scott.”

Wind rattles the windows. Inappropriate arousal coils in the pit of his stomach. “You’re beautiful,” he answers, almost entirely by reflex.

More silence follows. Scott isn’t disappointed. He’s certain that was the correct response. But on the heels of his relief comes the unwelcome image of Jean tangled up in unfamiliar sheets, fingertips dragging lazy circles over her stomach, blinking slowly, hem of her nightgown riding up over her thighs.

Scott swallows. Another thoughtless little high-pitched noise drifts over the line. Jean must be tired, wanting to stay on the phone because she wants to talk to Scott. Guilt fills Scott to the brim.

Excruciating seconds tick by. Scott has no idea how to get the conversation back on track. His temples throb.

“What are you thinking about?” Scott asks. He has nothing else to say.

A few beats pass, marked by the nervous drumming of Scott’s fingers on the lip of the table. Jean lets out a nervous laugh. “You really wanna know?”

Scott pauses. She’s acting strangely.

“Yes,” Scott says. Hesitantly, he continues, “That’s why I asked.”

“You and Logan. Actually. Is what I was thinking about.”

Air pounds against the inside of Scott’s lungs. The breath fizzes out of him on the back of the question, “Like. Sexually?”

Discomfort perfuses the radio waves linking their two phone speakers.

“Um,” Jean finally response. “Yeah.”

Baffled, Scott asks, “Why?”

Another laugh. Jean is immediately more comfortable. Briefly, Scott imagines the conversation as a scale upon which a set amount of embarrassment must be distributed. The weight of it bears down on Scott’s shoulders.

“I don’t know. You’re both attractive.” The click of Jean’s tongue, perhaps sucking her teeth or licking her lips. “And I like the idea of you just…giving in. To feeling good. Even though you know it’s wrong.”

Her voice grows more and more coarse as she continues, low-pitched and gravelly.

“Not that it’s like, wrong, but. You know.”

Not as speechless as he would like, Scott replies, “No. It’s definitely wrong.”

The sentiment oozes up from his gut, an acidic sludge eating at the grout that holds the floor tiles in place. The chandelier trembles, rooks scuttling forward on the diagonal and pawns crawling shyly backward. It’s the same disgust that accompanies the phantom shape of Jean’s toes between his lips, only stronger, and Scott doesn’t even have the chance to scrutinize the shape or scope or meaning of it before Jean continues with a giggle.

“Yeah, but I mean — I know you’d never cheat on me.”

Scott’s brain skips into double-time as he attempts to follow the conversation.

“And I know you like being bad.”

A fuse blows. The lights flicker out. “Huh?”

Even more laughter follows, pitched at a cackle. As the backup generator rumbles to life, Scott briefly wonders if Jean is mocking him.

“Oh, come on. Everything you like is like that. Mister Perfect loves to break the rules just a little.”

Scott’s brow furrows. He glances back at the window. No rain.

“Do I?”

He doesn’t. Jean’s making a joke. There’s no other explanation.

Should Scott be laughing? Jean isn’t. Her voice vibrates on the back of each breath, nearly a moan. Her chest heaves in his mind’s eye. Teeth pluck loose skin from the back of his lip. Scott squeezes his thighs together and tries to ignore the way he’s throbbing. He has to figure out what the hell is happening in this conversation —

“God.” Another noise crackles in Scott’s ear. It sounds even more like a moan. “I love what’s gotten into you recently.”

Scott blinks.

“Are you touching yourself?”

All at once, every muscle in Scott’s body locks up. “What?” he hisses. “Are you?”

“Um.” Embarrassed, Jean’s voice is just as tight as Scott’s. “Yeah. We’re having phone sex?”

Scott had not picked up on that.

“I’m. You. We. I don’t.” Heat creeps down his neck before descending even further, his chest breaking out into a blistering itch. “You’ll be back in two days.”

A beat passes before Jean responds. “What, so you can’t enjoy yourself because I’ll be back in two days?”

“No, I just.” Words slip through Scott’s mind like a sieve. “I don’t need to.”

More silence follows. Scott realizes, shame searing the corridors of his mind, that had not been the correct thing to say. He doesn’t know what the right thing is, and doesn’t particularly care. He wants out of this conversation.

He swallows. “The Patriot Act.”

Jean breathes into the line. In retrospect, Scott should have been able to discern the difference between her titillated little breaths from before and the shocked ones that rattle the Nokia speaker now.

“Scott,” Jean says, slowly. “The United States government doesn’t care if I masturbate in the White House.”

Logically, Scott knows this is true. The sentence makes him want to curl in on himself.

“Literally took a lawsuit for anyone to give a shit about Clinton, Scott, I don’t think — “

“Jean,” Scott interrupts. He bends at the waist, his skull sandwiched between his phone and one broad palm just as his dick is between his stomach and his thighs. He’s never wanted Jean to be able to read his mind so badly. “I don’t. Do that.”

Steely, Jean doesn’t give an inch. “Yes, you do.”

She knows. She probably knew when Scott first figured out how to. She’d probably known exactly when he was, salacious thoughts emanating from him every time his grip on his own mind slipped, impaling the surface of Jean’s mind as she simply tried to go about living her life.

But Scott doesn’t like to.

He says nothing. They both know this.

“You can, um. Keep going, though.”

Disappointed, Jean sighs. “Scott.”

Crushed beneath the weight of his own humiliation, Scott lashes out. “Why are you mad at me? I didn’t even do anything.”

“I don’t know, Scott, even if you hadn’t just embarrassed the hell out of me for thinking we were having a nice time together,” she snaps, “asking me and only me to keep masturbating while you just sit there because you’re uncomfortable with yourself is — uncomfortable. And weird. As — no.”

Scott blinks. Of course he had embarrassed her.

“You’re stressed,” he says. “You should.”

He wouldn’t mind listening to her. Probably. Truthfully, Scott’s not sure. But —

A groan of frustration hits his eardrums. “Did you not hear a word I just said?”

Frowning, Scott furrows his eyebrows. She’s not being fair. He’s not hard anymore, which should be a relief. Instead, a cocktail of helpless frustration races through his veins.

“I was listening to you.” The words scrape through clenched teeth. Scott doesn’t even think about telling her to calm down, as much as he wants to.

She sighs. “Okay.”

Like she’s trying to convince herself.

“Scott, that’s weird. It’s weird now. I’ll just — I’ll see you in a couple of days.” Leg itching beneath his cast, Scott stares down at his chessboard. The pieces remain stubbornly stationary. “I love you.”

Silence encroaches. Scott begs the pieces to move across the checkers tiles in the foyer of his mind.

An angry sigh cuts him off.

“Oh,” Scott says. “You, too.”

The line clicks dead.

With his own angry sigh, Scott drops his phone onto the table. The plastic clatters frantically against the glass. With his eyes screwed tightly shut, Scott peels his visor off and digs his fingers into his eyes until the pressure stimulates long-dormant cones. Saturated blues, greens, and purples erupt on the back of his eyelids.

With a resigned certainty, Scott straps his visor back to his face. The arms settle into the permanent canals lining the top of his ear, a familiar hurt. Crutchless, he shuffles over to Jean’s dresser and opens the topmost drawer.

Neatly-stacked rows of panties and bras stare back at him. Grim, Scott fingers waistbands and straps until he feels scratchy lace on his fingers. Its translucent white fabric glares daggers back at Scott.

He’d thought it was pink when he bought it.

Scott isn’t good at this. He doubts he ever will be.

As he collapses face-first onto the foot of the mattress, grime-ridden cast dangling haphazardly over the edge, Scott desperately misses the shape of Jean’s foot in his mouth solely for the fact that, for one brief moment, he hadn’t fucking thought about anything.

#the main purpose of the conversation at the beginning of this scene is to remind u that it's 2001 #so u don't shit urself when colossus and nightcrawler start saying slurs at each other in the next scene #lmfao

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