sixthiterationlogs | i've fallen out of favour and i've fallen from grace

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i've fallen out of favour and i've fallen from grace

WHO: Jean Grey
WHERE: The fountain, the village roads
WHEN: 2 December
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Jean is a telepath - her powers are diminished but she can feel strong emotions and loud thoughts/surface thoughts. If there's something you would like her to pick up in specific, let me know on Plurk. She also has the ice power, so as she's coming out of the fountain she is freezing things around her. This isn't normally what happens in the fountain and she's not freezing over the surface of the fountain itself, just the lip of it.
STATUS: Open to new threads.

Everything was black. It was black and cold, bone chillingly cold, and Jean couldn't understand why she felt like she was being pushed upward through a passage when she'd just been in Egypt where the heat was dry and hot. None of it made sense, really, but did anything make sense lately? There were people out to kill them because they were mutants, there were mutants out to kill them because they weren't the right kind of mutants. Down was up and up was down and she was currently swimming in an abyss she didn't recognize.

She reached out with her mind first. Charles had always said that her mind was her greatest gift and her finest asset and not feeling him, not feeling that familiar answer back shook her to the core; had he died? He'd been there. He'd told her to unleash her full power, to fight back, to be everything she was capable of and to stop restraining herself from fear in order to save them all. Why wasn't he answering? She tried again, harder, and then out loud. Surely he'd hear her if he screamed, wouldn't he, even if he couldn't hear her in his head?

"Charles!" she screamed, choking down water in exchange for her troubles. She scrabbled up through the water and bumped up against what felt like solid rock and then, only then, did she chance opening her eyes. It was a fountain, similar to a fountain at a school or a museum, and she had no idea why she'd be half-drowning in a fountain with snow on the ground when she'd just been in Egypt with hot, dry air swirling around her and searing her lungs.

"Charles! Professor! Charles, please!" she screamed again, fingers slipping on the edge of the fountain. She kept trying to clear the snow away but there was more and more, almost as if her efforts to get rid of it were multiplying it instead. What was happening? How was this happening? She'd always been a telepath, had always had this ability and this gift? How was she suddenly locked away from hearing anything but a low, faint buzz and making snow pile up beneath her fingertips?

"Answer me! Someone! Anyone!?"

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The snow has been more than a little inconvenient, to say the least. When Matt's been away from it, tucked up inside the warmth of the house or the inn, it's been easy enough to consider that this sort of trial by fire is likely good for him -- If he can manage this, getting by without his powers on a normal day should be a piece of cake, right? But when he's in the middle of it, he feels a lot less generous about having to trek blind through the drifts.

Case in point: After having nearly fallen on his ass on the front steps of the inn, he clatters into the front room, the wind knocking the door back against the wall with a bang. Snow in his hair, mouth in a line, he feels for the knob and jerks the door closed behind him.

The noise startled Jean for a moment but once she realized it was someone simply coming in from the cold, she relaxed a little. It was difficult to get used to the fact that her powers didn't work the way she was used to the them working. Before, she was pretty aware of people coming in and out, of all the people within the grounds of the school, even, so it was hard to be surprised even if she was distracted by something else.

It was different here. Here, she had to truly tune in to notice anyone and even still, picking out individual thoughts was hard. It took almost all of her effort and often she couldn't get anything at all. It was all right with Kylo Ren, if only because he could meet her halfway, but sometimes she got startled by someone like the man just now.

"Ah! Sorry, you startled me a little," she said, rising from her seat and giving him a little smile. "Did the storm start back up?"

Her voice is young and earnest, and Matt can't help but blow out a soft laugh through his nose. "Why are you apologizing?" he asks, moving forward mostly through memory alone, a hand held out to touch the edges of furniture as he passes further into the room. "I startled you."

He pauses a few paces away, skimming fingers briefly over the back of a dining chair in front of him before scrubbing his hands through his hair to knock out some of the snow before it melts.

"You're new?"

"Old habit," Jean said, laughing a little when he points out the absurdity of her apologizing for being afraid. It was a little silly, come to think of it, but it had just been her natural reaction to apologize for it.

She watched as he touched the things in the room and she wondered if his vision was affected. Why would he touch things like that? It might not be, though, and that was a pretty big leap and a dangerous assumption. It was difficult to start learning how to read people without the crib sheet of her telepathy and Jean was only now starting to realize how much of her gift she used subconsciously on a regular basis now that she didn't have it. Motivations, emotions - things that she used to have clearly were now a mystery to her. Huh.

"I just got here a few days ago. I could have done without drowning in freezing water but it hasn't been bad since then. What about you?"

"Months," Matt replies, then pauses, tilting his head as he considers. "God, at least two. No, three. That's a scary thought." He huffs out a little laugh and turns his attention more fully to the girl, his focus fixed just above her right shoulder. "That's probably not a very encouraging thing to say when you just got here, sorry."

He'd like to say that it's not that bad, and maybe for some people it isn't, but he doesn't like to lie.

"I'm Matt. Welcome. I assume you've been given the rundown?"

Jean noticed he didn't look exactly at her and that confirmed her suspicions that there was something up with his vision though what, exactly, she didn't know. It was too much to try and lift something from his thoughts and with the way her telepathy worked (or didn't) here, it wouldn't be subtle and it would be out and out prying to try.

"I have been, yeah. My name is Jean. It's good to meet you, Matt." It wasn't a bad place, all told, even if she didn't quite understand the change in her level of ability since coming here.

"Is it always this cold and snowy? Or is this a particular time to be alive?"

"You've just been fortunate enough to arrive during an extremely intense and premature winter," Matt answers. "It wasn't this cold when I got here." And thank god for that, since he'd been stuck in that fountain until Frank turned up.

"Do you happen to know if there's any hot water on for tea?" What he really wants is coffee, but he knows he can go head and drop that wish in the well with all the others; right now, he'd just be happy with something hot.

"I can go check," Jean said, getting up to go peek her head in the kitchen. There wasn't any but it wasn't difficult to start a kettle on the boil even if the method was a little different than the one she'd been used to back home. Once she'd gotten it started, she came back and settled in her chair.

"There wasn't hot water but I went ahead and started it," Jean said. "So we'll have tea pretty soon. It's been kind of a pain to learn how to use this old fashioned stuff, though. I never thought I would miss regular stoves and stuff. And microwaves."

"But on the upshot, soon you will be able to start a fire anywhere and with just about anything," says Matt, his smile wry as he settles himself in the chair to wait. "Thank you," he adds with a slight nod in her general direction.

He can't hear her heartbeat now, but she sounds young, which could be a blessing or a curse, depending on where she's coming from. She seems polite and eager enough, though, and he squints her way with a slight tilt of his head, listening.

"Where did you come from, Jean?" Her accent is fairly generic, but there's a hint of upstate there. It's just so hard to tell here; you never know when someone will tell you they're not from Earth at all.

"Westchester," Jean said, laughing a little. "But upstate before that, up near Syracuse. It's been so long since I've been home that I usually just think about school being home, though, so I always say Westchester."

So much of her life revolved around the school and the professor. It felt strange to be here, to be without the cocoon of her friends and the other students and teachers; for the first time, ever, it felt like she was all alone.

"What about you, Matt? Where do you come from?"

"Hell's Kitchen," Matt replies, his smile growing a touch more fond. "All my life, born and bred." Even after the city had been reduced to rubble. It never occurred to him to so much as consider leaving. "Well, except for the detour to Columbia. I let myself pretend to be posh while I was getting my degree."

He tilts his head, blinking sightlessly into the distance. "The water's almost done."

Jean tilted her head, a little surprised he could hear it from so far off. Really? Then again, maybe she wasn't the only one with an ability around here. She suspected that this place collected mutants and somehow dampened their powers; it made sense for her and Ren, after all, so maybe there were others like them.

"Let me go get it," she said, getting the water and setting the tea to steep. It wasn't a hard process, really, except the lack of a real range and modern convenience but when it came down to it, a lot of stuff hadn't changed. When she had the tea in hand, she carefully handed a cup to Matt.

"Careful. It's really hot. I don't want you to burn yourself."

"Thanks," Matt replies with an affable smile as he accepts the cup with nary a spilled drop. "To be honest, I just want to hold it for awhile. It's miserable out there."

Miserable here in general, he thinks, with his powers reduced to practically nil and no real direction. He doesn't even have the privilege of heading off into the woods for an extended sulk like Frank. Not that he wants to, as tempting as it might be to some small, dark part of himself, but it chafes nonetheless that what little sense he has insists he stay well within the boundaries of what he's familiar with as long as the weather's like this. He's no good to anyone dead.

"It's actually pretty horrific. I'm tired of the snow. It was spring when I came from home," she explained. "And I went through a whole winter of this crap back home to get hardly any break and now more of it? I don't think that's fair."

Jean laughed, as if it was a normal thing to ask a weird creepy village to consider her feelings as to when she should be pulled from her life and brought to a new one.

"I should file a complaint."

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i've fallen out of favour and i've fallen from grace

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