Chapter Text
The noise was the worst at night.
During the day Jean could manage it. She had things to distract herself. She had her classes and routines. When times were tough she had Dr. McCoy's measured voice cutting through the static like a frequency she could lock onto. There were walls to stare at and floors to walk and the specific kind of exhaustion that came from holding yourself very carefully for eight hours straight. Daytime had structure. Structure was a container. A container was something she could surround herself with.
Night had nothing.
The dormitory hallway went quiet around eleven and the minds didn't follow. They just got louder, untethered from bodies that were busy doing things, free to drift and bleed into each other and into her. Idie dreamed about fire. Bobby dreamed about something she refused to examine too closely. Kitty didn't dream at all, which was somehow the most unsettling of all of them. Her dreams were just a flat, grey absence where a person should be.
Jean lay on top of her covers and stared at the ceiling and counted the cracks in the plaster and tried to be a wall.
She was not very good at being a wall yet.
She'd been here two months. Xavier's was… fine. It was fine. Everything is usually fine here. Everyone was kind in the particular way people were kind to something they weren't sure was stable and she tried to not think about how that made her feel. So she went to classes. She ate in the dining hall. She said good morning and thank you and no really, I'm okay approximately forty times a day and nobody pushed too hard because pushing too hard at Xavier's was considered impolite. And that was one of the few things here she appreciated more than she could say.
But the nights were bad. They were so, so, so bad. To be fair, the nights had always been bad, even before she knew what she was. Even before the bus, before the hospital, before Dr. Whatever-His-Name-Was sat across from her parents and used words like manifestation and latent and we'll need to monitor her. She tries not to think of those words anymore. The noise had always been there, low and constant, like a television on in the next room. FOr most of her life she had tried so hard to lie to herself, to tell herself it was all just the imaginative quirk of an extremely imaginative child.
She knew better now.
Jean pressed her palms flat against the mattress and exhaled slowly and reached, carefully, for the edges of her own mind. Professor Xavier had given her exercises. “Visualize a room”, he'd said, in that patient voice of his that somehow managed to be neither condescending nor pitying, “Make it yours. Put walls on it. A door, if you like. You control who comes in”.
She'd built a library. Floor to ceiling shelves, the kind that needed ladders on rails, books she'd actually read and some she hadn't and one entire shelf dedicated to things she was trying to forget. It helped, during the day. At night was a different story. At night the walls went thin.
She was lying there, not sleeping, cataloguing the dreams bleeding through the walls. There was Idie's fire again, and something cold from the direction of Bobby's room that she sidestepped firmly. And that’s when she found it.
The thread.
Thread like spider silk.
She'd noticed it before. How could she not? It was the only thing in the noise that didn't feel like noise. It sat at the very periphery of her awareness, quiet and particular and specific in a way that other minds simply weren't. Not loud. Not demanding. Present. That is all it was. That is all it was trying to be. The way a candle was present in a dark room.
She'd been ignoring it for two months.
She pulled her knees to her chest and looked at it. Not actually. No, metaphorically, the way you looked at things in your own head with your minds inner eye, thank god she didn't have aphasia (Can telepaths have aphasia? She briefly wondered, before shaking the thought away), and thought about what Dr. McCoy had said that afternoon, very carefully, in the particular tone he used when he was delivering information he considered important and uncomfortable.
“The psychic residue of an event like the one you experienced doesn't simply dissipate, Jean. It leaves traces. In both parties”
“Both parties,” she'd repeated.
“I would recommend, when you feel ready, making contact. Clarity tends to be less frightening than ambiguity.”
She looked at the thread. Spiraling and soft as silk in her head.
She thought about ambiguity.
She thought about the hospital. She thought about the way his nervous system had felt under her hands, the specific texture of a mind that processed the world in vectors and angles and the particular spider-silk awareness of things moving through space. She'd been inside his head for four minutes keeping him alive and she knew things about Peter Parker that she'd never wanted to know and couldn't now unknow. She never would. And now the thread was just. sitting there. Connecting them. A leftover. An accident.
Both parties.
She wondered if he could feel it too.
She wondered if he'd spent two months ignoring it the same way she had, or if he'd just assumed it was nothing. After all, he wasn't a telepath. He wasn't like her. He only knew the way people without her particular problem got to assume things were nothing.
She should leave it alone.
She should forget about it.
She should turn over and try to go to bed and ignore the thread like she has been for the last two months and will continue to do so till the thread disappears.
She did not.
She reached out and pulled on it, gently. Similar to the way someone knocked on a door they weren't sure they were allowed to knock on.
Nothing happened.
She tried again, a little less gently. Projected something that wasn't quite a word. It was like a word sure, but it wasn't a word at the end of the day. It was more the shape of a word. An intention. It was a soft and scared and hesitant “Hello” distilled down to its most essential components. Which, when it all got boiled down, was mostly just, “ I know you're there.”
Silence.
Then, from very far away, the unmistakable sensation of someone falling off their couch.
Jean blinked at her ceiling.
A beat passed. Two. She felt him locate the thread. She felt him scramble at first,obviously not accustomed to the feeling of her. And then she felt him slow. ANd then, softly, she felt the moment he found it, recognized it, and oriented toward it with the same wary focus he probably aimed at things moving in his peripheral vision. She felt him act carefully, cautiously, like he was absolutely not sure this was a good idea.
And then.
...hello?
Jean exhaled.
Hi, she thought back. Sorry. Did I wake you?
Another beat. Longer this time.
I was watching TV, he said. A pause. I may have been mostly asleep.
I can…Fuck. This was a mistake, I can go…
No, he said, quickly. Then, like he was walking it back, I mean. You don't have to. I've been… I didn't know if you could hear me. Through this thing.
I didn't try, she said. Until now.
Right. She felt him settle. Physically, probably, which was weird because she was in his head and shouldn't be that close to his sensations but that was a thought for another time, back onto his couch or the floor or wherever he'd ended up. His presence on the thread had a texture to it that she recognized and didn't want to examine too closely. It was warm, a little tired, and threaded through with that particular spider-sense awareness that never fully switched off. Weird. Okay, he said. Hi.
Hi, she said again.
A silence that was, somehow, not entirely uncomfortable.
How are you doing? he asked. And then, like he'd caught himself: Sorry, that's. Sorry. You don't have to answer that. I don't know what the etiquette is for this.
There isn't any, Jean said. I looked.
You looked up psychic bond etiquette?
She could feel his confusion and bafflement through the link. Like he actually believed her and was confused as to how she was able.
I looked up psychic residue and accidental telepathic links and three variations of that search and came up mostly empty, so…
She felt something that might have been a laugh. Not heard. Felt. The shape of it in her lungs.
Okay, he said. Fair.
The noise pressed at the walls of her library, distant now, less insistent. Idie's fire had banked down to embers. Bobby had gone still.
I'm okay, she said, answering his question belatedly. Xavier's is, I don't know, it's a lot. But I'm okay.
Yeah?
The nights are hard.
She hadn't meant to say that. It came out before she could decide not to, the way things did when you were tired and the walls were thin and you were already inside someone else's frequency, and that someone else can read your thoughts like you can read theirs and suddenly she felt naked.
Yeah, he said, after a moment. Quietly. They can be.
Jean pulled her knees tighter.
I should let you get back to your TV, she said.
It was a nature documentary, he said. About jellyfish. I'm not going to pretend that's urgent.
Jellyfish are interesting.
They really are, he said, and she felt the sincerity of it, uncomplicated and a little dorky and very… him, somehow, even though she barely knew him. Did you know they don't have brains? Like at all. No central nervous system.
Must be nice, Jean said, before she could stop herself.
The laugh-shape again. Warmer this time.
Yeah, he said. Must be.
She stayed on the thread a little longer than she meant to. Not talking. just existing in the same frequency, two people on opposite ends of a very strange string. Together. The noise stayed quiet. Her library walls held.
Eventually she said goodnight and he said goodnight and she let the thread go slack, not cut, just resting for now.
She lay on top of her covers and stared at the ceiling.
The cracks in the plaster looked the same as before. Everything looked the same as before. Yet it was also somehow profoundly different.
She let herself make a soft smile.
She thought, I'm going to do that again.
She thought, That's probably not smart.
She closed her eyes, and for the first time in two months, she slept. Peacefully.