Summary: Jean Grey has been on the run for weeks, trying to wrap her mind around the events in New York and mourn her sister. The last thing she needs is falling for the girl at the cafe, but that seems to be increasingly hard when you smile at her like she isn’t completely broken inside
Warning(s): protective Jean Grey, suggestive themes, trauma, kinda stalker Jean Grey, brief mentions of rape (not from Jean!)
Word count: 2.4k words
Jean Grey was utterly alone. She felt it with every passing breath; the sinking feeling in her chest, the numbness in her brain, the void in her stomach that seemed to stop her from eating anything solid…
She didn’t have anyone. No one was there for her, at least not the person she wanted.
Sara.
Fuck. There it was again, that sting in her eyes, that tremble on her lips—
No, she couldn’t cry in public. She wouldn’t. She was tired of it; sick of the tears, the pity looks, the having to smile and pretend her fucking world hadn’t come apart the second she found her sister was gone…
But damn it did she feel alone. She had never felt that way before, at least not when she was with Sara; not since she found her and took her out of her shitty foster house she had been forced to live in, full of kids her age who despised her. Sara had swooped in and grabbed her hand in the middle of the night, telling her without speaking to shut up and follow her.
And she did. She grabbed her backpack and her sister’s hand and ran and never looked back. They lived off of whatever they could get away with at the moment, trying not to raise any alarms and choosing not to stay in the place for too long. Living like nomads, Sara had told her after making the cashier let them through without paying for the clothes they desperately needed.
And there she was, years later. Still a nomad, still alone, still sad.
“More coffee?”
Jean raised her head at the voice. She looked up and was met with your face, calm and soft amongst the pain in her brain. You looked beautiful, so much so the redhead raised her hand to push her hood back. Just a little, just so she could look at you a little bit better.
“Um— sure,” she said. She pushed her cut half-full of coffee towards the end of the table. You smiled, leaning down a little to full up the cup before giving her another look.
“You okay?” You asked. Your hand, without meaning to, raised to grip her shoulder. She flinched and you automatically dropped, taking a step back. “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No, um… I— I’m sorry. I just…” Jean pursed her lips. Just what, Jean? You’re not used to being touched? Stop acting like a weirdo. “Sorry.”
You smiled once more, though your eyes were full of concern and confusion. “Are you…” you took a look around the small diner, taking in the other two guests in the place. You set the pot of coffee on the counter and sat down in front of her. Jean awkwardly hugged her cup. “Are you hurt?” You asked her. “Is… did someone hurt you?”
You’ve seen it way too many times since you started working at Finnies’ Diner two years ago to pay the bills. Young girls running from someone, women hurt and in need of waiting out the storm their husbands were back at home. You had always wanted to help, but they rarely accepted the offer. It seemed the girl in front of you, with fierce red hair and broken green eyes wasn’t going to let you in.
“No,” she said. You could tell it was a lie. “No, I…” she shook her head. “I’m just tired.”
And she was. You could see it in her eyes; she looked like a war hero returning home after fighting in a war. Sunken eyes with bags underneath, chapped lips that had a smudge of blood on the left side from biting it constantly, and shaky hands that clung onto the mug with desperation.
“Alright,” you smiled at her. “If you need anything, ask for Y/N, okay?”
Jean wasn’t sure why she had chosen to stay another week in this town.
It was small, everyone was fucking noisy, and it smelled like the wood the local lumberjack apparently gifted to everyone in town, getting them ready for the winter. Honestly, it looked stuck in time, like one of those old movies Sara used to sneak them in to watch back in the city, all in black and white and full of handsome men with too many teeth. Sara loved them, the old movies with the loud voices and the cheesy lines, so she would religiously take Jean to see them whenever they played them at whatever cinema put them on to fill in the gaps from the lack of new movies and get some easy money out of nostalgic old people.
Jean had hated them with a burning passion, finding them lame and predictable, but she loved her sister and she loved watching her happy, so she would just lean back and watch her instead, her face full of unshakable happiness and relief at being able to be a kid for just a few seconds, instead of a forced adult taking care of her little sister.
Jean was lying to herself, actually. She knew exactly why she had chosen to make the man working at the motel let her stay for another month without having to pay a dime; you.
She liked watching you. She felt like a creep, but she couldn’t help it; you were hypnotizing. From the way you moved to the way you wrote down every other order to how you would fill in the coffee machine as you hummed a little tune that sounded familiar to her ears.
She couldn’t stop looking at you no matter how hard she tried to. It was borderline frustrating, the way you commanded her eyes to follow you wherever you went. She would watch, sometimes from afar and sometimes close, when she had waited enough time to not be considered a weirdo for drinking too much coffee alone at a deadbeat town diner.
She had memorized your schedules; not on purpose, but just from watching too much. She knew you had graduated from college, according to the diploma hanging from your wall in the living room. Your apartment was cute, and full of personality. She had only been there once, had only dared to invade your space for a few minutes before the guilt overtook her need to know more about you.
She watched and watched, and talked and smiled whenever you approached her, and slowly she found herself thinking about you instead of what had happened months ago.
Jean kept her distance, trying not to come off too strong, trying not to make you uncomfortable with her constant presence; she had been doing so for two weeks when she heard it.
The sound of dangerous thoughts. The feeling of blood pumping through veins fast in preparation of a tense situation.
She didn’t turn; she didn’t need to. She could read every thought in the man’s mind, feel the sickening feeling of want as he looked at you. She could see his face, clear in every memory she shuffled through of him waking up and looking at himself in the mirror every morning.
And the things he wanted to do to you…
They made her sick. They made her angry.
“Hey.”
She snapped her head up. You were standing next to her table, your uniform folded in your purse and a smile on your face. So innocently unaware of the sick man a few tables over, looking at you as if you were merely an object he wanted to stick his dick into.
Disgusting. Infuriating. Anger fueling her already on fire veins.
“Hey,” she smiled up at you. You would never know she never smiled at anyone else.
“My shift is over. Want to come over to my apartment? I’ve heard there’s a new show out now that’s really good.”
“Do you…” she blinked a few times. You found it adorable. “Do you want me to watch a show with you?”
“I mean, if you want to,” you gripped the handle of your purse tightly, suddenly scared of coming off too strong. You couldn’t help it; you were intrigued by the newcomer who had come over every other week to drink coffee alone. “It’s no big deal if you don’t.”
“Of course!” Jean said, setting the palms of her hands on the table. The mug rattled at the movement, the already-cold coffee moving side to side. “I— I have never really watched a show before. Not entirely, I mean.”
You raised an eyebrow, the intrigue over the woman in front of your spiking. Who was she, and where had she come from? You wanted to know everything about her.
“Let’s go, then.”
It became a routine Jean found herself falling in love with. Her, waiting for you to finish your shift so you could go back to her apartment to watch whatever show you felt like watching at the moment.
The knowledge that Jean had never watched a show before (due to her being on the system since she was a kid, she had once awkwardly explained) was, to you, perfect. You got to introduce her to every show you loved, from classics she had heard of to new ones that made her impressed by the technology that was invented into making art.
For two months you both kept the tradition going. First, you would sit on your tiny couch with a bucket of popcorn separating you. Then, the bucket got relocated to the coffee table, and after a few more days your legs wound up on her lap, your body fully stretched as she laid her hands on your shins, unsure of what touch was welcomed and which one wasn’t.
But then it happened— Jean didn’t make it to the diner in time, having been forced to take a nap midday from a painfully long headache that wouldn’t go away, and you have had to walk back home alone. It wasn’t like you could call her; she was strangely paranoid about technology, talking about how ‘they could find anywhere with a phone in your hands.’ You found the claim weird, but decided not to push it; very few foreigners make it to your hometown you had only left to get your degree, and the few that did only did it because they were running away from something or someone, and needed a place to lay low for a while.
Jean had woken when the sun was starting to set. She cursed, pushing herself off the bed and wasting no time to run over to the diner. It was relatively close, and she got there quickly, but once she looked inside you were already gone. The other woman who maimed the place, a middle aged divorced lady that always offered Jean a sweet smile, shook her head with a chuckle at the ginger. Jean had been looking out the glass window, her eyes scanning the place to try to find you. With the confirmation you were gone, she pushed herself off the door and walked towards the alley.
You always took that shortcut, saying you hated the main road as it made the time it took you to get back to your apartment double and sometimes even triple. Jean had told you not to go that way if you were alone, but it seemed you were as beautiful as you were stubborn.
The soft smile on her face that was always present when she thought of you dropped at the strangled sound that reached her ears. It was your voice, full of panic and fear, and—
And she couldn’t lose you. No, she couldn’t. She would not. She refused the idea of it.
Never. Never again. She had lost too much, she would not risk you.
Anyone but you.
She ran, turning the corner of the alley to see you pushed against the wall. Your purse had fallen to the floor, its contents spilling all around you, and that man—
That man had his fucking hands on your body. His dirty hands, as disgusting as his thoughts.
He wanted to hurt you. To make you cry. And Jean— she wouldn’t allow it. Never. Never.
Without thinking, without even breathing, she made the man move away from you. She pushed, making his body levitate above you. You stared in horror, unaware of just how that man was floating.
What the fuck?
“Y/N.”
You turned at the noise. It was Jean, standing a few feet from you. It was Jean, looking at you while the man choked on something you couldn’t see. It was Jean, the one who…
“Jean,” you called out to her, voice trembling and full of fear, and she went to you. She wrapped her arms around you, one hand pushing your face until it was buried in her neck, and then you heard it.
Bones breaking. A scream of pure, unforgettable pain. Something falling to the ground—
Not something. Of course it wasn’t just something. It was his body, broken and lifeless, crashing into the ground.
“What…?” You found yourself asking. You clinged onto Jean’s jacket, your fingers turning white from the sear strength you were putting into the hold.
“Sh,” she whispered. “I got you. No one is gonna hurt you.”
You raised your head to see the man. He looked… wrong. His limbs were bent in unnatural positions, bones sticking out from every place, and his face… his face was full of terror, as if he had seen a ghost.
Jean. Jean had done that. She had raised that man from the ground without even touching him, and then she had shattered his mind before he turned his body into a disgusting mess of meat and bones.
Jean, kind Jean who always respected you and your space. That same Jean had killed a man for daring touching you without your consent.
And you found yourself craving that side of her. You wanted to know more of her. Of her… powers. Or whatever it was that she called that ability to destroy.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Don’t be,” you whispered back. And once she looked at you, eyes full of remorse and fear, you pushed her into your body and kissed her.
