20141/A Quick Once-Over. For Safety

A Quick Once-Over. For Safety
Date of Scene:	26 February 2025
Location:	Science and Medical Lab
Synopsis:	Hank worries that he has lingering damage or contact from aliens in his head. Jean assures him that there's no lasting damage and it's all in his head.
Cast of Characters:	Henry McCoy, Jean Grey

---

Henry McCoy has posed:
Hank was most often the doctor when it came to Medical, but this time he was the patient. After his little encounter at the Starport he wanted to make _sure_ there were no lingering effects from his extraterrestrial psionic hive-mind contact and the defense he'd been forced to deploy to keep himself from being taken over entirely. So he'd asked one of the three telepaths he trusted the most in this world - the other two were Charles and Elizabeth - to come and give him a mental all-clear. He still felt mentally off-balance, like he hadn't really fully recovered from the contact. And when you know what Doctor McCoy knew, had access to what Doctor McCoy had access to, you took no chances.

So he waited patiently for Red to arrive, trying hsrd not to fill his downtime with work or timewasters on his phone. A little time to sit and meditate would probably do him a world of good.

Jean Grey has posed:
Despite that role reversal for the good Doctor himselfr, Jean is fairly familiar with this aspect of patient care: psychic oddities are not a rare thing for the X-Men to encounter, as various forms of telepathic ability are, if not common, at least frequently reoccurring within the mutant population. Nevermind weird aliens.

When she arrives, Jean looks her usual teacher-self, a green cardigan over a white blouse and a dark grey pencil skirt. Very librarian. Upon spotting him, she flashes a dismarming smile. "Alright, Hank, lets get you a clean bill of mental health and get you out of here, fast as we can, hmm?"

Despite the surroundings, none of the equipment is really all that necessary for the kind of procedure this is. "You know the drill by now. Just make yourself comfortable and relax. I read through the debriefing notes but is there anything else that stands out to you about what happened? Any lingering symptoms? I can tell you right off I'm not picking up anything at the surface level, even if that doesn't tell us much."

Henry McCoy has posed:
Hank shrugged. "I just feel - off-kilter. Which, I am entirely aware, is a dissatisfying diagnostic modality, but it's all I've got. I had to go deep atavistic to keep the hive-mind from overriding my conscious will and utilizing my intelligence - and what I know - to do real harm." he said with a blue-furred shrug. "And while Mrs Richards was kind enough to electrocute the being I was in contact with I want to make sure nothing was left behind in my mind. It's a fragile enough place without outside meddling." he confessed.

But when one was talking to one's psionic doctor, one engaged in complete honesty. Red wouldn't go anywhere she didn't have to and in return he owed it to her to make the exam as quick and thorough as possible. Psi-exams were no fun for anyone, really.

Jean Grey has posed:
"Off-kilter is off-kilter. We don't minimize feelings here!" Relentlessly affirming, to be sure, but also just a demonstration of how her particular discipline approaches things, in contrast to some of his own hard-science analysis. Jean gets to engage in the wonderfully vague field of subjective personal experience!

"But that's all a pretty fair concern, given the circumstances. OK, well, let's get this show on the road. Sit back, deep breaths, and just do everything you can to relax. Up to you if you just want to try and blank your thoughts and let things wander like you're going to sleep or if its easier to focus on something mundane." These sorts of exercises, in any form, are no doubt very familiar, but like any good practicioner, she goes through everything anyway, one more time. Redundancy makes or consistency, or something like that.

However Hank does settle in to some base-line mental state, Jean herself engages a familiar gesture: closing her eyes, she lifts two fingers to her right temple. Not strictly necessary for mind-wonkery, but a bit of a focusing technique, of her own, perhaps instilled by Xavier many years earlier.

With it, she begins the journey, finding the surface of his thoughts and then delving beyond. First stop? The actual memory center, to get her own accounting of the incident.

Henry McCoy has posed:
Hank smiled at Jean as he relaxed. "We've been doing this for how long now?" he teased as he relaxed on the table. Hank's mind is rapid-fire, building associations and raw creativity far in excess of a normal human mind. Even now, when he was trying to relax and let her contact happen, his mind was thinking. Analyzing. Assessing.

He let her poke around, gently guiding her mind-self to the incident and the exploitation of the deep fractures in his self-image. And even just thinking about it changed Hank's psi-self from the oversized normal-looking person that she knew once to the blue-furred simian-like Hank he was now.

Jean Grey has posed:
"You mean professionally, or are we counting my amateur years as a student practicing on my classmates?" Of course, with one of said classmates now once again under the psionic microscope, so to speak, it suggests that this may be a distinction without much in the way of difference.

Once she's there, Jean does, well, what she's here to do. She gets nosey, she pokes around, observing the environs of the moment, from her own sort of proxy position. The brain doesn't record perfect replays of things, of course, it records impressions, with varying degrees of detail and heavy levels of bias based on all manner of factors. Is that Sue's perfume? They always talk about how strongly scent reinforces memory.

Fast forward, to the moment of attack, and, well, even Jean grimaces a bit, because of course, she is experiencing some of this in her own way now. And it isn't only the threat of the creature itself, but also, well, the _intensity_ of that other side of Hank's own psyche.

In the moment, he may separate a bit, disassociate, lock parts of himself away. But in retrospect, it's all still there, side-by-side. But it isn't the intensity of the beastial portion that she's interested in: she's interested in what's going on in that other half while it's locked away, feeling if there's contact, if the division holds, or if things begin to leak through, mix together, blend.

Henry McCoy has posed:
"There was an awful lot of experimentation back then." he siad agreeably. "And the Professor had a wicked fondness for making us give reports mentally. Helped to build up us poor mindblind folks's psionic skills and probably did wonders to cut down on your migraines." he said aloud. He didn't want to jog her mental elbow, after all.

"I used to think ... pun intended ... that I had decent psi-shields. But they cracked and folded under a hivemind's assault." he noted. "And, as you've seen already, I occasionally don't deal with my self-experimentation's side effects as well as I should. All these years later, you'd think I'd have a better grip on things." he said.

Ultimately, his mind didn't much care for letting the atavistic part of Hank's mutation out. Not even in self-defense. And his vague disassociation was a side-effect of the defense he'd deployed.

Jean Grey has posed:
"Of doing -everyhting- mentally. You'd just sitting around eating breakfast, doing your homework, taking a shower, whatever it is, and suddenly, there he is in your head 'Jean, come to my office immediately.'" Jean gives a performatively melodramatic sigh, and then cracks into a bit of a laugh thereafter. "I suppose we can't blame him for not wanting to roll all around the house chasing a bunch of hyperactive teenagers."

Engaging in some irrelevant side-conversation is not just good bedside manner, nor even just a facet of spending time with an old friend, even if it is also that. It's useful, in this work, because it's helpful keeping a patient's conscious attention in one place, distracted from wherever you might be rooting around in those deeper levels. "I wouldn't count it as a personal failing. You're incredibly well-disciplined, as it goes for a non-telepath. Sometimes that kind of thing just isn't enough."

Then, with her expressioning softening a little, she observes: "We all have those darker sides, Hank, and complicated relationships with them. You've got leagues on Logan, for what it's worth."

Though they'd flickered open somewhere in the discussion, she closes her eyes again as her journey takes her just a little deeper. That other side of him is, frankly, frightening to face, to experience some of its own stray thoughts, but she doesn't rattle too easily. It's worth being thorough here, for his sake, and for everyone else's. "Still haven't found anything, let me know if any of this is... uncomfortable."

Henry McCoy has posed:
"I'm sure you can tell just how not reassuring that is." he said with a laugh. "The bar is in Hell but hey, at least I cleared it." he smirked. "And as for comfort levels, I trust you implicitly. If there's anything unpleasant in there - and we all have unpleasantness in our brains and I'm no different - I'd like to pre-emptively apologize. There's a mad scientist in there somewhere and I like to think I keep him well-contained. We all have dark impulses, evil thoughts, it's whether and if we act on them that matters. Ethics 101." he said.

Hank not only had an atavistic side, all fury and impulses, but indeed a Dark Beast, all cruel intellect and no ethics. No morals.

"Or is the Dark Phoenix - or even your clone-sister Madelyn - behaving well?" he asked. "Come to think of it, that must have been hard on you. Harder than I realized until right now. I probably owe you an apology for not being as supportive of a friend as I could have been." he said. "Having my sizable hands full with the Avengers was and is a poor excuse."

Jean Grey has posed:
Jean's voice immediately adopts a very serious, not taking any guff tone, no doubt well-honed in the classroom. "Hank, I've been a telepath since I was ten years old. And one through my entire adolescence, through my teen years in a school with a bunch of boys, nevermind all the legitimate psychopaths we've encountered in our line of work. I've heard all kinds of inner voices, unshared thoughts, fantasies benign and dark, with no small number of them directed at my person. Not only do you not need to apologize, because - exactly - it's actions not thoughts."

Whether the things she sees are worrying? Well, there has to be a sliding scale there too. They're a group of dangerously talented, powerful people, after all. She has the sense not to dwell on it, in the moment.

However, his own mention of her own, slightly more literal inner passenger, draws a slight frown. "I would have said 'good,' up until this Galactus business. I feel like something is brewing there, but I don't know what I can do. It's part of why I stepped back from things, a bit." She forces a smile, and shakes her head. "Hopefully, I don't decide to eat the sun to spite him from eating the planet. Anyway, no, it's fine, and I haven't really heard from Maddy, no, not since one run-in a while back. I hope she's doing alright. It's far worse on her, all of that, being forced into such a strange life, than it is for me."

With all that said, she lowers her hand. "I'm not finding anything, Hank. Any out of sorts you're feeling is probably just good old fashioned stress-anxiety response. Do a hobby you enjoy, do your best to get a good night sleep, and let me know if it persists."

Henry McCoy has posed:
Hank looked somewhat dubious but he soon got his expression under control. "Yes ma'am." he said with an jaunty salute as he sat back up. "I was pretty sure it was nothing, but at our level we don't take chances." he said wryly. "And get some time on my calendar. I suspect I owe you a greaseball burger and a glass or four of barely-acceptable wine." he said with a laugh.

"Don't get so wrapped up in stepping back that old friends also get kept distant." he said as he hopped off the table.