2013.06.03 - No Iceman You're Not Dying (Again)

Jean enters the Medlab at a crisp clip, her brows knitted together in concern. "How long has this been going on?" she asks Bobby as she does, stepping to one side and gesturing him toward one of the biobeds. She doesn't yet know much about his condition -- only what she saw by the lake. But the ice creep was remarkable enough she couldn't miss it. "And why the hell didn't you come see me sooner?" (Never mind the fact she's been hit and miss around here, herself.)

Having ditched his armor on the way in, Bobby's not far behind Jean. Of course the ice has reached the bottom of his face by the time he gets down there. "Depends, what do you think is going on?" he tries, attempted joke dying quickly. He takes a deep breath before hopping onto the bed. "Since...I uh..." he shifts awkwardly. "Came back. From...being 'dead'," he murmurs, avoiding Jean's gaze for a moment. He's still not comfortable talking about that part.

If anyone can sympathize with the whole death-and-resurrection thing, it's Jean. She moves to prep some exam utensils, glancing to him, her expression empathetic. "Take off your shirt, please. Let's take a look, while you tell me what, exactly, you've been experiencing since then."

Bobby winces when told to take off his shift. First he takes off the gloves to reveal his hands are pretty icy. As he takes off that long-sleeved shirt, it becomes more obvious why he was wearing the unusual getup. His entire torso...arms, chest, back, shoulders, neck...it's all ice. Not just covered in ice armor...actual ice. Ice that feels oddly like cold, slightly more solid and smooth flesh if touched. "It's worse today than it's been before," he murmurs.

Jean runs her hand along one of Bobby's arms, testing the flesh there. "And this has been happening since you came back?" A red brow arches slightly. He really should have said something before. She purses her lips slightly. "Okay. I want to see if I can take some blood from you--" Somewhere? She's not really sure she'll get anything out of the 'ice'-- "and a tissue sample from one of the frozen parts." Because how it responds when separated from his body will be as telling as anything else. "It may hurt a little."

The first thing she preps, however, is the needle.

"It was just little patches then. And I could control it better. Switching back easier. But since the mission with the Sentinels it got worse," Bobby replies. "Bigger areas, taking more concentration to change back, sometimes I wake up and I'm completely ice..." he trails off. "If you want blood, I'm gonna have to take off my pants...unless you want it from my head," he says, tapping his still unfrozen face. The ice melds seemlessly into flesh, making it hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. "Do I get a lollipop after?" he tries to joke.

Jean chuckles, now. "If it will help, yes," she says as to the lolly, green eyes dancing a little. Nonetheless, she then says, "Okay. Then, strip for me." She has enough grace to smile to him when she says that, and offers a friendly -- though not saucy -- wink. Just something to try to ease the discomfort. She'll use a needle to extract the blood and then run medical scanner over one of the transition points between ice and flesh before she finally takes a small scalpel and scrapes a little of the ice tissue off to put in a petrie dish so she can get a look at it under a microscope and via any one of several scanners they have. She does pause a moment, to see if the ice 'bleeds' when she uses the scalpel. If anything, though, she expects she'll have to sharpen the blade, rather than fetch a bandage.

"If you insist, Jean. Gosh, didn't even take me to dinner," Bobby keeps the humor up. It's how he deals with things. Standing, he kicks off his sneakers and drops his jeans. Yes, he's wearing boxers covered in snowflakes. It's Bobby after all. The ice stops just above the waistband, another seemless transition. Hopping back onto the table, he winces slightly when the blood is taken purely out of habit more than actual pain. The scraping doesn't bleed but it does take more muscle than might be expected. And the scalpel will be needing sharpening. The ice would register as...different than normal ice. More dense and with traces of Bobby's DNA in it. Less ice and more organic material.

Jean places the tissue in a scanner and takes a moment to peer at it under a microscope. Realistically, however, it will doubtlessly take her some time to really get a handle on it. "How does it feel to you?" she asks, setting the tools aside to pull up a chair and simply talk about his symptoms and what's been going on. She can make educated guesses based on cell structure, and the like, but personal feedback may bring a different experience. "Are you in pain at all?"

"The ice? Like...me," Bobby replies with a little shrug. "I'm not in any pain I just..." he shrugs. "it feels weird. Like I can still...feel. I felt your hand it just didn't feel like it does on the non-ice me."

Jean considers that for a few moments. "You say all this started back when Kurt pulled you from the lake?" She's careful not to say 'brought you back from the dead' or anything like that. She knows how that's a sensitive button to push, from personal experience. (Explaining what she experienced to her seminary-student brother was so much fun!)

One of the analysis machines beeps softly. She moves to inspect the readouts. Her lips purse at what it tells her: Bobby with extra water. Sort of. Really, it's melted ice that is Bobby. "According to these preliminary readings, Bobby, the ice is as much you as the blood is."

She lets out a small sigh that's more thoughtful than anything else. "Okay... If you're willing, I'd like to take you back there telepathically. I want to see if there's something around all of that, which could have triggered this sort of response. It could actually be a natural progression of your abilities. You wouldn't be the first mutant to experience that dramatic a shift." Hank comes to mind, among others. "So before we jump to any drastic conclusions, let's rule out whatever we can."

Bobby nods, rubbing the back of his head. "The night after. I woke up and had a patch of it on my chest..." he trails off. "I got it to go away easy but it kept happening," he explains. The machine beeping makes him jump and give it a nervous look. He waits as Jean reads the results, the stress making the ice spread a little lower down his body. When Jean reveals what happened, Bobby freezes...not literally for once. "What?"

He's pretty stunned but shakes it off and frowns. "Back to where? Getting pulled out of the lake?" he asks. "You're telling me this...this is me? I'm doing this somehow?"

Jean gives Bobby an oblique twist of her head, which is actually something of a non-committal shrug. "It looks that way," she tells him. "I'll have to run more tests to be sure, but the ice-water is full of your genetic material. So, my best guess right now? Yeah. It looks like you are." She moves away from the machine, returning to him. "That's why I'd like to take a look at your memories, see if there's a trigger in there, possibly, or if there was some sort of physical shift that might have happened to trigger it." Well, hey. It worked with TJ and her new found bamf.

"...you've gotta be kidding me," Bobby groans after a few moments of silence, head in his hands. Eventually he looks back up and takes a deep breath. "Alright...let's go back there," he says. "It's pretty messed up though. Until they all had my hand I could barely even feel myself..."

Jean lays her hand lightly on Bobby's shoulder and gives him a rueful smile. "Don't worry," she says gently. "I actually do have some idea what that feels like." 'Cause, well... Phoenix. "We'll work it through, together." She pauses a moment, though. A small smile plays at her lips. "Since this could take a little while, you can get dressed again, first, if you want." Though it won't really bother her if he stays in his boxers.

Bobby takes a deep breath and manages a smile. Jean's manages to reassure him enough. "My hot bod that big a distraction?" he jokes, pulling his jeans back up at least. He doesn't bother with his shirt, getting back onto the bed.

Jean chuckles. "What can I say?" she says lightly to him as he pulls up his pants. "You give me chills." Once he's settled again, she sits down opposite him and reaches out to brush his temples lightly with her fingers. Closing he eyes, she begins to adjust her shields so that she can let his thoughts in without endangering any of them. With a light, psychic touch, she guides his thoughts back to the water, so she can start to piece together what he felt and experienced, with the hope it will illuminate his current situation.

Bobby laughs, running a hand through his hair. He flashes Jean a grateful smile and shifts a little on the bed. He takes a deep breath as Jean starts to bring them back to that day. From Bobby's perspective...he's in the lake but has no form. No body, spread among the water and trying desperately to pull himself together. He knows there are people on the shore calling to him. Friends investigating the oddly frozen lake and the half formed ice bodies and limbs floating in the water. For him, the last thing he can remember before that is getting stabbed by Lady Deathstrike and shattering on the pavement in front of that clinic.

Jean is careful, as she picks her way through his memories, to do two things in particularly. Firstly, she tries to shield him from relieving the worst of the emotional impact of the events, gently softening the sense of those emotions like looking through the haze of a slightly out-of-focus lens. It's that way to him, but she still absorbs the full impact, and it's definitely not pleasant -- though she's also careful to shield her emotions from him, so that they don't compound one another. Secondly, however, she's careful to absorb as many of the details as she can -- particularly the transition point from the pavement to the lake. Because, there had to be some point of transition. His molecules and consciousness had to go somewhere. And it's by following that trail that she can better appreciate the way his molecules rebonded to one another when his friends took his icy hand and pulled him out of the water.

Bobby's awareness isn't all that there. From when he hits the pavement, it's like getting smacked in the head. Things are a daze, blurred, and scattered for Bobby, fading in and out as the ice melts and enters the water system. When he ends up in the lake, he wakes up at the sound of the familiar voices of students and starts trying to pull himself together without even realizing what happened. It's when he has the hand gripping his, something to focus on with everything he's got, that he's able to pull himself back into a solid organic ice body. Shortly after emerging from water, he shifts back to his flesh and blood self.

But there's more to it than that, Jean knows. Just as TJ's unexpected bamf into Hell was triggered by her desperation to get home, she knows there's more to Bobby's reincorporation than the blurred and scattered haze. It will be found in his subconsciousness, however, not his conscious mind. Somewhere in that basic lizard-brain everyone possesses, where the basic will to survive lives.

Sinking into that mind, however, isn't necessarily easy, especially given all the fears and uncertainties Bobby harbors. But, Jean's convinced the key will be found there... somewhere in his will to live.

There are a lot of fears and uncertainties in Bobby. Fear of being alone, of being not good enough, of his friends being hurt and killed, of more students being taken from them like too many have already. As he reincorporated himself there were a few intense feelings. Desperation to not be alone, to not die, and to get back into the figiht and stop Lady Deathstrike from kidnapping and killing the hospitalized mutants. Following the Deathsrike thread will lead to the instant Bobby 'died'. Seeing her diving at him claws outstetched, a few thoughts go through his head. 'Make the ice thicker, stronger, better. Stop holding back of she'll kill you'. It's right there that something just clicks in Bobby and he shifts from just armor to becomming the ice. And it's that event that saves him. Of course the sudden shock is what allowed his body to be shattered but that just led to the lake and coming back together.

And it's that moment that is the 'Eureka!' moment for Jean -- 'Stop holding back or she'll kill you...' And his body turns to living ice. Carefully, now, Jean sorts through the rest of what she sees, allowing him to feel the relief of being back together and solid again, adding to it a sense of her own reassurance. ~ You're going to be okay, ~ she tells him now, softly. She begins the process of separating their minds, building her shields back up and allowing him the privacy of his own thoughts as she switches to speech. "I think I know what happened, now." She smiles. "And the good news is, you're going to be fine. The bad news is, you've got a lot of work ahead of you, learning to control your new level of power. The instant before Lady Deathstrike hit you, something in your subconscious snapped and released whatever blocks your power previously had. Turning into living ice? You've always had that potential. In that instant, you simply realized it... it was the only way to save yourself."

There's a beat as she considers it. "I don't really suggest you try the evaporation-reintegration thing again anytime soon, however. That's probably pushing it a little."

The relief, the joy, the confusion (because hey, a week passed while he was 'dead' and he thought it was only a few minutes), it all rushes over Bobby. Jean's voice helps as well. Slowly, the icy form he's taken has been changing back to flesh and blood. By the time Jean starts speaking, Bobby's his usual self again. He looks a bit shocked at the news that he had that potential but the relief overrides it. And unless he's stopped, he's just going to try to grab Jean for a hug. He thought he was really done for and having that weight of his shoulders has him brightening up considerably.

Jean laughs at Bobby's delight and returns his hug. She does understand that, sometimes, that's just necessary. As the moment passes, however, she steps back from him and smiles. "So, there you go. You're going to be just fine." Her eyes dance a little. "Besides... only the best of us get a second chance at life." A beat. A grin. "I ought to know."

Letting Jean go, Bobby pushes his hair back again and laughs. "Oh man...I thought...damn. Thank you," he says. "For this...and not smacking me for not coming here sooner," he's feeling really dumb about that now. "How'd I get it then?" he jokes to Jean's line about second chances.

Jean laughs. "Beats me," she grins. "The universe is fickle, I guess." She gives him a mock stern look. "I really should smack you about not coming in sooner," she says. "Especially now that we know you'll be fine." Because that takes the pressure off. "Because it was a stupid, stupid thing to leave for so long." But, her lips twist. "On the other hand... It seems to me not a single one of us is good at asking for help when we need it -- myself, included. So..." She shrugs now. Guess he gets off lightly.

She picks up his shirt and tosses it at him. "Now, go find yourself a t-shirt, Frosty, and put the sweaters away." She chuckles then. "Oh." Then, she turns toward a cupboard. Her hand flips, the door opens, and a cup of lollipops comes floating out. "Here." She grins at him, a little smugly. "Since you were such a good boy..."

Bobby has the good graces to look scolded at least when Jean tells him hiding it was stupid. He knows he was dumb. He catches his shirt and reaches down to step back into his shoes. Looking back up, he laughs and snags a lollipop. It's quickly unwrapped and popped into his mouth. "You're the best, Jean."