("Do you ever wonder why your mutation isn't better for slaying?" Peter asked, one night down at the graveyard. He asked it from on top of about five different headstones; sitting still wasn't for him. "Like, you could have had super super strength, or stakes for hands or something...but all you got instead was telepathy, and you can't even use it to help stake things."
Jean, leaning against a different headstone (one belonging to some guy who'd died way back in 1980, because who wanted to give a newly risen vamp the chance to grab your ankle on their way up), thought about it. Coming from anyone but Peter or Scott, it would have been a gotcha (or maybe, if it was her Watcher saying it, yet another Lesson, capital-L), but from one of them, it was just a question. So it was okay for her to take the time to think about it and give a real, thoughtful answer.
"It is useful, actually," she said. "Maybe I can't read vampires' minds or take control of them or anything like that...but if I see something human-shaped and can't read its mind, I know I can probably stake it without it being murder."
"There's something over here," said Scott. Unlike Peter, he was never up for personal discussions when they were out on patrol.
He was also right; on the other side of the graveyard, something was rising from the dirt.
Several somethings, as it turned out. By the time they were done and dusted (literally), Jean had forgotten what else she had been going to say, the thing that was in her heart all the time, every time she let them come out with her instead of telling them to stay home (not that Peter ever, ever did what she told him to do; and as for Scott, he was a stickler for rules, but somehow always let Peter talk him into following her when she'd told them to stay put).)
***
Jean met Peter in a museum, when he was busy stealing something he really, really shouldn't have been. Something old. Something powerful. Something he'd decided was really, really shiny, and would look neat stacked up with all the other stolen stuff in his bedroom at home.
On the one hand, he was too fast for Jean to chase. On the other hand, all she needed was for him to stop for long enough for her to get a hold on his mind. Eventually, a few blocks away from the museum, he doubled back to get a look at her and figure out why she was following him. He stopped for just a second, and that was all she needed to be able to make him hand over the vase.
"Do you have any idea what you would have set loose if you'd broken it?" she asked.
"Uh, no?" he said.
And, of course, that was when the vampires Jean had been a little too distracted to notice following her decided to attack. And, also of course, she dropped the vase during the fight, and it shattered into a million pieces. Peter was impressed enough by what had come out of it that he grabbed her, started running, and kept going until they were all the way on the other side of the country. A big freak out and a little research later, they had the incantation that would send the demon back into a different vase, and he took them back.
According to Peter, it was the most interesting thing that had happened to him...well, ever. And from that day on, there was no getting rid of him.
***
They met Scott a week or two later. He'd been cornered in an alley by some vamps, and was doing his best to vaporize them. The thing was he didn't have his visor yet, so he couldn't really see what he was doing. By the time Jean and Peter got there, he'd blasted a hole in the dumpster, shattered the windshield of a car, and left a scorch mark from one end of the alley to the other. Maybe he'd even vaporized a few vamps, too, though Jean wouldn't have bet on it.
"There's no such thing as vampires," he said, after Jean and Peter had saved his ass.
It didn't take too long for them to convince him otherwise. Scott liked rules; he'd really liked his old certainty that there couldn't be monsters under the bed or in the closet. But he also wasn't stupid, and he would have had to be not to believe something that kept happening right in front of him.
Once he admitted vampires, demons, and the other things that go bump in the night were real, he decided it was his duty to help her wherever he could. So there was no getting rid of him, either.
***
In the past, most Slayers had worked alone. Even though they didn't, these days--even though there were a lot of them, all over the world, where once there had only been one at a time--Jean had kind of thought she would end up being on her own anyway. Telepathy made people uncomfortable, whether you were one of the Chosen Ones or not. She'd been good with knowing that her Watcher, at least, got it, since he was a telepath too; she'd decided early on not to worry about whether or not anyone else had her back.
She'd made allies, before Peter and Scott. She had informants who told her things, people she'd fought beside a time or two when their goals were the same. But she hadn't had friends, and she hadn't had...whatever the three of them were, after that one time.
It happened after the apocalypse, of course--one that almost happened, one they stopped just in time (from what Jean had heard, apocalypses could pretty much only be stopped at the last possible second). And in the end, they were dirty, and battered, and bruised...but they were all still here, and all together. And it was together that they went back to Peter's apartment, so they could get cleaned up without her parents or Scott's brother asking too many questions; and it was together that they ended up in bed, fumbling with each other's clothes, not always certain which of the other two they were grasping at.
If it had been Peter or Scott, that would have been easy, or at least easier. It would have been, 'that's my boyfriend,' or 'we're friends with benefits now,' or 'that was a bad idea, let's never do it again, or talk about it either.' The worst thing Jean would have been worried about would have been losing either of them as a friend. But it was both of them, and they were in it as much for each other as they were for her, and if she'd had a gun to her head she couldn't have figured out which of them she'd wanted more. It was both of them, and Jean had spent her entire life being guarded, because of her telepathy, or because she was the Slayer. She'd never prepared for this, how much her heart would ache just looking at them. Not because she was worried about losing them, but because they were there, and they were hers, and they were all each other's.
***
They didn't talk about their relationship much, just like Scott didn't talk about how he still sometimes woke up in the night and couldn't quite believe that vampires were actually real; and just like Peter didn't talk about how he felt each time his biological dad released a couple thousand demons to help the cause of mutantkind (...somehow. The reasoning there was never super clear); and just like Jean didn't tell them about the power she sometimes felt inside of her, the darkness that had nothing to do with telepathy or telekinesis or slaying...the one that felt like it was going to come for her after she lost her last fight, the one all Slayers had to eventually.
They didn't have to talk about it. Like all those other things, it was just there.
***
(By the time the fight in the graveyard was over, Jean had forgotten to tell them that the other reason her telepathy was good for slaying was that she would never have to be with either of them without knowing for sure that they were still safe, still hers, still themselves...or not any of those things. She'd never have to wonder, or worry; she'd always just know. And that was worth more than every other mutation she could have had put together.
She'd forgotten to tell them, and by the time the night was over, it seemed like it was too late to say anything about it out loud.
But sometimes, usually when they'd been separated during a fight, she'd call out to them with her mind and get back such a strong sense of relief that she thought they must have known anyway.)