New York, Saturday Afternoon to Evening
"I can't get it in. It won't fit."
"You're not trying."
"I missed."
"You don't know what you're doing."
"I don't know what I'm doing either."
"Concentrate. Become one with it."
"Not too fast. Take your time."
"Okay-- There it is."
"Ooooo-- Yes! I got it."
"Alright. Grace, turn on the lights--"
Well. That had gone poorly, overall. The entirety of the New Warriors were all huddled together with Jubilee standing over them, assorted bits and pieces of their tech scattered around them. Jonothon had managed to put his collar together in the dark and it was in perfect working order before Lee had called time on this training exercise, but the other New Warriors hadn't had nearly as much success. Was he really the only one who took this seriously enough that he actually knew his weapon inside and out?
Apparently so. Vin had just started to brag about how he'd managed it, too, when his gauntlets blew up in his face.
Jonothon shook his head and wandered off while the others complained. Naturally, it had given way into Barry and Vin's crazy conspiracy theories, and he hardly needed that. He'd been mind-wiped by Weapon X before. Jono had known more than his share of nasty conspiracies from the inside, and he wasn't about to sit around to listen to them speculating about the government's use of specially engineered superhumans as soldiers, or whatever the tin-hat theory of the week was. He let the room as the girls started talking about baked ziti at Angel and Barry's place, or some such thing. They'd hunt him down for it if it was important, he was sure.
It wasn't long after when Jonothon heard the voices in the armoury. Jubilee was taking Sofia through the tech, letting her make that same decision that the rest of them had when they had agreed to get back into the heroing business. It had been... daunting, Jono remembered, trying to choose what was right for him in a room full of bits and pieces that had been reverse-engineered from tech scavenged from the Avengers mansion after the Scarlet Witch had demolished it.
"Our leader is a dumpster diver?" Sofia poked through the bits and pieces, and then picked up something that had Jono taking a step back and humming. "So what's this? Hey!"
"Already spoken for, luv." Jono stood back, arms crossed over his chest as a pair of hard-light duplicates of himself took the part in question from Sofia's hands. "You wouldn't want to take away the one thing that makes me special on this team, now would you?"
"Get over yourself, Jono," Jubilee mumbled, hands on her hips, as Sofia reached out and gave one of the constructs a poke on the shoulder.
"So, what made you choose sound powers?"
Oh, there was a loaded question. And the answer... Jonothon didn't want to delve into so many parts of it. About Sean and how much Generation X had looked up to him before he'd gone... off... About years without being able to make a sound. About watching Everett use Jonothon's own powers, once upon a time, in order to fly. Something that Jono himself had never been able to do.
Such a loaded bloody question.
"I don't know, really," he replied. "I guess it's about how each of us felt inside."
"What does that even mean?"
"Look," Jono sighed, "this is only as hard as you make it. Before this, I was basically a monster. There were bloody scarecrows that had more of a face than I did. I couldn't get close to anyone... then to make matters worse, Apocalypse turned me into one of his dogs."
He wasn't going to touch on Weapon X. Nobody here needed to hear about Weapon X.
"This was the first time I actually got to choose who I am." He held out a hand toward Sofia, and with another soft hum, a blue light construct of a bouquet of flowers hovered in the air before her. "I can create now. I'm not just a being of bloody destruction. You can't imagine how good that feels."
"Take your time," Jubilee advised as Jonothon slipped an arm around Sofia's shoulders. "We have plenty of tech to choose from."
"It's all about rebirth, luv. The answer will come."
Of course the girls had talked Jono into joining them at Angel and Barry's for dinner. Who was he to turn down free food? Besides, Christian needed some time alone, his sister's death still fresh in his mind, and he wasn't going to crowd the lad in by sticking around when he needed the space the most.
This didn't mean Jono was going to be social, of course. While the girls had headed off to gossip in the kitchen, and Vin and Barry entertained the children in the living room with some video game or other, Jono had found a spare television set, and was watching the news.
More accurately, he was scowling at the news.
"What do you think, Jono?" Barry's voice broke into Jonothon's consciousness as the man picked up one of his daughters and threw her, squealing and laughing, up into the air. "Does Vin suck, or what?"
"Huh? Sorry -- What was that?"
Vin and Barry stepped up behind Jono's seat and eyed the television over his shoulder.
"What are you watching?"
"Some stodgy wanker..."
They all fell silent as the voices of the three men debating on the news filled the room.
"-- The question this host is asking: Are the New Warriors terrorists or freedom fighters? I'll start off by saying yes. Based on their behavior and their constant harassment of S.H.I.E.L.D. director Tony Stark, the New Warriors are in fact terrorists."
The other men on the television were quick to disagree, but there it was, out in the open, an accusation on national news that cut the three of them deep and then took the extra pains to gleefully rub in some salt while it was at it.
"I don't believe that idiot actually called us 'terrorists.'" Vin protested. "Is he out of his mind??"
"But... does he have a point? I mean, we do operate outside the law."
"C'mon, Barry, get real. People tend ta lump things together based on similarities, but rarely look at the real differences," Vin scoffed. "I admin, what we do, walkin' down villains and carryin' on-- it could look like terrorism ta some folks, but if it does... They got heads full of rocks."
"Daddy," Tito, the one child of Angel and Barry's that hadn't been stripped of his X-Gene on M-Day, looked up at his father with wide eyes, "what's a 'terr'rist?'"
"Uh... Bad people who hurt innocent people for what they think is a good reason."
"You at least agree with that," Jono dryly noted as Barry crouched down to wrap Tito in his arms, "right, Vin?"
"Have you been listenin' ta me?"
"Look, mate-- I was fifty feet from an explosion in London," Jono growled, his eyes narrowing. "A bloody car bomb planted by the I.R.A. that killed nineteen people. Six of them were kids. People who weren't even involved in a war between enemies, ad they were snuffed out, just like that. That's what terrorism looks like."
Fire, twisting in Jonothon's mind's eye. A trolley pitched over on its side, people burning, screaming...
And that was what they were being likened to.
"Why are you guys lettin' this clown get ta you? It's only one guy. No one else is sayin' it." Vin looked like he was at about the end of his tether as he argued with them. "Seriously, both o'you are givin' this way too much thought."
"This isn't a game, Vin!" Barry, now, raising his voice. "This is serious."
"I know it is. But you know as well as I do that we've captured over thirty villains since we've started. And that was the only spark of hope that true heroes have in doing things the old ways. What's goin' on with you, man? What are you really afraid of?"
They carried on that way for a while longer before Mira's voice ran through the apartment, calling them to dinner.
And they were quiet as they ate. Civil, even, though Barry was brooding and Jono had lost himself almost embarrasingly in the flavours of a home-cooked meal. The topic had been tabled until after the food was cleaned from the plates, and they were all sitting around, full and complimenting Angel on her cooking.
"So what were you guys yelling about earlier?" Thanks for that, Miranda. "C'mon, Corn Pone -- Catfish got your tongue?"
Vin didn't seem terribly forthcoming with a reply, so Jonothon was the one who answered, straightforward. Blunt.
"Tell me something... Do you think what we do could be seen as terrorism?"
"Terrorism?" Jubilee seemed shocked at the question. Probably about as surprised as they had been when the topic had come up at all. "What brought that up?"
"Come clown on CNN mentioned it," Vin grumbled. "I told them it was no big deal."
"All we do is catch criminals," Sofia countered. "How is that an act of terrorism?"
"It's not," Vin stressed, waving a finger in the air, "but Bird-Boy and the Blue Banshee have bugs up their tails that it is."
Jonothon frowned and looked into his juice cup. Snapple wasn't nearly hard enough for this conversation.
"It's not that, okay?" Barry's voice had gone a shade more stern, his eyebrows furrowed as he spoke. "Look -- I have a family now. A wife and kids, plus you guys. People I care about that have been there for me ever since the X-mansion. If people think we're terrorists, it could put my family in jeopardy. And I won't stand for that."
"There are consequences ta everything we do. This is one of them."
"It shouldn't be, Vin," Jonothon snapped, slamming his cup on the table and waving his fork in the air. "But if this is going t'be a problem, we have t'rethink how we do things... Immediately."
"What if the world does look at us as terrorists?" Angel frowned down at the sleeping infant in her lap as Barry reached to take her hand. "This could come back to bite us. I don't want our children growing up to think that we're criminals. Not like that."
"They won't, honey," Barry murmured. "And the world won't. I promise you."
"You can't promise anything like that, Barry," Mira noted, gently. "Because you can't read minds. Everything that goes on in this world is based on perceptions. What people think -- how they react--" Leave it to Miranda to be the one ready to present the hard facts as she saw them. Jonothon found himself nodding a little as she spoke. "Look -- We are what we are and we do what we do. All we can do is show people that we're on their side. That we can take down villains and save lives without sellin' out like the Initiative. We're not terrorists. We know that, and thank God, the public knows it. I say we go on with business as usual. If we start second-guessing ourselves, we could wind up like the old team. And I'm not goin' out like that."
Nobody could argue with reason like that. When the last New Warriors had gone down, there hadn't been enough left of a few of them to fill a body bag between them.
"Okay, guys, that's enough." Jubilee pushed out her chair, pulling herself to her feet. "Mira's right. The last thing we need is to question ourselves. We're not terrorists. End of story. And what we do is good. But there's something else I think needs to be said... Ever since I joined this group I've felt a kind of... comfort. A kinship with you all that goes beyond anything I ever had with the X-Men. Maybe it's because losing our powers really put life in perspective for me. But if it's going to work, we can't be just a team. We have to be something better... a family. A place where we have the latitude to speak our minds as well as enough trust to have each other's backs when things get tight. This is all there is for me now... and it's all I want." Jubilee raised her cup into the air, a proud gesture, in spite of the goofy smiley face on the side of it. The perils of eating dinner in a home full of children. "Now, who stands with me?"
Vin slammed a fist on the table.
"We're not done yet." A silence, and then he turned to look the other way. "Barry, no hard feelin's?"
"We're all good, man."
"So if this Hallmark Moment is over..." Angel rested her head on her husband's shoulder.
And then every New Warrior present lifted their cup into the air.
"To the family!"
...
"Say... Is a toast really legit if we're drinking Snapple?"
Someday, Miranda would stop asking the difficult questions. Someday.
[NFB for distance yet again, and cut with a possible trigger warning for a long conversation about terrorism with a reference to the IRA. Everything comes from New Warriors Vol. 4, Issues 7 and 8. And that's about all the canon I'm going to toss Jono at for now. Open if anybody wants to text or call Jono while he's digesting Angel's baked ziti!]
"You're not trying."
"I missed."
"You don't know what you're doing."
"I don't know what I'm doing either."
"Concentrate. Become one with it."
"Not too fast. Take your time."
"Okay-- There it is."
"Ooooo-- Yes! I got it."
"Alright. Grace, turn on the lights--"
Well. That had gone poorly, overall. The entirety of the New Warriors were all huddled together with Jubilee standing over them, assorted bits and pieces of their tech scattered around them. Jonothon had managed to put his collar together in the dark and it was in perfect working order before Lee had called time on this training exercise, but the other New Warriors hadn't had nearly as much success. Was he really the only one who took this seriously enough that he actually knew his weapon inside and out?
Apparently so. Vin had just started to brag about how he'd managed it, too, when his gauntlets blew up in his face.
Jonothon shook his head and wandered off while the others complained. Naturally, it had given way into Barry and Vin's crazy conspiracy theories, and he hardly needed that. He'd been mind-wiped by Weapon X before. Jono had known more than his share of nasty conspiracies from the inside, and he wasn't about to sit around to listen to them speculating about the government's use of specially engineered superhumans as soldiers, or whatever the tin-hat theory of the week was. He let the room as the girls started talking about baked ziti at Angel and Barry's place, or some such thing. They'd hunt him down for it if it was important, he was sure.
It wasn't long after when Jonothon heard the voices in the armoury. Jubilee was taking Sofia through the tech, letting her make that same decision that the rest of them had when they had agreed to get back into the heroing business. It had been... daunting, Jono remembered, trying to choose what was right for him in a room full of bits and pieces that had been reverse-engineered from tech scavenged from the Avengers mansion after the Scarlet Witch had demolished it.
"Our leader is a dumpster diver?" Sofia poked through the bits and pieces, and then picked up something that had Jono taking a step back and humming. "So what's this? Hey!"
"Already spoken for, luv." Jono stood back, arms crossed over his chest as a pair of hard-light duplicates of himself took the part in question from Sofia's hands. "You wouldn't want to take away the one thing that makes me special on this team, now would you?"
"Get over yourself, Jono," Jubilee mumbled, hands on her hips, as Sofia reached out and gave one of the constructs a poke on the shoulder.
"So, what made you choose sound powers?"
Oh, there was a loaded question. And the answer... Jonothon didn't want to delve into so many parts of it. About Sean and how much Generation X had looked up to him before he'd gone... off... About years without being able to make a sound. About watching Everett use Jonothon's own powers, once upon a time, in order to fly. Something that Jono himself had never been able to do.
Such a loaded bloody question.
"I don't know, really," he replied. "I guess it's about how each of us felt inside."
"What does that even mean?"
"Look," Jono sighed, "this is only as hard as you make it. Before this, I was basically a monster. There were bloody scarecrows that had more of a face than I did. I couldn't get close to anyone... then to make matters worse, Apocalypse turned me into one of his dogs."
He wasn't going to touch on Weapon X. Nobody here needed to hear about Weapon X.
"This was the first time I actually got to choose who I am." He held out a hand toward Sofia, and with another soft hum, a blue light construct of a bouquet of flowers hovered in the air before her. "I can create now. I'm not just a being of bloody destruction. You can't imagine how good that feels."
"Take your time," Jubilee advised as Jonothon slipped an arm around Sofia's shoulders. "We have plenty of tech to choose from."
"It's all about rebirth, luv. The answer will come."
Of course the girls had talked Jono into joining them at Angel and Barry's for dinner. Who was he to turn down free food? Besides, Christian needed some time alone, his sister's death still fresh in his mind, and he wasn't going to crowd the lad in by sticking around when he needed the space the most.
This didn't mean Jono was going to be social, of course. While the girls had headed off to gossip in the kitchen, and Vin and Barry entertained the children in the living room with some video game or other, Jono had found a spare television set, and was watching the news.
More accurately, he was scowling at the news.
"What do you think, Jono?" Barry's voice broke into Jonothon's consciousness as the man picked up one of his daughters and threw her, squealing and laughing, up into the air. "Does Vin suck, or what?"
"Huh? Sorry -- What was that?"
Vin and Barry stepped up behind Jono's seat and eyed the television over his shoulder.
"What are you watching?"
"Some stodgy wanker..."
They all fell silent as the voices of the three men debating on the news filled the room.
"-- The question this host is asking: Are the New Warriors terrorists or freedom fighters? I'll start off by saying yes. Based on their behavior and their constant harassment of S.H.I.E.L.D. director Tony Stark, the New Warriors are in fact terrorists."
The other men on the television were quick to disagree, but there it was, out in the open, an accusation on national news that cut the three of them deep and then took the extra pains to gleefully rub in some salt while it was at it.
"I don't believe that idiot actually called us 'terrorists.'" Vin protested. "Is he out of his mind??"
"But... does he have a point? I mean, we do operate outside the law."
"C'mon, Barry, get real. People tend ta lump things together based on similarities, but rarely look at the real differences," Vin scoffed. "I admin, what we do, walkin' down villains and carryin' on-- it could look like terrorism ta some folks, but if it does... They got heads full of rocks."
"Daddy," Tito, the one child of Angel and Barry's that hadn't been stripped of his X-Gene on M-Day, looked up at his father with wide eyes, "what's a 'terr'rist?'"
"Uh... Bad people who hurt innocent people for what they think is a good reason."
"You at least agree with that," Jono dryly noted as Barry crouched down to wrap Tito in his arms, "right, Vin?"
"Have you been listenin' ta me?"
"Look, mate-- I was fifty feet from an explosion in London," Jono growled, his eyes narrowing. "A bloody car bomb planted by the I.R.A. that killed nineteen people. Six of them were kids. People who weren't even involved in a war between enemies, ad they were snuffed out, just like that. That's what terrorism looks like."
Fire, twisting in Jonothon's mind's eye. A trolley pitched over on its side, people burning, screaming...
And that was what they were being likened to.
"Why are you guys lettin' this clown get ta you? It's only one guy. No one else is sayin' it." Vin looked like he was at about the end of his tether as he argued with them. "Seriously, both o'you are givin' this way too much thought."
"This isn't a game, Vin!" Barry, now, raising his voice. "This is serious."
"I know it is. But you know as well as I do that we've captured over thirty villains since we've started. And that was the only spark of hope that true heroes have in doing things the old ways. What's goin' on with you, man? What are you really afraid of?"
They carried on that way for a while longer before Mira's voice ran through the apartment, calling them to dinner.
And they were quiet as they ate. Civil, even, though Barry was brooding and Jono had lost himself almost embarrasingly in the flavours of a home-cooked meal. The topic had been tabled until after the food was cleaned from the plates, and they were all sitting around, full and complimenting Angel on her cooking.
"So what were you guys yelling about earlier?" Thanks for that, Miranda. "C'mon, Corn Pone -- Catfish got your tongue?"
Vin didn't seem terribly forthcoming with a reply, so Jonothon was the one who answered, straightforward. Blunt.
"Tell me something... Do you think what we do could be seen as terrorism?"
"Terrorism?" Jubilee seemed shocked at the question. Probably about as surprised as they had been when the topic had come up at all. "What brought that up?"
"Come clown on CNN mentioned it," Vin grumbled. "I told them it was no big deal."
"All we do is catch criminals," Sofia countered. "How is that an act of terrorism?"
"It's not," Vin stressed, waving a finger in the air, "but Bird-Boy and the Blue Banshee have bugs up their tails that it is."
Jonothon frowned and looked into his juice cup. Snapple wasn't nearly hard enough for this conversation.
"It's not that, okay?" Barry's voice had gone a shade more stern, his eyebrows furrowed as he spoke. "Look -- I have a family now. A wife and kids, plus you guys. People I care about that have been there for me ever since the X-mansion. If people think we're terrorists, it could put my family in jeopardy. And I won't stand for that."
"There are consequences ta everything we do. This is one of them."
"It shouldn't be, Vin," Jonothon snapped, slamming his cup on the table and waving his fork in the air. "But if this is going t'be a problem, we have t'rethink how we do things... Immediately."
"What if the world does look at us as terrorists?" Angel frowned down at the sleeping infant in her lap as Barry reached to take her hand. "This could come back to bite us. I don't want our children growing up to think that we're criminals. Not like that."
"They won't, honey," Barry murmured. "And the world won't. I promise you."
"You can't promise anything like that, Barry," Mira noted, gently. "Because you can't read minds. Everything that goes on in this world is based on perceptions. What people think -- how they react--" Leave it to Miranda to be the one ready to present the hard facts as she saw them. Jonothon found himself nodding a little as she spoke. "Look -- We are what we are and we do what we do. All we can do is show people that we're on their side. That we can take down villains and save lives without sellin' out like the Initiative. We're not terrorists. We know that, and thank God, the public knows it. I say we go on with business as usual. If we start second-guessing ourselves, we could wind up like the old team. And I'm not goin' out like that."
Nobody could argue with reason like that. When the last New Warriors had gone down, there hadn't been enough left of a few of them to fill a body bag between them.
"Okay, guys, that's enough." Jubilee pushed out her chair, pulling herself to her feet. "Mira's right. The last thing we need is to question ourselves. We're not terrorists. End of story. And what we do is good. But there's something else I think needs to be said... Ever since I joined this group I've felt a kind of... comfort. A kinship with you all that goes beyond anything I ever had with the X-Men. Maybe it's because losing our powers really put life in perspective for me. But if it's going to work, we can't be just a team. We have to be something better... a family. A place where we have the latitude to speak our minds as well as enough trust to have each other's backs when things get tight. This is all there is for me now... and it's all I want." Jubilee raised her cup into the air, a proud gesture, in spite of the goofy smiley face on the side of it. The perils of eating dinner in a home full of children. "Now, who stands with me?"
Vin slammed a fist on the table.
"We're not done yet." A silence, and then he turned to look the other way. "Barry, no hard feelin's?"
"We're all good, man."
"So if this Hallmark Moment is over..." Angel rested her head on her husband's shoulder.
And then every New Warrior present lifted their cup into the air.
"To the family!"
...
"Say... Is a toast really legit if we're drinking Snapple?"
Someday, Miranda would stop asking the difficult questions. Someday.
[NFB for distance yet again, and cut with a possible trigger warning for a long conversation about terrorism with a reference to the IRA. Everything comes from New Warriors Vol. 4, Issues 7 and 8. And that's about all the canon I'm going to toss Jono at for now. Open if anybody wants to text or call Jono while he's digesting Angel's baked ziti!]