Fic: "I Understand" Jubilee/Synch
Title: I Understand
Author: Wyzeguy
Universe: Age of Apocalypse, prior to the Gambit and the X-Ternals mini-series.
Characters/Pairing: Jubilation Lee/Everett Thomas; assorted characters from more recent X-Men comics
Rating: T
Challenge: Love
Summary: Jubilee's lost love, and the choice she made
Warnings: The AoA-verse really ain't a fun place to visit, so be prepared for harshness and adult situations, even amongst adolescents.
Notes: Originally posted to xmenflashfic
This idea had been kicking around in my head for years. In Gambit and the X-Ternals #1, narrative captions gave hints about Jubilee's past prior to joining Gambit's team, and part of it involved Everett Thomas, who became the Generation X member Synch in the core comics but who died in AoA. So this is my interpretation of that backstory, with a lot of liberties taken.
Jubilation Lee was barely fifteen, and already she was a folk hero.
She was like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Or more accurately, she was more like Friar Tuck or one of those nameless extras in the Merry Band; Remy Lebeau was the Robin Hood, complete with his own Marian, Lila Cheney. Guido Carosella, all eighty-five tons of him, could've been no one else but Little John. And Jubilee honestly didn't remember enough about the legend to find counterparts for herself and Roberto DaCosta.
They called themselves the "X-Ternals", after some inside joke only Gambit knew. They'd been around for a while, stealing stuff from the ruling mutant empire for use by the endangered humanity. The stuff in question was often food, medical supplies, weapons -- pretty much everything but money since only the mutants had a use for an official economy. And if they had to kick the asses of the local security forces and Infinite clones, then so much the better. If they were going to be traitors to their own kind, they might as well cover all the bases.
But Jubilee hadn't always been an X-Ternal. In the nebulous time between her twelfth birthday when her pyrotechnic mutation kicked in and when she joined LeBeau's posse, she'd actually had a promising career ahead of her ... as part of Apocalypse's empire.
* * *
The Slave Pens were lynchpins of the empire. They were prisons where human and mutant alike were consigned upon capture by the big man's forces. There, they were subjected to horrific experiments, physical and psychological, in order to determine who was strong and who was weak. The scientists were card-carrying sadists -- especially Dr. Henry McCoy -- so a vast portion of the prisoners who were brought in never made it out alive.
Still, some of the survivors showed promise, in that they refused to die and were willing to play ball with the regime. They were liberated from the Pens, given homes of their own and a place in society, and some of them even joined the security forces. Jubilee had been one of those people.
When she closed her eyes, she could still see all the death and decay of the Pens around her, but it was important to her to seem more well-adjusted than she was. It was important to her to have a chance at survival her human family never had. She had to keep going, and stay strong in a society that valued strength above all else.
And she guessed maybe she'd lied well enough that they gave her a spot in that society. All she'd wanted to do was disappear into it, going about her business under the nose of the mutant ruling class, but they'd been insistent that she join the police force. Her ability to generate explosive energy had been too lucrative for her to do otherwise. Or rather, it'd been too useful to the empire.
So she became a cadet. She and a number of other mutant Pen survivors were put through rigorous training that turned out to be a cakewalk compared to the daily torture of their lives as prisoners. Jubilee was taught to uphold the law. She was taught to kill. And she was taught to like it.
Except she didn't. She'd begun to understand that she'd traded one prison for another.
That lesson came from a fellow cadet, Everett Thomas. His mutant name was Synch, which Jubilee found endlessly easy to tease. She started calling him "Kitchen Synch" and Bathroom Synch", which he didn't seem to like very much. He put up with her anyway; he had no choice because they were paired up as training powers. He could generate a psionic aura that keyed into other nearby mutant biosignatures and allowed him to mimic their powers. Standing next to her, he could create a multicolored fireworks display that rivalled her own, and they learned a lot about their powers from practicing each other.
Weeks of close proximity also taught them what it was like to touch, to kiss, to skyrocket the temperature of any enclosed space they found that was away from their peers and instructors. While they came close on several occassions, they were careful not to actually have sex; they reasoned that their combined powers would would nuke the compound if they got too carried away.
But damn it, they needed each other. They were both orphans, each the sole survivor of his or her human colony. They'd both forgotten what it'd felt like to laugh and actually enjoy another's company. And they both managed to connect on a level that didn't require words, only feeling (though Jubilee was seldom short on words).
Four weeks into their training, the end was in sight. They were close to graduation. Jubilee tried to be happy about that, but Everett refuse to be. He'd only become moodier and mooder as time progreesed, to the point that their makeout sessions had stopped being fun. And Jubilee reasoned that if it was was no fun to suck face, then something had to be terribly wrong.
"So're you gonna tell me what's the problem?" she finally asked the day before graduation as Everett nibbled on her neck with all the enthusiasm of a five-year-old who just didn't want to eat his vegetables. "I mean, if you're not in the mood, you can just say so an' we can get on with the rest of our day."
"Nothing's bothering me, Lee," he replied, looking away from her. "And yeah, I'm still in the mood." He played with her unbuttoned tunic as if to illustrate the point.
"Fifty demerits for poor lying skills, cadet," she retorted. "If you're gonna lie to me, at least make it sound convincing so I don't go thinkin' I didn't teach you anything."
He smiled slightly. "You taught me plenty."
"Still a bad liar. A hundred demerits. And I'm withholding sex from you."
"You always do that." Their words might have sounded unsettling coming from a fourteen-year-old girl and a boy who was scarcely older, but one quirk of Apocalypse's regime was that age-of-consent laws were nonexistent; more babies were made that way.
"Well this time I mean it," she asserted, rebuttoning her uniform. "So what's eatin' you? No, that ain't an innuendo."
He let out a sigh. "I don't like what we're becoming." He glanced at her, seeing her questioning blue eyes. "This academy. This life. We got out of the Pen just so we could ... just so we could become this? That's ... that not what my mom and pop raised me to be."
Jubilee bit her lip, her eyes stinging as she thought of her own parents. "I'm sure ... they would've wanted you to stay alive." She wanted to take back her words as soon as she said them.
"Don't you get it?" he practically shouted back. "That's not the point! It's not about living or dying, it's what you do with your life! My pop told me that, and I've never forgotten it. But now ... now I look at the life I got ... and I just want to forget what he said. This isn't worth it, Jube. It's not worth it, and I thought you'd understand." He turned away from her and opened the supply room door, stepping out into the hallway where it was brighter and colder.
Shivering from more than the influx of conditioned air, Jubilee watched Everett walk off, then she closed the door, sliding downward against the wall and sinking into a sitting position.
He was right.
Those three words haunted the rest of her waking hours that day. That night, they invaded her dreams, accompanied by the haggard faces of her mother and father. Faces that kept morphing into the starving, hopeless prisoners of the Slave Pens.
He was right, and the following morning Jubilee woke up determined to tell him that. But he didn't show up for morning roll-call. She asked around but only received blank looks and knowing grins. The knowing grins scared her.
Everett still hadn't surfaced for the graduation ceremony that afternoon, and by that point she was absolutely frazzled with worry. She tried telling herself that Everett had decided to take off for parts unknown rather than spend one more day in this career he hated. And while she didn't enjoy the idea of him leaving without telling her, she just wanted him to be okay.
Judging by the knowing grins on some of her fellow cadets, he wasn't. Her mounting sense of dread was approaching critical mass, so she decided to skip the ceremony altogether and check the one place in the entire training complex she hadn't yet looked that day ... and in retrospect it should have been the first. She took a deep breath and opened the door to the supply closet.
She'd tried to prepare herself for whatever awaited her ... but the sight of Everett -- beaten, bloody, and impaled on biological spikes -- still shook her to the core. Her fingertips touched his lips but didn't feel a breath, touched his neck but didn't feel a pulse. Still in shock, she wrapped her arms around his body, careful of the spikes that unmistakably belonged to one of her classmates.
"You're gonna be late for the graduation, Lee," a familiar male voice behind her declared. "But don't worry about Synch, there -- he's not coming."
Jubilee turned and glared at the rest of her graduating class. Hellion. Catseye. Talon. And Vlad, who was responsible for the spikes.
"Hey, we understand he's your boyfriend and all, and you were attached to him," Hellion continued.
"Yeah, attached at the groin," Talon commented, gesturing obscenely with his wings.
"But he's a gene-traitor," Hellion went on, ignoring Bohusk's remark. "A bleeding-heart weakling. We just made it literal for him."
Jubilee clenched her teeth.
"You're better off without him," Hellion asserted. "He didn't deserve his place in the empire, and he would've just dragged you down with him."
"Unless ... you agree with him," Vlad ventured, forming another foot-long crystalline spike in his hand. "In which case, it's not gonna be pretty."
Hellion hovered telekinetically toward her. "So what's it gonna be?"
Jubilee looked down at Everett's lifeless body. "I understand," she whispered to him.
The plasma explosion she created that day devastated most of the building, killing everyone in a fifty-foot spherical radius. But not her. Immune to her own power, she survived, almost exhausted. Everett's body was incinerated, and she was afraid to dwell on that too much. In truth, when she'd kicked in her power on a scale she hadn't attempted before or since, the idea had been to die as well. No such luck.
Security and emergency crews were already mobilizing, and Jubilee made herself scarce, running away from the damaged building into the neighboring city slums of Apocalypse Island. She operated on adrenaline, retreating into the sewer tunnels. When she finally stopped running, exhaustion kicked in and she threw up what little she'd eaten that day before curling up in a lightless section of the cold tunnel and hoping she'd never wake up.
But days later she did. She found herself deeper in the tunnel system, sharing a sewer den with a host of human refugees, and greeted by a man with exotic red-on-black eyes and a killer smile.
"'Bout time you woke up," he commented, then introduced himself as Remy LeBeau, Gambit. The former X-Man proceeded to make her an offer she could have refused. An offer to join his merry band of outlaws.
She could have refused, but for Everett, she didn't.
Author: Wyzeguy
Universe: Age of Apocalypse, prior to the Gambit and the X-Ternals mini-series.
Characters/Pairing: Jubilation Lee/Everett Thomas; assorted characters from more recent X-Men comics
Rating: T
Challenge: Love
Summary: Jubilee's lost love, and the choice she made
Warnings: The AoA-verse really ain't a fun place to visit, so be prepared for harshness and adult situations, even amongst adolescents.
Notes: Originally posted to xmenflashfic
This idea had been kicking around in my head for years. In Gambit and the X-Ternals #1, narrative captions gave hints about Jubilee's past prior to joining Gambit's team, and part of it involved Everett Thomas, who became the Generation X member Synch in the core comics but who died in AoA. So this is my interpretation of that backstory, with a lot of liberties taken.
Jubilation Lee was barely fifteen, and already she was a folk hero.
She was like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Or more accurately, she was more like Friar Tuck or one of those nameless extras in the Merry Band; Remy Lebeau was the Robin Hood, complete with his own Marian, Lila Cheney. Guido Carosella, all eighty-five tons of him, could've been no one else but Little John. And Jubilee honestly didn't remember enough about the legend to find counterparts for herself and Roberto DaCosta.
They called themselves the "X-Ternals", after some inside joke only Gambit knew. They'd been around for a while, stealing stuff from the ruling mutant empire for use by the endangered humanity. The stuff in question was often food, medical supplies, weapons -- pretty much everything but money since only the mutants had a use for an official economy. And if they had to kick the asses of the local security forces and Infinite clones, then so much the better. If they were going to be traitors to their own kind, they might as well cover all the bases.
But Jubilee hadn't always been an X-Ternal. In the nebulous time between her twelfth birthday when her pyrotechnic mutation kicked in and when she joined LeBeau's posse, she'd actually had a promising career ahead of her ... as part of Apocalypse's empire.
* * *
The Slave Pens were lynchpins of the empire. They were prisons where human and mutant alike were consigned upon capture by the big man's forces. There, they were subjected to horrific experiments, physical and psychological, in order to determine who was strong and who was weak. The scientists were card-carrying sadists -- especially Dr. Henry McCoy -- so a vast portion of the prisoners who were brought in never made it out alive.
Still, some of the survivors showed promise, in that they refused to die and were willing to play ball with the regime. They were liberated from the Pens, given homes of their own and a place in society, and some of them even joined the security forces. Jubilee had been one of those people.
When she closed her eyes, she could still see all the death and decay of the Pens around her, but it was important to her to seem more well-adjusted than she was. It was important to her to have a chance at survival her human family never had. She had to keep going, and stay strong in a society that valued strength above all else.
And she guessed maybe she'd lied well enough that they gave her a spot in that society. All she'd wanted to do was disappear into it, going about her business under the nose of the mutant ruling class, but they'd been insistent that she join the police force. Her ability to generate explosive energy had been too lucrative for her to do otherwise. Or rather, it'd been too useful to the empire.
So she became a cadet. She and a number of other mutant Pen survivors were put through rigorous training that turned out to be a cakewalk compared to the daily torture of their lives as prisoners. Jubilee was taught to uphold the law. She was taught to kill. And she was taught to like it.
Except she didn't. She'd begun to understand that she'd traded one prison for another.
That lesson came from a fellow cadet, Everett Thomas. His mutant name was Synch, which Jubilee found endlessly easy to tease. She started calling him "Kitchen Synch" and Bathroom Synch", which he didn't seem to like very much. He put up with her anyway; he had no choice because they were paired up as training powers. He could generate a psionic aura that keyed into other nearby mutant biosignatures and allowed him to mimic their powers. Standing next to her, he could create a multicolored fireworks display that rivalled her own, and they learned a lot about their powers from practicing each other.
Weeks of close proximity also taught them what it was like to touch, to kiss, to skyrocket the temperature of any enclosed space they found that was away from their peers and instructors. While they came close on several occassions, they were careful not to actually have sex; they reasoned that their combined powers would would nuke the compound if they got too carried away.
But damn it, they needed each other. They were both orphans, each the sole survivor of his or her human colony. They'd both forgotten what it'd felt like to laugh and actually enjoy another's company. And they both managed to connect on a level that didn't require words, only feeling (though Jubilee was seldom short on words).
Four weeks into their training, the end was in sight. They were close to graduation. Jubilee tried to be happy about that, but Everett refuse to be. He'd only become moodier and mooder as time progreesed, to the point that their makeout sessions had stopped being fun. And Jubilee reasoned that if it was was no fun to suck face, then something had to be terribly wrong.
"So're you gonna tell me what's the problem?" she finally asked the day before graduation as Everett nibbled on her neck with all the enthusiasm of a five-year-old who just didn't want to eat his vegetables. "I mean, if you're not in the mood, you can just say so an' we can get on with the rest of our day."
"Nothing's bothering me, Lee," he replied, looking away from her. "And yeah, I'm still in the mood." He played with her unbuttoned tunic as if to illustrate the point.
"Fifty demerits for poor lying skills, cadet," she retorted. "If you're gonna lie to me, at least make it sound convincing so I don't go thinkin' I didn't teach you anything."
He smiled slightly. "You taught me plenty."
"Still a bad liar. A hundred demerits. And I'm withholding sex from you."
"You always do that." Their words might have sounded unsettling coming from a fourteen-year-old girl and a boy who was scarcely older, but one quirk of Apocalypse's regime was that age-of-consent laws were nonexistent; more babies were made that way.
"Well this time I mean it," she asserted, rebuttoning her uniform. "So what's eatin' you? No, that ain't an innuendo."
He let out a sigh. "I don't like what we're becoming." He glanced at her, seeing her questioning blue eyes. "This academy. This life. We got out of the Pen just so we could ... just so we could become this? That's ... that not what my mom and pop raised me to be."
Jubilee bit her lip, her eyes stinging as she thought of her own parents. "I'm sure ... they would've wanted you to stay alive." She wanted to take back her words as soon as she said them.
"Don't you get it?" he practically shouted back. "That's not the point! It's not about living or dying, it's what you do with your life! My pop told me that, and I've never forgotten it. But now ... now I look at the life I got ... and I just want to forget what he said. This isn't worth it, Jube. It's not worth it, and I thought you'd understand." He turned away from her and opened the supply room door, stepping out into the hallway where it was brighter and colder.
Shivering from more than the influx of conditioned air, Jubilee watched Everett walk off, then she closed the door, sliding downward against the wall and sinking into a sitting position.
He was right.
Those three words haunted the rest of her waking hours that day. That night, they invaded her dreams, accompanied by the haggard faces of her mother and father. Faces that kept morphing into the starving, hopeless prisoners of the Slave Pens.
He was right, and the following morning Jubilee woke up determined to tell him that. But he didn't show up for morning roll-call. She asked around but only received blank looks and knowing grins. The knowing grins scared her.
Everett still hadn't surfaced for the graduation ceremony that afternoon, and by that point she was absolutely frazzled with worry. She tried telling herself that Everett had decided to take off for parts unknown rather than spend one more day in this career he hated. And while she didn't enjoy the idea of him leaving without telling her, she just wanted him to be okay.
Judging by the knowing grins on some of her fellow cadets, he wasn't. Her mounting sense of dread was approaching critical mass, so she decided to skip the ceremony altogether and check the one place in the entire training complex she hadn't yet looked that day ... and in retrospect it should have been the first. She took a deep breath and opened the door to the supply closet.
She'd tried to prepare herself for whatever awaited her ... but the sight of Everett -- beaten, bloody, and impaled on biological spikes -- still shook her to the core. Her fingertips touched his lips but didn't feel a breath, touched his neck but didn't feel a pulse. Still in shock, she wrapped her arms around his body, careful of the spikes that unmistakably belonged to one of her classmates.
"You're gonna be late for the graduation, Lee," a familiar male voice behind her declared. "But don't worry about Synch, there -- he's not coming."
Jubilee turned and glared at the rest of her graduating class. Hellion. Catseye. Talon. And Vlad, who was responsible for the spikes.
"Hey, we understand he's your boyfriend and all, and you were attached to him," Hellion continued.
"Yeah, attached at the groin," Talon commented, gesturing obscenely with his wings.
"But he's a gene-traitor," Hellion went on, ignoring Bohusk's remark. "A bleeding-heart weakling. We just made it literal for him."
Jubilee clenched her teeth.
"You're better off without him," Hellion asserted. "He didn't deserve his place in the empire, and he would've just dragged you down with him."
"Unless ... you agree with him," Vlad ventured, forming another foot-long crystalline spike in his hand. "In which case, it's not gonna be pretty."
Hellion hovered telekinetically toward her. "So what's it gonna be?"
Jubilee looked down at Everett's lifeless body. "I understand," she whispered to him.
The plasma explosion she created that day devastated most of the building, killing everyone in a fifty-foot spherical radius. But not her. Immune to her own power, she survived, almost exhausted. Everett's body was incinerated, and she was afraid to dwell on that too much. In truth, when she'd kicked in her power on a scale she hadn't attempted before or since, the idea had been to die as well. No such luck.
Security and emergency crews were already mobilizing, and Jubilee made herself scarce, running away from the damaged building into the neighboring city slums of Apocalypse Island. She operated on adrenaline, retreating into the sewer tunnels. When she finally stopped running, exhaustion kicked in and she threw up what little she'd eaten that day before curling up in a lightless section of the cold tunnel and hoping she'd never wake up.
But days later she did. She found herself deeper in the tunnel system, sharing a sewer den with a host of human refugees, and greeted by a man with exotic red-on-black eyes and a killer smile.
"'Bout time you woke up," he commented, then introduced himself as Remy LeBeau, Gambit. The former X-Man proceeded to make her an offer she could have refused. An offer to join his merry band of outlaws.
She could have refused, but for Everett, she didn't.