Fic: After the Kiss (X-23/Jubilee) - rated PG-13
Title: After the Kiss
Characters: Laura Kinney, Jubilation Lee, Hank Pym, Remy LeBeau, Logan
Pairing: Laura Kinney/Jubilation Lee
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: References to Laura's history of self-harm
Summary: Laura and Jubilee are back in town for Northstar's wedding, and they want to prove to everyone--including each other--that they've changed.
Author's Notes: This was written for renata_kedavrafor rarepairfest2012.
After the Kiss
“Don’t get married,” Gambit said.
He paused in front of the mirror to peer at himself. “Christ,” he whispered. He tugged at his tie. “Christ,” he whispered again and started to undo the knot under his chin.
Laura and Jubilee sat on the bed in Gambit’s room, watching him fumble and swear at his dresser mirror. Jubilee gave Laura a small smile.
Gambit said, “Ninety percent of the time, it’s a bad idea.” He knotted his tie and then paused. “No, it’s actually a good idea. It’s the execution that’s bad. People ruin a good thing by gettin’ married.”
“You want help with that tie, Remy?” Jubilee asked.
“Non, petite. You just sit there and stay single.”
Logan appeared in Gambit’s doorway. He was also dressed nicely; they were both getting ready to attend Northstar’s wedding rehearsal in the city. “You guys ready to go?” he said. “C’mon, it’s late already. Traffic’s gonna be a bitch.”
Laura and Jubilee were not attending the rehearsal, but Logan had offered to drive them to the city where they could hang out for a while. Laura was glad. The Jean Grey School was crowded enough with students and grown-ups and friends of friends who had flown in to the East Coast, and the crush of people didn’t make Laura feel relaxed. If anything, seeing the people she’d left reminded her of how much things had changed. She wasn’t an X-Man anymore. She wasn’t even part of a team, not really. The rules and regulations of the Jean Grey School didn’t apply to her, and the responsibilities of being an X-Man didn’t define her.
“Remy was just telling us not to get married,” Jubilee said. Her feet dangled over the side of Gambit’s bed. Laura immediately felt reassured by her presence.
“Good advice,” Logan said, leaning against the doorframe. “The best I've heard from him yet.”
Jubilee slid from the bed. “You guys are so ridiculous.” She sounded exasperated, but she was smiling. One of her feet slipped out of her flats and she stomped it back in. “So cynical.”
“Well, let’s be cynical together in the car,” he said. “C’mon, X. You waiting for a personal invitation?”
Laura stood from the bed.
“And Gumbo, staring at yourself isn’t going to make you better looking.”
Gambit leaned forward into the mirror. “These circles under my eyes. They’re from too much teaching.”
As if to prove his point, loud music shook the walls. It shut off three seconds later.
Logan didn’t even flinch. “You’ve only taught once this week,” he said. “Seriously, let’s move.”
They made their way down the hallway together and out through the main entrance and to Gambit’s car, parked in the driveway. Logan had paused once to give some instructions to Rachel. All the other adults were going to the rehearsal and then to the dinner afterwards, but Rachel was watching the school.
As they left the school, Laura looked at Jubilee. Though Laura found Jubilee’s scent difficult to categorize, she guessed she wasn’t nervous. Jubilee rarely seemed bothered by other people, least of all the people in Westchester. Laura often wondered if she’d ever ease into social situations the way Jubilee did-if this was something she could learn, like volleyball or backgammon-or if Jubilee had some special talent that couldn’t be imitated. The second thing, Laura guessed.
When Laura had arrived at the school earlier that afternoon, she’d hoped to see Jubilee right away. But she couldn’t find her anywhere. Logan carried her suitcase inside and set it in the foyer. “She’s around here somewhere,” he told her. “Take a look around.” He nodded at the rec room. “Go on. I hear voices. Go on and say hi to everyone.”
She did not want to say hi to everyone, but she didn’t tell him this. To say this would seem ungrateful, unsociable-and Laura was trying to prove to him that she had changed. He’d picked her up at the airport earlier that afternoon, a fact that surprised her. She’d thought he’d have sent Gambit or left her to her own devices to get to Westchester. But there he was, standing next to the car he’d left parked in the pick-up lane, its lights blinking. His cowboy hat was pushed back from his face. And he smiled when he saw her, as if he was truly happy she’d come home, and then he’d embraced her. “Thanks for comin’,” he said, pulling her close to his chest. He pulled back and looked at her, almost shyly. “You look great. Let me get your things.”
As she watched him toss her bag in the trunk of the car, she felt relieved-and then a little guilty. Logan had come all this way to pick her up-Logan. And he’d been happy to see her, too. She hadn’t expected that. In fact, she’d spent the entire flight angry with him, seething a little bit. She wasn’t really angry with him for one particular reason, just a lot of little reasons that had accumulated in her mind during the last three months.
Since she’d been at Avengers Academy, she’d had time to think about things. About Logan, and about the rest of the X-Men. What Logan had said to her, and what he’d never said. The promises he’d made and then broken. The things he’d forgotten. The fact that he hadn’t really tried to stop her from leaving the Jean Grey School. Or the fact that he didn’t write to her, didn’t call. And she knew she was foolish for thinking that things would have changed-that things would ever change between her and Logan-but she’d still been hurt by the way he’d cut her out of his life. More hurt because it had taken so little effort for him to do so.
“He said he’d adopt me,” she confessed to Jubilee once. They were talking on the phone, late at night, when no one was supposed to be awake. Laura lay in her bed and whispered into her cell phone, hoping that no one would hear her. “He doesn’t say things like that anymore.”
“You can’t let it bother you, X,” Jubilee said.
“I do not let it bother me,” Laura said, and her heartbeat accelerated, and her face felt hot. She wondered if Jubilee knew she was lying. She and Jubilee rarely saw each other anymore, a fact that Laura hated. But at that moment she was glad they weren’t face-to-face. “I just think it is strange. Now I live here and he lives in New York.” I thought we would live together, she wanted to add. She didn’t confess her most far-fetched fantasy of all, a fantasy that she knew most people would have labeled as weird or immature: That Logan would adopt her and they would get a house together-or maybe an apartment-and live somewhere far away from either Westchester or San Francisco. Laura would have her own bedroom. And Logan would have his work with the Avengers, but it wouldn’t consume him completely, and Laura would go to school during the day, and at night they would both come home and eat dinners of cubed steak and macaroni and cheese and watch sitcoms with canned laughter.
She was aware of lives like this, even though she’d never lived one. In books and in movies, kids lived in houses with their parents. They went to school and they came home and a mom and a dad lived there, and the family ate together and watched TV together. Sometimes the mom and the dad had only one child, a child they doted on and talked to and worried about and sometimes yelled at. Sometimes a mom even died or went away, and sometimes a dad remarried, but he remained a dad forever.
Laura knew that this kind of fantasy was unusual in someone her age; she was getting close to the age of most kids when they went off to college. But she couldn’t help it. She’d grown up in a facility and then on the streets; her idea of “home” was a boarding school, four beds to a room, three mass-prepared meals a day in a cafeteria.
“It’s Logan,” Jubilee said. “It’s always strange with Logan. And nothing’s personal. He’s really busy and sort of like clueless about things. Not that that excuses anything, but it’s just the way he rolls. Trust me, I know from experience.”
Laura didn’t tell Jubilee about the care package she’d received from Logan earlier that week. “Care package” was what the other kids called it; Laura just called it a box full of her stuff.
“Woo-hoo,” Ken said when he saw it. “Care package from Wolverine. And I thought my life was exciting.”
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Julie said.
They were standing together in the lounge. Laura held the box under her arm. “Later.”
“Later?” Julie said. “But we want to see what’s in it.”
“It is nothing,” Laura said.
“That’s easy for her to say,” Hazmat said from the sofa. She was leaning back and her arms were crossed over her chest. “No one ever sends me care packages. I guess it’s something Laura takes for granted. Must be nice to have Wolverine as like, a dad. Oh sorry, not a dad. A clone. Clone-dad.” Behind her mask she laughed.
Laura regretted that she had checked the mailroom when other people were watching.
Later she took the box to her room. She unsheathed one claw and tore through the tape. Inside the box were a few of the things she’d left behind in New York-her sneakers, her school notebooks, and her teddy bear. The things weren’t even packed that well, no styrofoam pellets. Then she caught a glimpse of a smaller box, and right away she could smell that it contained chocolate. So it was a care package. Logan had sent her something nice, something to let her know that he missed her.
She reached into the bottom of the box and pulled out the chocolates. The carton was white with gold trim, and the contents smelled good. She held the carton up to her nose and sniffed. Then she pulled it away and examined it more closely. It didn’t smell like Logan. No, it smelled like Ms. Pryde. The chocolates had not been purchased by Logan. They had not even been handled by Logan. They’d probably sat in Ms. Pryde’s office since Valentine’s Day-a gift she from some man she didn’t particularly like-and when she’d discovered that Logan was sending a package to Laura, she’d thought it a good opportunity to unload them.
At the bottom of the box there was a scrap of paper with Logan’s handwriting. X: Just sending along a few of your things. Let me know if you want me to send the rest. L.
Laura put her things under her bed. Then she collapsed the box to put it in the basement. She took the box of chocolates into the library, where Finesse and Reptil were studying. “You don’t want those?” Reptil said to her when he saw her laying them on the table.
“You eat them,” Laura said, and she kept walking so she wouldn’t have to explain herself.
So when Logan picked her up at the airport that morning, she felt that maybe she should forgive him-for the chocolates, and maybe for everything else. “I did not know Northstar was getting married until Gambit called me last week,” she said as they pulled away from the pick-up lane.
Logan checked his rearview mirror. “The whole thing was kinda sudden. It was nice of you to fly out.”
She didn’t really know Northstar that well, but when she heard that Jubilee was flying in as well, she’d decided to go. Her decision to attend had nothing to do with Northstar.
When they pulled onto the highway, Logan asked her how she liked Avengers Academy. It was the first time he’d ever asked her about her new school.
“Fine,” she said. She didn’t mention that she’d hated it when she’d first started there. “Has Jubilee arrived yet?”
“She got in this morning. Gambit picked her up at Newark. She has to travel early, before the UV rays get too intense. Before she went upstairs to sleep off her jet lag, she asked when you were landing.”
She tried not to smile.
“So tell me about the school,” he said. “I think Avengers Academy was a good idea, don’t you?”
***
On the way to the city, Gambit sat shotgun and fiddled with the air conditioner vents. He tugged at his tie and fought Logan for control of the armrest.
“Will you fuckin’ calm down?” Logan said, edging the car around a semi.
“Will you fuckin’ slow down?” Gambit said. “You forget I’m the only one in this car who’s not immortal.” He paused. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Do you know where Jean-Paul’s putting me at the reception? Like, at what table?”
“Do I look like the fuckin’ wedding planner?”
Gambit settled back into his seat and adjusted the knot in his tie.
“I doubt he put you at the same table with Rogue. He’s not that stupid.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Gambit was quiet. “Okay, that’s what I meant. You don’ think, do you?”
“You guys are friends. You can handle sittin’ next to each other at a wedding reception. Now take a Xanax already.”
Gambit tilted his head back against the headrest. “I don’ know why they’re getting married.”
Logan said nothing for a several moments. Then he said, “It’s not for us to judge. They’re adults.”
“That’s my point. Ain’t like they’re young and naïve.”
Logan was quiet again. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it’ll get him to settle down a bit. Besides, why do you give a shit?”
“I’m sick of the drama, homme. You weren’t the one who had to play Dr. Phil when him and Kyle were all broken up. Which was like, two weeks ago.”
Jubilee sat up. “Jean-Paul and Kyle were broken up two weeks ago?”
Laura caught Logan’s stare in the rearview mirror. “Girls?” he said. “You didn’t hear this conversation.” Then he turned to Gambit again. “Nice goin’.”
Next to Laura, Jubilee hunched forward. “Who the hell would we tell?”
“I don’t care,” Logan said. “Point is, this conversation never happened.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“I’m serious, Jubilee. No blabbing to Santo.”
Jubilee made a zipping motion over her lips.
They rode along in the car in silence. A few minutes passed.
Then Gambit started again. “Girls, don’t get married.”
“Oh Jesus,” Logan said.
“Marriage ruins women. It’s a really bad deal for them because they always give everything away. Seriously, girls.” He turned around in his seat to look at them. His gaze alternated between them, but it was steady and sincere. “Don’t let a man wreck your life.”
“Okay Gumbo, we get it,” Logan said, lifting one hand from the steering wheel.
At the same time, Jubilee said, “Done and done.”
They didn’t speak for the rest of the trip. Logan dropped them off in the Upper West Side. Gambit gave them a key to his apartment where they could crash that night.
“You have your umbrella?” Logan asked Jubilee.
“Yes,” Jubilee said, annoyed. She opened her umbrella as she followed Laura out of the car. “Geez, I never thought I’d be one of these little old Asian ladies with an umbrella in broad daylight. And I’m dressed for an ice age.” She was wearing black pants, boots, a turtleneck, and a coat.
“Good,” Logan said, “keep it that way.” As soon as Jubilee closed the door and opened her umbrella, he hit the gas and sped away from the curb.
Then Jubilee and Laura were alone together on the sidewalk-the first time they’d been alone since they’d both arrived back in New York. “Crazy, huh?” Jubilee said, her eyes shielded from the sun by big sunglasses. She smiled.
“Gambit’s behavior was odd. He smelled very nervous.”
“Oh, he hates weddings. You know he got married when he was a teenager, don’t you?” She took Laura’s arm in hers and started to nudge her down the street. They walked together under the umbrella.
Laura said, “I did not . . . know that.”
“Well, the whole thing was a disaster. Ever since then, he’s had this hang-up about weddings. Until the big day is over, he’s totally impossible to live with.”
“Did he tell you that?” Laura said. She meant, about his marriage. She couldn’t help but feel hurt. During all the time they’d traveled together, Gambit had never told her about a wedding.
“Storm did. Now let’s go check out his place. I have a feeling it’s posh as all hell.”
Just then, a teenage boy on a bicycle blew past them. “Hey freak!” he called out. “It’s ninety degrees outside!” And before they had a chance to respond, he was gone.
“Asshole,” Jubilee said.
“He is wrong,” Laura replied. “It’s not ninety degrees. Only eighty-seven point five.” She knew this because they’d passed a bank.
“All the same, I do look stupid. I can’t wait till the sun goes down so I can get out of this gear.” She tightened her arm around X’s. “So, anything interesting going on at Avengers Academy?”
Laura knew that when Jubilee asked if anything interesting was going on, she meant boys. “Not really.”
“Not really?”
She thought of the boys at Avengers Academy. None of them interested her. More to the point: all of them were off limits, even if she’d been so inclined. “No.”
“But you sure talk enough about Dr. Pym.”
“Jubilee,” Laura said. She almost stopped walking.
“What? It’s perfectly okay to have a crush on a teacher. Though if I were you, I’d probably obsess over that sexy-as-hell Clint Barton.”
“Jubilee,” Laura repeated. “Dr. Pym is . . . my friend.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good.” Jubilee seemed mildly disappointed. “So tell me about him.”
Laura didn’t know where to begin. When she thought of Dr. Pym, she couldn’t help but feel a gratitude she couldn’t articulate. No one had ever given her such a big chance before-not Wolverine, maybe not even Gambit.
“He has put me in charge of the animals,” she said.
Jubilee glanced at her. “Yeah?”
“Two rabbits, four guinea pigs, and some hamsters. I am responsible for feeding them, cleaning their cages, and making sure they get exercise.”
“Huh,” Jubilee said thoughtfully.
Laura could tell that Jubilee didn’t know what she was getting at. She said, “He lets me do this despite the fact that when I first arrived at the Academy, I sneaked into the lab and tried to steal the animals so I could set them free. Dr. Pym caught me.”
“Shut up,” Jubilee said. “You never told me this.”
Laura remembered the event clearly. She’d been planning on smuggling the animals outside to a place in back of the campus, beyond the stream. Dr. Pym had walked into the lab as she was putting a guinea pig into her backpack. “I didn’t apologize,” she said to Jubilee. “I told him that animals should not be kept in cages. Or used for experiments.”
Dr. Pym had looked a bit shocked, but he recovered right away. He pointed out to her that he didn’t use the animals for scientific experiments. “Laura,” he said, and she’d never before heard her name spoken with so much concern. “They’re domesticated animals. If you put them outside, they won’t survive. You know this.”
She held the guinea pig against her chest. It wiggled slightly, warm and alive. “At least they would be free.”
“Laura,” he said again. “Outside they’ll die. Are you saying that it’s better to die than to live with us in here?”
What a question! Only someone who had never lived in a cage would ask such a thing. “Yes.”
Dr. Pym seemed to reconsider her. “I don’t believe that you really feel that way. You care about these animals.” He paused. Then he gestured to the guinea pig. “I can tell you care by the way you’re holding him. Starvation and exposure . . . you know that’s not a good way to go.”
She ran her thumb along the scruff of the guinea pig’s neck and felt its whiskers brush against her arm. She’d thought then that Dr. Pym would ask her to hand it over or put it back in the cage. But he didn’t. The moment lengthened. She didn’t say anything-not because she wanted to have to agree or disagree with Dr. Pym, but because she saw the situation for what it was. She now understood what she’d planned to do all along: take the animals out to the stream and quietly kill them. Yes, she would have done this. She would have reached the stream and realized that the air was cold and the grass dry-how inhospitable to animals. And because she couldn’t have taken the animals back inside to captivity, she would have been forced to put them down.
She turned away and put the guinea pig back in its cage, mildly horrified, wondering if she’d ever be able to cut ties with her former self. Despite all her soul-searching, she was still the same girl she’d been at the facility and with X-Force-the type of girl who understood compassion only when it was paired with death.
“I’m sorry,” she said, unable to face Dr. Pym. “I should not have done this.” She wanted a quiet place to think.
“Laura-” Dr. Pym sounded like he was about to launch into something, but then he paused. “This merits a much larger discussion, but I don’t think either of us is up for it now. Go to bed. Come to my office tomorrow morning.”
That night, Laura lay in bed, feet away from her roommates, but she didn’t sleep. She thought about getting up, packing her bags, and leaving the Academy. But where would she go? She didn’t want to go back to Westchester-she’d have too much explaining to do. And she despised the thought of going to Utopia, even if Jubilee was there. She thought about calling Gambit, but she didn’t want him to get riled up. She also didn’t want to be someone he had to rescue all the time.
Since she’d come to the Academy, she’d been a poor student at everything except combat training. She cut class all the time and didn’t bother to socialize with the other students. “It’s the X-Man thing,” Hazmat said one evening, loud enough so that Laura could hear her. “She thinks she’s better than us.”
Laura didn’t think she was better than anyone. She was just tired of school. In the past eighteen months, she’d started over three times-first at the Xavier Institute, then at Utopia, and now at Avengers Academy. She was tired of the fact that she never got used to a place before it got hijacked or destroyed, or before she was asked to go somewhere else.
Surprisingly, she’d done her best schoolwork when she was in X-Force. Because she’d had to budget her time wisely, she simply opened her books and did her work. Calculus. Literature. Physics. Ethics. When X-Force was finished and she came back to Utopia, she was given some tests to complete. She never got the results-she ran away before Cyclops or Ms. Frost could tell her how she did.
So when she came to Avengers Academy, she was asked what classes she’d been taking at Utopia. And she was then enrolled in similar classes. But she was tired of school, tired of studying. Running away, traveling with Gambit-these things had taught her everything she needed to know about rebellion. She didn’t want to take orders anymore. She didn’t want to do anything. After a week of halfheartedly attending her classes, she started to skip. She left the Academy each morning to go exploring, to see the city. And no one stopped her. Hawkeye raised an eyebrow once when she came late to archery, but he didn’t say anything.
She let it slip once to Jubilee, what she was doing. One day she was milling around downtown Los Angeles when Jubilee called her with a question. She was answering it, but the traffic was noisy and she had to stop talking while a police car passed.
“Where are you?” Jubilee said.
“Echo Park.”
“Jesus, X. What the hell are you doing there?”
“Nothing.”
“But why aren’t you in school?”
“I don’t wish to be.”
“Wait, Laura-” Laura could tell that Jubilee was trying to find a more private place to talk. Then her voice came again, quiet and concerned. “You’ve left the Academy?”
“No. I . . . haven’t been attending class.” She looked up. The city’s skyline was in her line of vision, big and imposing.
“Oh my gosh, Laura. You can’t just not go to class.”
“But you don’t go to class either,” Laura said.
“Laura, I’m a vampire. I can’t be around kids. Plus,” she added, “I’m dumb. I was never good at school anyway. And now it doesn’t matter.”
“That’s not true,” Laura said, and she knew she should ask Jubilee what was really going on in her life. But Jubilee didn’t like to talk about herself; she steered each conversation to something else.
“Give it another shot, X,” Jubilee said. “Promise me, okay?”
So when Laura met with Dr. Pym, she wondered if she’d get kicked out. And she didn’t wonder how Wolverine or Gambit might react when they heard the news-but how Jubilee would react. Laura had made her a promise.
When she entered his office that morning, Dr. Pym was not smiling, but he did not seem hostile or angry. He told her to take a seat.
“Are you going to kick me out?” she said before he had the chance to say anything.
Dr. Pym peered at her from the other side of his desk. “Is that what you want?”
She thought for a moment. Then she shook her head.
Dr. Pym folded his hands in front of him. “I don’t want to keep you here if you’re not happy. And though we allow our students a great deal of freedom to come and go as they please, we do have enrollment requirements.”
Laura looked down. If you’re not happy, Dr. Pym had said. She’d never thought about school in terms of happiness-only in terms of something that had to be done. Just as she’d thought about X-Force.
When she didn’t respond, Dr. Pym picked up his end of the conversation. “When you stopped coming to class, I took another look at your file.”
Laura’s heartbeat hastened. Her file. Then she realized that he meant her academic records, not other kinds of records. Not facility records.
“There wasn’t a whole lot to go on, so I called Wolverine. When he never called me back, I called Emma Frost.”
Laura’s heart rate hadn’t yet had the chance to slow down; when Dr. Pym mentioned Ms. Frost, she wanted to bolt from the room.
“The business between the X-Men?” Dr. Pym shook his head slightly. “We Avengers aren’t as territorial. The people at Utopia were happy to fax me your test scores.” He turned around in his chair and grabbed a piece of paper from the bookshelf behind him. “Outstanding performance in calculus, physics, chemistry, English . . . and you’re fluent in a few languages. It occurs to me that I don’t have the faculty or the resources to offer you the kind of classes you might find challenging. The rest of our students are still fulfilling core requirements. Some are studying for the GED.”
Laura wondered where the conversation was going. When she’d entered Dr. Pym’s office, she’d figured she was going to be expelled. Now she had no idea what he was getting at.
“Ideally, I’d like to see you take college classes. We can get discounted tuition through the state system.” He studied her for a moment. “Does that idea not appeal to you?”
It didn’t. But if she told him the truth-that she planned not to go to college, not ever-he might not like her answer.
“Are you intimidated by being with older kids? Because, as someone who went through the same thing, I can tell you that it’s not really a big deal.”
“I don’t want to go to college,” she said. “School is too institutional.”
“Oh, I think you’ll find that college isn’t all that institutional.”
“I do not want to go to college,” she said, this time more firmly. “I am certain.”
Dr. Pym sat back. “Okay,” he said slowly. He opened his hands. “What are your favorite subjects?”
She liked archery with Clint Barton. And volleyball with Tigra. She told him this.
“So you like sports.”
“I like being on a team.”
“What about art? Or music?” He swiveled his chair to look through his bookshelf. Moments later he sat up and placed a book on his desk. “What about woodworking? Here, let me show you something.” He opened the book and pointed to a wooden structure that looked like a cross between a dog run and a maze.
“What is it?” she said.
“After our conversation last night, I lay awake thinking about what you said. About animals. I agree that they shouldn’t be in cages either. But we can’t just set them free. So I would like you to build a different kind of structure for them-something that will allow them to be both freer and safe. Maybe one outside and one inside, if that sounds doable.”
She glanced down at the book.
“I want to put you in charge of the animals,” he said.
At that moment, she thought that Dr. Pym had misjudged her very severely. She almost thought less of him. He didn’t know anything about her-if he did, he wouldn’t have wanted her around animals. “I don’t know,” she said.
He looked at her, waiting for her to elaborate. When she didn’t, he said, “Have a go at it. If you hate it, we’ll find something else for you to do.”
***
“Wow,” Jubilee said. “So what did you do next?”
Laura shrugged. She and Jubilee had located Gambit’s apartment building on the tree-lined street. “I started to build it.”
“You are the queen of understatement, X,” Jubilee said, waving the key fob in front of the door. It beeped and Jubilee pulled the door open. “I mean, did Dr. Pym totally love what you built? Was he like, ‘Laura, no one has ever done something so amazing in the history of Avengers Academy’?”
“No.”
“I was kidding. Here we are.” She stopped in front of Gambit’s door and put the key in the lock. She pushed open the door and went inside. “Holy shit.”
Laura followed her. The apartment was large loft, with long windows and high ceilings. It was also tastefully decorated-paintings, matching furniture, bookshelves.
“We’re looking at so much tax evasion,” Jubilee said.
Laura skimmed her hand over the bookshelf.
Jubilee moved to the sitting area and flounced onto the couch. “I wonder what the rent runs him here. You know,” she said, turning her head to look over the back of the couch at Laura, “Emma Frost said this mean thing about Gambit, and I’ve never been able to get it out of my head. She said that his obsession with looking cultured was evidence of him trying to cover up his white trash roots.” Jubilee turned around again. “She didn’t say ‘white trash,’ but that’s basically what she meant. I hate Emma Frost.”
Laura came around to sit on the sofa. “I do not know how you tolerate her. I would never return to the X-Men, least of all because of her.”
Eyes cast downward, Jubilee played with a ring on her index finger. “Yep,” she said, almost to herself.
Laura felt bad. She hadn’t meant to disavow the X-Men so adamantly-not when Jubilee had little choice but to live with them. Before she had the chance to amend her statement, Jubilee reached into her back pocket.
“Got something for you,” she said, holding out a card.
Laura took it. It was a fake ID.
“We’ll hit the clubs tonight,” Jubilee said. “I’ve already got some places in mind.”
“Jubilee,” Laura said, studying the ID. “This girl looks nothing like me. This girl is Asian.”
“Nobody’s going to be looking at your face, X.” Jubilee rose from the couch. “Come on, let’s get ready.”
Laura followed Jubilee into the bedroom, already searching for an excuse, for a reason they shouldn’t go. She didn’t want to go to the clubs. She just wanted to be with Jubilee, maybe in a quiet place like a movie theater or a coffee shop.
“Did Logan and Gambit say it was okay for us to go out?”
Jubilee turned to give her an amused look. “Don’t tell me the Avengers have you following rules now. And I doubt Logan or Gambit would give a shit.”
“No, I meant-”
Jubilee was already unzipping a duffel bag she brought. She took out a dress.
“Maybe it would be dangerous for us. Out there. With other people.”
Jubilee leveled her gaze. “What do you mean?” Without waiting for Laura to respond, she dropped a pair of shoes onto the floor. “You think I can’t handle a crowd? I go out all the time. I’m not going to get all bloodthirsty just because, you know, the lights go down.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Whatever. Did you bring something to wear? Here, try this on.” Jubilee thrust a top into Laura’s arms. It was a purple shirt with sequins. “What are you planning to wear to the wedding? It has to be something sexy enough so that Creepy McCreepy realizes what a huge mistake he made in treating you bad.”
Creepy McCreepy was what Jubilee called Julian. Laura had seen him earlier that day when she was looking for Jubilee-Julian had come around the corner so quickly that she hadn’t had time to prepare herself. He’d averted his gaze and puffed out his chest as acted as though he hadn’t seen her at all. Everything that had happened between her and Julian felt as if it had happened to someone else.
“I love weddings because it always seems like something important could happen,” Jubilee said. She turned around started to undress, pulling her shirt over her head and unfastening her pants.
“Something important is happening. Northstar is marrying his boyfriend.”
“I’m talking about us. Like, some guy could fall out of the sky for you, you never know.”
Laura reluctantly took off her jacket and laid it on the bed.
“Or like, maybe Gambit will finally stop flirting with Cecilia and just ask her out.” She shuffled her dress over her head. “Could you zip me?”
Laura reached over and pulled the zipper up.
“Now you’ll have to tell me if I look okay,” Jubilee said, turning around. She ran her fingers through her hair and then put both hands on her hips. Her eyes were warm and soft. “I can’t check myself out anymore. So how do I look?”
Jubilee looked pretty-beautiful, even. The dress fit her perfectly. When she smiled she had dimples, and Laura thought that no one would mistake her for a vampire if they didn’t really know her.
Jubilee always told Laura that she was pretty-that she turned heads and drew stares. But the truth was that Jubilee was prettier, and not just because of the way she looked. She was outgoing and gregarious, popular for the right reasons. She was the sort of girl who’d always have friends, vampire or not. She made people feel special-even when they were not obviously likable. Like Laura.
“You look healthy,” Laura said.
“That’s a compliment I’ll accept,” Jubilee said, adjusting her earrings. “Considering the fact that I’m technically dead.” She didn’t stop smiling. “You want me to do your make-up?”
***
The last time Laura had gotten dressed up to go out, she’d been with Avengers Academy for two months. Dr. Pym and Tigra had taken her class to see a ballet in downtown Los Angeles. It was Friday evening; Finesse, Reptil, and Julie had come, but Hazmat and Mettle had stayed back at the school. “Ballet is boring,” Hazmat told her while they were walking back to the dorm after lunch. “And there’s something really gross and weird about guys in tights. You’ll see what I mean. Sometimes junk is best left to the imagination.”
Laura hadn’t known what to expect from a ballet. She’d been to only one in her life-as an assassin. She couldn’t tell you what it was about, just that her targets had been sitting in the mezzanine, two men and a woman. She’d killed them right after intermission. No one had noticed. She’d been out the back door before anyone knew they were dead.
With the lights down in the theater, it was difficult not to think about this past event. She wondered, briefly, who those people had been-if they’d done something terrible to deserve such a fate, or if they’d ended up on her kill list arbitrarily. She tried not to wonder if they had families. Certainly they must have had families, everyone did.
When the curtains went up and the stage lights came on, she put aside her despair. Dancers spun from the wings of the stage. They danced in pairs. They carried each other, entwined. They leapt and struggled, but not with themselves, and not against each other. Laura watched as they moved seamlessly. Everything seemed to fall into place without much effort-odd, because Laura knew that dancing required effort. Movement at such an advanced level required practice and constant training. Fighting, of course, required practice and constant training. But Laura recognized that this kind of movement wasn’t like fighting. Fighting was utilitarian. Even when it was done well, and even when it accomplished what it was supposed to, it wasn’t beautiful.
Well, it wasn’t pretty. That was something Logan used to say when they finished an X-Force mission. Well, it wasn’t pretty, but we got the job done.
What if, what if, Laura thought. What if she did something like dance? She might have been able to execute the movements-she had the flexibility and the strength. What if, what if.
Dancing surprised her; it made her reconsider what she knew about the body. All her life, she had used her body to accomplish certain things-to kill, for instance, or to maim. And bodies-your own body, other people’s bodies-were things you had to overcome. They had limitations. They were heavy. They took up space. Sometimes you had to push them out of the way to get what you wanted. Sometimes another person’s body was the thing you wanted, but in subduing it, or in bringing it down, you experienced no joy-only the satisfaction of completing another mission.
Dancers used their bodies for joy-for making themselves happy, and for making other people feel things-and this, Laura decided, was why she could not be a dancer.
When the curtains came down and the lights went on, Laura looked up, startled. “It’s over?” she asked Dr. Pym.
“Intermission,” Dr. Pym said, pointing down at his program. “You can get a drink if you want.”
Reptil stirred beside her and yawned. “I fell asleep too.”
The ballet had made her feel things-happier and sadder than she’d felt in a long time. She didn’t know how to handle those feelings, how to hold them inside her all at once. This swirl of emotions made her anxious and nauseated. “May I be excused?” she asked Dr. Pym.
“Of course,” he said, standing to let her out of her seat. “But the show starts again in ten minutes.”
In the aisle, she paused in front of him. “Is it acceptable if I wait in the lobby for the show to end?” She didn’t make eye contact with him.
“Are you okay?”
“I am not good in crowds.”
“Do you want one of us to wait with you?”
She paused. “I do not want you to miss the show.”
In the lobby she sat on the steps that went up to the balcony. She thought about how beautiful the dancers had been-so beautiful-and how this made her anxious. One of her legs twitched. She wanted to get up and pace. Worse, she wanted to go into the bathroom and open her wrists. The blood would run into the sink, and is it did so it would calm her down, still her heart. (At moments like this, she understood why people smoked meth and walked into traffic.)
What stopped her from going into the bathroom was the promise she’d made to Gambit-as well as the prospect of getting caught. She didn’t want to get caught. At Avengers Academy she was still new; she didn’t want to ruin everything. She didn’t want to be the center of some big, memorable scene in a public restroom-blood everywhere, people traumatized. Already no one at school liked her, not really, and she could accept that. But if she caused a scene, she would have to live with the fact that her unpopularity was truly her fault.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the railing. Then, someone approached. When she opened her eyes she saw shoes. She looked up to see Dr. Pym.
“Are you all right?” Without waiting for her answer, he sat down next to her. “Are you sick?”
She shook her head. She knew her face was flushed. She must have looked sick-perhaps Dr. Pym was wondering what could make a girl with a healing factor so ill.
He sat next to her for a few long moments. Then he put an arm on her shoulder very slowly, tentatively. As if he was trying not to startle her. “Let’s get you home.”
“What about the others?”
“Tigra will drive them. We’ll take a cab back.” He nudged her to her feet.
Before she had time to protest, he guided her out the door and into a cab. She settled against the window as he gave the cabdriver directions. In the cab she could think about other things-the way the seats smelled or how many people had ridden in the car that evening. She could distract herself. She could make her darkness go away.
“I’m sorry I’m making you miss the show,” she said, watching the city pass by. “I did not intend for this to happen.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dr. Pym said. “I like ballet as much as anyone, but missing the last act isn’t the end of the world.”
She slowly turned to look at him, and she tried to relax her hands so that they weren’t balled into tight fists. I can be normal if I want, she thought. I can make people think I’m normal. “It was nice of you and Tigra to take us. I have never seen a ballet. I loved it.”
“Really?” In the dark he studied her.
“My friend Jubilee likes to dance. She’s good at it. I think she could have been a ballet dancer if she’d wanted to. She was once a gymnast. She tries to get me to dance, but I’m terrible at things like that.”
“I know of Jubilee.” Dr. Pym’s voice was quiet.
“She is a vampire now. She was made a vampire against her will. Sometimes,” she began. She heard herself trail off.
“What?”
She turned to look out the window. Sometimes she wished she’d been made a vampire instead of Jubilee. Not that she wanted to be a vampire. It was just that she was accustomed to things like that happening to her. She would have dealt with it. She would have been okay. Jubilee, on the other hand, seemed so stunned by the turn of events that had made her into a predator. And even though she rarely talked about it, Laura could tell that she missed normalcy-the warmth of the sun on her skin, the ability to walk down the street without smelling people, or sizing them up as potential prey.
When they arrived back at the Academy, Laura thanked Dr. Pym once again and went to her room. She shuffled off her shoes and went to bed, still dressed. By the next morning she’d be able to appear normal again. When Dr. Pym knocked on her door to check on her, she pretended to be asleep.
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