Roadtrip: Healing wounds

[x-jubilee.livejournal.com]

When: Backdated 19th June 2005. What Time: 2:00pm
What Happens: Jubilee and Forge discuss his new arm, among other things.



Jubilee knocked on the door of the room Forge was sharing with Catseye. They'd arrived early that morning and rented two rooms at a beachside hotel. Carlie was already down on the beach, and Jubilee had changed into her bikini but she'd wanted to see how Forge was getting on, and whether he wanted to come down as well.

"Come in," Forge shouted, figuring that it'd be Jubilee at the door. He could see Catseye and Carlie running up and down the beach, and hear their shrieks of laughter over the waves. Glancing down at his foot through his sunglasses, he frowned at the wide expanse of sand and kicked back in the deck chair. The hotel patio stretched between both rooms, providing a great view of the ocean. While he'd never been much for the beach, the times his family had been down to the Gulf coast, Forge saw how it could be easy to get used to this.

Jubilee entered the room, looking around curiously. It had much the same layout that her and Carlie's had. "Hey Dude, you comin' down to the beach?"

"Too much sand," Forge explained. "Besides, gotta take it easy for at least another week or so on the arm." He raised his left arm, still encased in bandages, and bent his elbow weakly. "Feels like it's asleep - but I can feel it. Probably means the bandages can come off."

Reaching up to his shoulder under his tank top, Forge picked at the top edge of the linen bandage, slowly unwinding it from his arm, revealing inch by inch of bare metal.

Jubilee watched curiously, looking on as Forge removed the bandage. She had been wondering what the new arm would look like. Forge had been babbling about the design one night as he navigated, while she drove. While she was not mechanically minded at all, she'd always found listening to the tech types in the mansion interesting.

"You sure you're ready for that?" she asked.


"Feedback's well within expected parameters," he explained, winding the bandage down past his elbow. "I've got full tactile sensitivity, and motor response is up to fifteen percent, from a predicted six point five." He finished wadding up the bandage, then dropped it to the patio and painstakingly raised his left arm.

At first glance, the prosthetic looked almost identical to his flesh-and-blood right arm, only dipped in matte silver metal. On closer inspection, Jubilee could see tiny seams where bands of metal overlapped and crossed, and unseen metal muscles flexed beneath the silver skin. With slow precision, Forge curled his fingers into a fist and brought the arm to shoulder height. "That means," he explained, "that I'm getting stronger. It means that it worked. I'm a whole person again."

Jubilee leaned forward to take a close look at the arm. It really was remarkable; a feat of engineering that she'd never seen the like of. Without realising it, her hand moved forward, hovering close as if to touch the arm. "Can you...Well, can you feel it if someone touches it? Like, you know, how you can feel it if someone touched your other arm?"


"Try," Forge said, turning his arm over, palm-up. Slowly, Jubilee trailed her fingers down the metal bicep, over the crook of the elbow, and down to the inside of Forge's wrist. The metal was warm, with less give than human flesh but more than she'd expected. Glancing up, she noticed Forge was blushing slightly.

"Yeah, uh, the feedback works..." he mumbled, cautiously tucking his arm to his chest.

Jubilee fought the urge to grin widely as she noticed Forge's blush. Still, she didn't want to embarrass him, so she quickly buried the grin. "Dude, outstanding. It even felt warm. Seriously, I'm impressed. Does it have any optional extras or were you just goin' for 'arm like'?"

She leaned back against the railing, noticing that Carlie appeared to have gone for the pounce and roll technique to corner Catseye and had come out second best.

Forge ran a finger over the smooth metal. "It works like muscle - just
like the human body. I'm not installing a laser cannon or anything,
but there's room for upgrades." He paused, frowning slightly. "I'm not
trying to make myself into some kind of 'cyborg hero' like Mr.
al-Rashid," he explained, "Right now I'm settling for 'not a cripple',
you know?"

Jubilee placed a hand lightly on the shoulder of his good arm, giving it a squeeze. "Yeah, I know. It's brilliant, an not just in that 'this is my mutant power, it's what I do', kinda way. It's brilliant cause you didn't give up, even after life handed you a shitty deck of cards."

She didn't want it to sound like she was giving him a pep talk but sometimes there was only so many ways you could say something. She did admire the way he'd kept on, hadn't spent his time wandering the halls moaning about how life was such a dark, hideous mystery to which they were all pawns. She'd done her own share of moaning about the whims of fate, and the one thing she'd learnt was that bitching and crying about things never fixed anything.

"Spent so long letting myself be a victim," Forge explained, "that I just got tired of it and decided that I was going to change my situation." He definitely wasn't about to go into what led to his accident, but as long as he focused on the changes after...

"Kind of like you leaving home, following Ms. Monroe and Dr. Grey? Make a decision, do it. Thought to action, one step. Sometimes it comes out for the best, sometimes it doesn't." He sighed, tucking his arm into his chest and remaining silent for a moment, watching Carlie and Catseye chase each other through the smaller waves, pondering. "You going to be okay, seeing this place tomorrow?"

Jubilee paused, it was something she'd been asking herself almost the entire way here. If she were ready to say goodbye, what it would mean to her. "Truth? I'm not sure. It was always my safety net, the place I could come back to if everything turned pear shaped. I mean, no matter what I did at the school, how much I stuck my foot in it. I could always come back here, an no one would care who I was, or what I'd done. Seeing it tomorrow, it's gonna be sayin' goodbye for good. I think I'm ready to do that but I don't know till I get there, till it’s done."

"But do you need the net anymore?" Forge asked earnestly. "I mean,
look at you. You graduated high school with a 4.0 last semester.
Training for the X-Men. As self-sufficient as it gets. Hell, way I
hear rumours, you've made some pretty major screwups in the past year
or two, and look at the friends you've still got." He gestured subtly
to himself and out to the girls on the beach. "I'd say that if anyone
around here needs a safety net, it's not you, Jubilee."

She'd had it this good once before. Parents who loved her, good grades, friends who cared. It had all been taken away so suddenly that she'd barely had a chance to catch breath before she needed to learn how to survive in a world that had changed beyond recognition. Self sufficient? Possibly. She still wasn't sure how much of that was due to herself. She'd had so many opportunities, so many lucky breaks. It scared her how much now felt like what she'd had before. A home, people who cared. What if it got taken away again? But you took risks in life. You couldn't keep looking to the past and never living just in case things turned sour. You had to just grab hold of it with both hands and ride it for all it was worth.

"No, not anymore. Just a force of habit, ya know? An yer right, I've done pretty damn well for someone who was such a screw up ta start with." Jubilee replied, looking up at the clear blue sky overhead. It really was the most perfect day. "Sure you won't come down? There's a wall near the beach you could sit on if you're worried about the sand. Better then sittin' around up here alone, anyhow."

Experimentally, Forge flexed his knee. "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea." He looked at Jubilee with a smile. "All of it, you know? We've got a good bunch of people out there at the school. Better than any safety net, I think." He waited for Jubilee to turn around for the beach before standing up and surreptitiously winding up a towel. "But you know, if I'm going to go sit by the beach, you're going to have to do one thing first."

"What's that?" Jubilee asked, bending slightly to pick up her sunscreen.

"Catch me," Forge said quickly, whipping the towel forward to catch Jubilee on the back of the leg with a *snap*.

Jubilee caught herself before she fell flat on her face, looking back as Forge made a run for it. "Dude! You are so getting it for that!" Jubilee yelled, laughing as she launched herself up and dashed off after him.

This, meant war.