xp_logs | Kurt and Jubilee go camping

By which we mean, fail to sleep and swap life stories. With a stick, in Jubilee's case.

It felt almost like home, Kurt thought, lying on the bare ground and looking up at the stars. Not quite like home, of course, his caravan had a bed, but he could live with sleeping rough if he was free.

Jubilee was slightly less happy about the whole arrangement, but then it beat being carted down a mine and turned into a drooling moron any day of the week. She liked her free will just the way it was, thank you very much. Of course, she'd have enjoyed the camp out a lot more if she'd been able to get comfortable, but the ache in her mouth and the side of her face made sleep an almost impossible task.

"Are you all right?" he asked worriedly, glancing over at her. "I could try to find something for a pillow..."

Jubilee didn't smile, it would hurt too much, nor did she talk for much the same reason but she shook her head softly, shrugging her shoulders as well before sitting up and resting her chin carefully against her knees.

It was the most frustrating thing in the world, not being able to talk, and she swore that she'd never again take for granted the simple act of speech once she was out of here. Of course, knowing herself well, she expected that would last for all of an hour once she was back in New York, but still, the thought was there.

"No?" he asked, head tilted, then glanced to one side and grabbed a stick, holding it out to her. "For the dirt. If you want to say anything so it will not hurt."

"Not alright, not sure a pillow will help," Jubilee wrote in the dirt on the ground, explaining both her head shake and her shrug. She sighed and doodled a quite good drawing of herself with a giant question mark over her head and then erased it. "I don't feel very well at all."

"To be expected, after what they did to you", he said quietly. "Does your nose feel any better now?"

"Not really," Jubilee wrote, and then drew a small drawing of herself as a chibi, smiling before wiping it out again. She had to admit, all those years of drawing small cartoon figures when she should have been doing actual schoolwork had helped with her speed here. "Thankyou for helping, anyway. I'm sure it'd hurt much worse if you hadn't set it. How are you doing?"

She hadn't had a chance to ask what had happened to him before, what with being preoccupied with having a concussion and all, but they had time now, and she really did care.

"Sore", he admitted, and moved over closer to sit up with his arms around his knees, for a less awkward angle of reading her messages. "Rather a lot of bruises, especially from when I tried to stop Layla hitting him. But it could be much worse."

"I'm sorry you got hurt," Jubilee wrote, unable to control the yawn that pulled against her mouth, even as the pain of it brought tears to her eyes. "We're going to make them pay for everything they've done."

"Yes, we are", he said with determination. "It appears that Catseye got away, as well, and took Molly and Meggan with her, so at least those two are no longer in their hands." He glanced sideways at her face and shifted to wrap a comforting arm around her. "You should try to sleep."

She stiffened for a moment before relaxing back against his arm with a sigh, it wasn't that she minded the gesture of comfort, it was just that at her current state of high alert, any random touch made her nerves jump like crazy. "Probably, what about you?" she wrote in the dirt in front of them both.

"Perhaps. I am not sure I can, at the moment." After everything that had happened, even in this relative safety, he was coiled like a spring on the inside.

"We could always swap stories till we're tired? Well, you could tell me things about yourself and I can listen anyhow," Jubilee wrote, leaning back further into his arm afterwards to get comfortable.

"Yes, we can do that", he agreed. "And you can draw pictures about your life in return, if you like, that would probably be easier. What would you like to know?"

"Anything?" Jubilee wrote, idly doodling in the dirt with the stick as she waited for him to answer. "How about what you were like growing up, that's a start."

"...quiet and insular", he said after a moment. "Growing up being so very different from birth, it did not matter so much when I was small because young children hardly realise, but later they very much did. And my parents knew all too well, so they kept me close to home as much as they could."

"Were you happy that way?" Jubilee asked, stick making a soft scraping sound in the dirt as she wrote.

"Mostly." He shrugged slightly. "I was never completely alone. I had my brother, and later our little sisters. Stefan took care of me, when I was bullied, he fought for me... and I cleaned and patched up his hurts before our parents saw them. And I was loved."

"Only mostly?" Jubilee asked, although she could guess why. Nobody liked to be trapped, even if the cage was one as pleasant as that of a family who wanted what was best for you. As a 'passer', she'd never had to deal with the stigma that came with being a visible mutant. She couldn't imagine what looking like Kurt, and being religious on top of that would have felt like.

He smiled faintly. "It got harder as I grew older and started to question the world. Started to realise why my parents were so concerned to keep me inside the camp. And then when I was twelve, Rack took Amanda, and nothing was ever quite the same. That was when I met Father Michael."

"And what did he teach you?" she wrote, not making any particular gesture as she did. She had technically been raised a Buddhist by her parents but she felt no loyalty to that religion, and indeed, had lost her parents at such a young age that she could barely remember anything about it. She mostly thought of herself as an agnostic if she thought about it at all.

"That the world outside our gates was not quite as dark and frightening a place as my parents had warned me, and there were good people in it. I had run away from my father and Stefan, they held me back from trying to help Amanda - out of fear for me, but I did not understand that then. I was just a boy and I was angry and grieving, so I ran away, and it was raining so I took the first shelter I could find, in his church. He found me in the confessional, wet and miserable, and he was the first stranger ever to look at me close up -and he saw only an upset child. He gave me cake and kind words."

"That could have turned out much differently," Jubilee wrote, not particularly wanting to get into the world she existed in with him, where a kind gesture was more often used to bring down someone's defenses and make them open to exploitation. She was glad the younger Kurt had found someone who helped him, but her life to this point was too full of the opposite for her not to point it out. "I'm glad it wasn't that way for you."

"It could have", he agreed quietly. "I knew very little of the real world at that time. I could not have been more lucky in the person who found me in such distress, because he truly was good, and he taught me that his God was good too. He taught me that God could see beyond a demon's body to the person inside."

"I've seen actual demons, can't say I see the resemblance," Jubilee wrote, wincing as the smile that followed caused her mouth to ache. "I should probably stop trying to make jokes or smile in any way."

He laughed a little in turn. "I suspect the people who came up with the classic image of a demon had never seen a real one, or they would look more like those."

Silence stretched after that, Jubilee merely resting her head against his shoulder and staring up at the night sky above, she wasn't exactly sure how to share her own story, and as much as she'd moved on from the things she'd seen when she was younger, they still had some power to unsettle her, even now. Finally she leaned forward and quickly draw a portrait of her mother and father as she'd last seen them, as accurate as she could make it when using dirt as both canvas and medium.

"My parents were killed in front of me," she wrote simply, wishing she could tell this particular tale out loud. "And then I was alone for a long time."

"I am so sorry", he said sincerely, his left hand going to cover hers. "You must have been very young when it happened. Too young to see such a thing."

"It's water under the bridge," Jubilee wrote, realising as she did that it was true. It wasn't that it hadn't been traumatic, or that she didn't recognise the toll it had taken on her and her decisions as she grew up but it was so long ago now, and she'd lived so much of life since then that it seemed a distant ache now. She'd said her goodbyes when she'd last been at their graves, she couldn't shed any more tears for them now.

With quick movements, she sketched out the remainder of her early childhood, the abusive foster parent, who had really been the last moment in a series of moments that had been a family struggling to deal with a child who was too damaged to be easily understood and hadn't been able to effectively communicate even if she had known what it was she wanted to say. Jubilee hadn't forgiven that abuse, she never would but she knew now that she hadn't belonged with those people, any more than she'd belonged in the mall or really any of the places she'd been since then.

Even the mansion and China had only been stops on the road, places to tryand find herself, attempts to find a family or a home where she felt wanted. She'd found some of what she wanted, but not all of it, it was only after China that she'd realised that it wasn't anything she was going to find until she could know that she deserved it. She would always find a reason to move on, or a way to screw up, that no matter how fast she ran, she couldn't run from herself.

"I am who I am, there's no running from that," she wrote finally, at peace if not unbroken.

"And that is something all too many people never come to accept", he said quietly. "Even therapy can only help us to come to terms with what has happened in our lives and how it has changed us, not change us back. I wish life had been happier for you, but it is what it is and I rather like the person you are."

"I rather like the person I am now too," Jubilee wrote, before leaning back and closing her eyes finally.

She was feeling tired finally, enough that she might even be able to get a few hours sleep. If there was anything she'd learnt, it was to take the time to rest when you could.

"I have been told I make a very good pillow", Kurt offered. "If you want to stay where you are. I think it must be the fur."

She turned the uninjured side of her face into his shoulder, patting his hand in the affirmative before settling down again, if he was okay with her using him as a pillow, she wasn't about to argue. Not only was he warmer than the cold ground, but his fur was most definitely a lot softer.

He wrapped his tail around her waist, careful not to press bruised flesh or cracked ribs too hard, as a means of keeping her upright in her sleep along with the arm around her shoulders. "Sleep and heal, Jubilee. Tomorrow will be a busy day."