Log: Jubilee and Remy

[x-jubilee.livejournal.com]

Remy takes Jubilee out for a little walk - as always, it leads to interesting places.




Remy sat on the top of the gothic spire, looking as comfortable as a man standing on the sidewalk, despite the fact that he was a half dozen stories up on his vantage point on the church. It represented one of the more difficult climbs in the city normally, and that was without the icy rain that was coming down all day. Everything was a test. always, with LeBeau in charge.

"A little help?" Jubilee asked, holding onto a gable a few feet below.

She'd been trying to figure out what the best next step would be, and considering Remy was above her, using his vantage point wasn't exactly cheating, least not as far as she was concerned. She'd been about to head out for the afternoon when he'd tagged her and told her to come along.

"Sure. Try not to slip." Remy said lightly, before resuming his scrutiny of the skyline.

"If I break my neck, I'm totally haunting you," Jubilee noted; but it was said with good humor. "I'll like, re-label all your weird foreign soap operas."

Jubilee knew if Remy wasn't providing pointers, then the solution had to be right in front of her if she just looked for it hard enough. Remy might be a tough task-master but he wasn't a complete dick, at least she'd never found him so. He'd never given her any task that didn't have some purpose behind it, even if that purpose meant she had to fail at it.

It took her a moment longer to see a way up and she thanked years of training and mutant physiology that she was light enough, and her hands were strong enough to start pulling herself up over the side of the roof. She listened to the creaking of the gutter she was now standing on and quickly reviewed her options. She didn't have a lot of them from where she was standing, which meant she was going to have to work her way around and hope the gutter didn't give way before she got around toward the other side.

"Don't go anywhere, I'll be right back."

"Don't take too long. Dere's other views Remy might switch to." He put his hands in his pockets and improbably rocked on his heels, waiting for her.

"Remind me to do something horrible to you when you're old and using like, a walker or something," Jubilee answered with a grunt, swinging herself upwards onto a slightly better angled roof and then working her way to the top so she could walk along the zenith till she reached the spire. There were handholds if you were insane and named Remy Lebeau; but for her things would be a little more 'my danger sense is tingling'. Still, if she was scared of dying, she wouldn't be where she was now. "Batman powers, activate!"

"Don't be silly, Jubilee. We're not going to make old age." Remy lit a cigarette and blew out a long plume of smoke. "Cigarette?"

Technically, she'd given up awhile ago but the occasional one was no crime.

"Sure," she replied, finally reaching the spot he was loitering with only a little more difficulty. She took the cigarette before holding it out for a light. "You never thought of a future where we don't all die horribly doing something sneaky and underhanded?"

"I try not to. Not to be pessimistic, but it's not even just that we do a dangerous job; it's dat one day, we may have to leave someone behind. Fantasizing 'bout a future dat we're all safe in makes it harder to make dat choice."

"We're a team," Jubilee noted, pausing a moment to take a drag on her cigarette as her gaze tracked the traffic below. "Don't think anything we do is gonna make it easy to leave one of us behind."

She'd left Remy behind when she had to, and Wanda had done the same to them in Genosha. You had to be willing to do that or you didn't belong in this job. Even with that history, she wasn't sure Remy's way of dealing with it would work for her.

"And just so you know? Next time, you get to be the one getting the fuck outta dodge. Cause dude, I gotta say, leaving you behind sucked."

"Not surprised. But it's what has to be done. And I'm a lot more dangerous to cover an escape den you are."

"I hear ya but cold equations suck, Remy," Jubilee replied with a sigh, figuring he'd know what she meant. It's where their business lay; in a measurement of cost analysis vs sacrifice where the result could be death for any one of them if the benefit outweighed the cost by far enough. She didn't have to like it, she just had to live with it.

"Of course dey do. If dey didn't, you'd be a sociopath." He flipped his cigarette off the edge. "We need to talk. It's time to grow up, Lee."

"I wondered if there was more to you dragging me out here then just sightseeing," Jubilee replied, taking another drag of her own cigarette. "Grow up how?"

"It's time to move past being a glorified courier. We're too thinly spread for dat any more, and it's time." His oddly coloured eyes seemed locked on a point in the distance, tracking something concealed on the horizon. "On you desk in de morning, you going to find a stack of files. Dose are now you contacts. It will be up to you to manage dere take, set up new drops for dem, and target dem to get intel dat we need. You now dere Case Officer."

It would be wrong to say she was startled, she'd known Remy wasn't training her just to be backup to the others. It was still a surprise though, and she'd be lying if she said she wasn't nervous.

"Thankyou," she replied finally, even though she was sure he'd already run the odds on what would happen if she fucked this up. It was, at least to her, a measure of respect that he'd give her this chance. "I won't fuck this up."

"Good. Because dese people may be trusting dere lives to you, Jubilee. Dat's why I wanted to meet you here. Balanced on de edge-" He made a sweep with his hands. "It's an imperfect metaphor."

Jubilee looked down, judging what would happen to them if either should fall, it wasn't a pretty thought, and neither was having people's lives depending on her every move. It's what she'd signed up for when she'd allowed Remy and Pete to save her ass in Madripoor. Even if she never said it out loud, it was that turning point that had given her everything she currently had. There was no way she'd ever give less then her best to Remy, no matter what he asked of her.

"How come these always keep popping up?" Jubilee murmured out loud, and then grinned. "Crossroads, I mean. People like you, offering me choices. Seems like I've gotten an awful lot of saves over the years, might be time for me to start giving them back, yeah?"

"Jubilee, life will always offer you choices. And a lot of dem aren't nice ones, but dey are choices." Remy took a drag from his cigarette and blew out a smoke ring. "Saves implies dat you here because of Wisdom and Remy, and dat's not really de truth. No one was ever going to leave you to rot because you were stupid. But dis - where you are now. Dat's because of what you made of it. For a long time, Remy didn't think dat you were going to make it. Or dat, at best, you'd be useful as a body in de field and not much else. But you chose to make de effort, and chose to work you ass off once you figured out dat dis was de life dat you were committed to. No one could give you dat, Jubilee. You had to earn it."