jubilee & april | parkour
Jun. 14th, 2022 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logs(backdated) Jubilee and April tackle the parkour course, and their combined lack of chill makes an appearance.
Kyle and Jubilee had been working on the outdoor Parkour course for a while now, with the occasional help from the other 'flippy, climby' people of the mansion, as Jubilee liked to name them.
She figured they'd done a pretty good job, including the larger walls and obstacles that required a grappling hook, or other forms of propulsion to get around. That one had been a small sell on her part, she'd fed Kyle hamburgers and he'd done a lot of the grunt work of getting things into place.
"You ready for this?" Jubilee asked her younger companion. She didn't really do competition the way other people did, for Jubilee the thrill of simply getting to do a run with another person was way better than any 'win' you could achieve. But she figured it was a great way to get to know their newest resident wall-crawler. "Like, we can totally go for burgers or whatever after. Kyle and I kinda have a food economy thing going, since we're like way more calorie motivated than most people.
Jubilation Lee. Wow. From what Kyle had told her, this one sounded as awesome as the counterpart she had known, and she was uncharacteristically shy about spending one on one time with the older woman. April fiddled with the fit on her bracers a bit nervously as she nodded, biting her lip to avoid blurting out something stupid. "Yeah, burgers, I just, wow, Jubilation Lee, May's gonna be--" she cut off abruptly, face heating up at the slip and the reminder. "Sorry. Burgers after sound great. Apologies if I'm a little weird, just... your counterpart back home was so cool."
“Do tell,” Jubilee replied with a smile. She was always happy to talk about herself, especially other herselves that may or may not be real dependent on which universe you currently happened to be inhabiting. “What made her cool?”
April blushed at her extreme lack of chill before giving Jubilee a hesitant smile. "She's just--Okay, so we didn't interact much, because I left most of the teaming up to May, but when we did she was just.. coolly competent, able to cut through other people's bullshit to get things done. And you could tell she really cared about her team. She seemed to trust them to do their things, but wouldn't hesitate to speak up if they were being put into a situation that wasn't good for them. And she was generally just less uptight and rigid than others, didn't get mad about a little banter in the field as long as people did their jobs. And her powers were cool too, as long as I wasn't getting up close and personal with them."
"Okay, so like, I am in no way that cool or responsible," Jubilee noted with a grin, waving for April to start them off on the track. "Like, I'm totally an International woman of mystery and a super competent and flexible spy, but totally not cool. I like, completely had a hyperventilation excitement party at the thought of good wine glasses the other day even."
April cracked up as she took off, setting an easy pace as she bounced from step to step. "I'm not a big drinker and Pyotr mostly drinks vodka, so I'll take your word about good wine glasses," she commented, toes landing on just the edge of a landing before she sprang to the wall in front of her, pulling herself up so she could sit on top for a second and talk. "And obviously you're just a different kind of cool if you're an international woman of mystery."
“Not sure if people who have no chill can be considered cool,” Jubilee noted, flipping over onto her hands to move along the lower balance portion of the course. Normally people would do it on their feet but she enjoyed the challenge. Besides, she also enjoyed the side-eye everyone gave her while she did it as well. Never, ever let it be said that Jubilation Lee wasn’t extra in every possible way. “And I like, have never had any chill. So how else is your universe different? Tell me you got unicorns there. That would like, absolutely blow Wade’s mind.”
Sure, Wade had disappeared in a puff of logic somewhere but that didn’t mean the knowledge that unicorns existed somewhere wouldn’t somehow reach him.
"Not unless you count the really squishy collectibles people went nuts over, sadly. Not that I knew about, at least." April watched curiously for a moment as Jubilee moved along on her hands, then took a running jump to the next tall obstacle. "You're doing this course on your hands, that's pretty rad. I think it's great that you just do what you do. Deciding everything is too pedestrian or whatever to enjoy openly isn't cool to me."
“Everyone’s got their reasons, kid,” Jubilee noted, pushing down with her hands to do a flip-up onto a small wall before tumbling down the other side to come back up on her hands. “And I’m a spy, it’s like anyone's guess who I’ll be at any given moment. Sometimes the only way through is to be completely myself while I’m here so hard that I remember it out there.”
April nodded, somewhat able to relate. "I-well. It took a while to figure out my personality separate from May's memories," she offered up. "I took a few years after we graduated to just do other stuff, figure out some of the parts that were me. Didn't help that we shared a room and pieces of our wardrobe and everything else at first. With the memories on top... same reactions and sayings, all of that. Like sharing a brain between two bodies."
"That can't have been easy,"
Jubilee's words held not even a hint of uneasiness or judgment as she started hand walking out onto the next part of the course, this one was a rope drawn taut between two blocks, and it bowed slightly under her weight as she moved. Not as much as say, someone like Kyle, but it still took some concentration to make it over.
"Is it harder or easier being here?"
"Bit of both. My world was a little kinder to mutants, and I miss my family sometimes. It's weird not having May at my back if I need her." She looked over the next obstacle for a moment before she started to hop across, feet and hands sticking lightly to the wall before she pushed off to the next jump. "But I'm just April here, and I don't have to share a bedroom and I can't hear everything going on in the house all the time. And most of you have been at least polite or helpful and nobody's expecting me to be anything but myself, and that's... it's really different. Good and bad. I think working with a team is going to be a big adjustment."
Jubilee didn’t answer straight away, concentrating on getting over a series of stepping stones that were slightly further away than what was truly comfortable trying to jump with only her hands. She’d designed it that way, of course. Anyone with a longer wingspan than she had would have been fine.
“Teams are a big adjustment,” Jubilee noted, and given that she’d gone from the X-men to X-force, she had a world of experience in just how big an adjustment they could be. “People are going to like, have expectations and you’re gonna have expectations and sometimes they don’t always meet well, and sometimes they do. It’s probably gonna be stupidly chaotic at first.”
April let out a thoughtful hum as she jumped sideways from a wall to grab a bar. “Hopefully I can work with them a bit before making a decision. Well, the X-Men, at least. No offense, but I’d be a rubbish spy. And I’m not sure about being a PI either, although I guess I do have some insight into how a detective operates.
“What do you think you're best at?” Jubilee asked, having made it to the next park of the track, and paused while she decided whether it was worth the effort to continue the hands thing or if she should just flip back to feet now. “Don’t think choosing a team now means you can’t move later if it doesn’t fit. I started as an Xman, after all.”
"Dad's.. well. Between his time as Spider-Man and working for NYPD, he's really big on not using lethal force if you can avoid it. Since I mostly stayed in Queens doing your average person crime fighting, I spent a lot of time pulling my punches and webbing people up. Maybe breaking a few bones or dislocating a joint." April shrugged, and let a flicker of black go across her arms as she tackled the next part of the course. "I'm pretty good at stealth, and I can get up high with my webs, so if I could figure out shifting into the full body form I arrived in I'd probably be useful for recon and cutting off exits. My webbing's pretty strong and lasts a few hours, which is nice for impromptu tying someone up. And I've got that whole enhanced thing going on, so fighting things that baseline humans would struggle with... I'm happy to help out with that too." She gave Jubilee a shy smile. "Pretty sure using your abilities to help others is hard-coded into the Parker family DNA at this point."
“That stuff is definitely important,” Jubilee noted, flipping back onto her feet to run sideways along one of the walls before flipping backward onto her hands again on the other side. It was cheating, sure but whoever said she wasn’t a rule breaker at heart? “But who do you know on the teams? Got any ride-or-die peeps yet? “
"Ah... Clarice and Kyle on the X-Men, and Pyotr of course. Be pretty weird to be sharing space and not be friendly." April mentally ticked through the people she'd met as she watched the other woman run sideways on the wall. "And... Clint, Alani, and Molly on Excalibur? I've met Garrison a few times, and Sooraya and Betsy, and Kurt. Arthur. Everyone's decent enough and I could see working with them given time, though Garrison's a bit of an asshole when he's running DR sims for you." She let out a huff of laughter at the last. "Damn flash bangs."
“I kinda got an advantage there. My eyes have weird ass mutations to stop me from blinding myself.” Jubilee used her hands to climb a line up to the top of a pyramid obstacle before turning herself over and curling into a cross-legged position on top. “You should ask to shadow them, get a feel for the teams. Worst they could do would be saying no, ya know?”
"Yeah, now that I'm done with school that's the plan. I don't want to shove in and end up a liability because people aren't used to working with me at all." April got close enough to the pyramid to not be yelling as they talked, taking a seat of her own on a half-sphere jutting out from the wall. "Go along on some... not milk runs, necessarily, but smaller stuff. Do some training, sit in on meetings. Whatever I have the chance to do."
“There’s always something going on, although if you ask us old folks for stories you’ll get a lot about field trip curses and people getting chased by dinosaurs.”
Jubilee leaned her head back and squinted at the blue sky. It was definitely getting warmer, but she wasn’t particularly fussed. She’d always preferred a bit of heat to a lot of cold. She figured it probably had to do with the fact she didn’t have a lot of padding to keep herself warm.
"Being chased by dinosaurs sounds like a terrifying riot. I wonder if I could web up a saddle for a velociraptor or something," April mused from her perch. "But it also sounds like a lot of crazy shit happens here, even outside the damn portal thing."
“We were always on the edge of chaos in this place, even before the different realities decided to get all fucked up,” Jubilee admitted with a wry smile. “It does make it a lot more fun though, other than the occasional heartbreaking trauma. Try to avoid those if possible, they pretty much suck.”
April’s face twisted a bit, voice wry as she replied. “Yeah, I’d like to minimize any more of that,” she agreed, tilting her face into the sun to avoid the complicated emotions swimming through her mind. “I suppose it’s probably inevitable, though, this place being a little zany.”
“Oh?” Jubilee questioned, having noticed the change in mood of her young companion almost immediately. She really did need to watch her mouth sometimes, it tended toward writing checks she couldn’t cash. “Why zany?”
"We have a dimensional portal, for one." April paused. "That might be my main argument, honestly. Oh, and we run paramilitary ops, sometimes against our own government because they want to kill us for a genetic anomaly? That's pretty zany."
“Dude, clowns are zany and sometimes terrifying,” Jubilee noted with a wry grin. “The term you’re looking for is ‘worrying beyond all reason’”
April shuddered at the thought. "Ew clowns, absolutely no. But if I don't call it zany I might lose grip on my form and get stuck in the scary one again. So it's zany. Not terrifying or rage-inducing or extremely worrying."
“Zany it is,” Jubilee noted with a smile. “That happen a lot? Getting stuck, that is?”
"I didn't know I had the full form until the incident that ended up with me here, so.... I dunno? But now that I'm done with school I should probably actually test it. See if I can get consistent at switching, see if I can choose not to shift some areas, that sort of thing. Mouth full of razor-sharp teeth is terrifying but awful for communicating."
“I’m pretty sure you could convince your large Russian suite mate to help you with that,” Jubilee noted with a thoughtful look. “I mean, sentient metal, you can’t get much more tooth proof than that.”
April let out a loud snort of laughter at the mental image. "Oh yes, just... stay right there until I decide if I want to give gnawing on metal a try," she got out between giggles. "When I shifted fully I was like... really, really, really pissed off. Almost ill with rage, because someone kidnapped dad for revenge over something that happened decades ago. I can't imagine Petya actually being able to make me that enraged. Or being dumb enough to stick around after, he's more clever than that dumb Russian farmboy act he likes to pull."
“Anger’s a pretty standard trigger, most of us had like, some kind of seriously heinous emotional issue going on when we manifested,” Jubilee noted thoughtfully. “You worried about your Dad back in your home dimension? Can’t be easy being stuck here.”
She shook her head, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them tightly. "No, not really. He's got May, and his job doesn't usually have him front and center for active crime anymore. And Mom and Benji. He's in good hands. I was... always an extra. A weird complication. I'm sure they were sad for a while, but the memories... that history's just not there. After a while, it'll probably be like that childhood friend that moves away or something, except in my case they're probably certain I'm dead."
Jubilee’s smile was understanding if a little sad. She didn’t have any family ties these days, and the ties she did have were always with the understanding that any one of them could die at a moment's notice or simply bad luck.
It made for intense bonds but it certainly wasn’t normal.
“Just because you were a complication, doesn't mean you were an unwelcome one,” Jubilee finally replied after she’d let the silence stretch for as long as seemed appropriate for such weighty topics. “And love doesn’t really ever go away, it just changes, becomes different. It’s okay if you’re not okay but it’s okay if you are okay too.”
"I am mostly okay," April said after a few minutes of silence. "The hardest part was when I first got here. I'd never been alone like that. But now I've got a roommate and it helps a lot. There's something going on, I've got someone to talk to, and the dog is happy to jump on me and bark. It helps, not being so alone. And it could be worse. I didn't get to say goodbye, but I got to help my twin save our dad. I saw the woman who'd tried to kill him cuffed and surrounded by SWAT. There are worse ways for us to have lost one another."
"I get it," Jubilee noted, and she did honestly. There were much worse ways, and if April could see it that way then far be it for Jubilee to say anything else on it. "Still, you ever need a place for Thanksgiving or anything, there's a bunch of us that tend to do some kind of random Friendsgiving, or you know, like, turn up on people's doorsteps with shockingly waifish good looks and expect to be fed. I'll totally teach you how to do the look if you want. You have to get the 'I'm about to expire from lack of food and I know you love me too much to let me die' eyes just right."
"Usually I just volunteer to help with chopping before or dishes after," she remarked dryly. "But sure, we can see if I can get the waifish doe eyes just right." She looked down at herself. "I'm not very good at the waif part of the look, Spidering requires too much energy to skip meals or protein shakes. And gods, I don't even ask what Pyotr puts in my shakes anymore, as long as I don't have to see him crack raw egg into it. Or worse, drink it from the glass solo." She gave a delicate shudder. "They taste fine. It's better than the bars we had back home. Super protein and nutrient dense, had the consistency of tree bark. Emergency rations only."
“I’ll do the Twiggy styling, you do the doe eyes and together we’ll take them by storm!” Jubilee noted with a grin as she stood from her spot. “Come on, I’m pretty much done here for the day and I want to get my coffee on if you want to come along?”
April let out a loud laugh, pushing herself up from her spot. "Coffee sounds great. Lead the way."
Kyle and Jubilee had been working on the outdoor Parkour course for a while now, with the occasional help from the other 'flippy, climby' people of the mansion, as Jubilee liked to name them.
She figured they'd done a pretty good job, including the larger walls and obstacles that required a grappling hook, or other forms of propulsion to get around. That one had been a small sell on her part, she'd fed Kyle hamburgers and he'd done a lot of the grunt work of getting things into place.
"You ready for this?" Jubilee asked her younger companion. She didn't really do competition the way other people did, for Jubilee the thrill of simply getting to do a run with another person was way better than any 'win' you could achieve. But she figured it was a great way to get to know their newest resident wall-crawler. "Like, we can totally go for burgers or whatever after. Kyle and I kinda have a food economy thing going, since we're like way more calorie motivated than most people.
Jubilation Lee. Wow. From what Kyle had told her, this one sounded as awesome as the counterpart she had known, and she was uncharacteristically shy about spending one on one time with the older woman. April fiddled with the fit on her bracers a bit nervously as she nodded, biting her lip to avoid blurting out something stupid. "Yeah, burgers, I just, wow, Jubilation Lee, May's gonna be--" she cut off abruptly, face heating up at the slip and the reminder. "Sorry. Burgers after sound great. Apologies if I'm a little weird, just... your counterpart back home was so cool."
“Do tell,” Jubilee replied with a smile. She was always happy to talk about herself, especially other herselves that may or may not be real dependent on which universe you currently happened to be inhabiting. “What made her cool?”
April blushed at her extreme lack of chill before giving Jubilee a hesitant smile. "She's just--Okay, so we didn't interact much, because I left most of the teaming up to May, but when we did she was just.. coolly competent, able to cut through other people's bullshit to get things done. And you could tell she really cared about her team. She seemed to trust them to do their things, but wouldn't hesitate to speak up if they were being put into a situation that wasn't good for them. And she was generally just less uptight and rigid than others, didn't get mad about a little banter in the field as long as people did their jobs. And her powers were cool too, as long as I wasn't getting up close and personal with them."
"Okay, so like, I am in no way that cool or responsible," Jubilee noted with a grin, waving for April to start them off on the track. "Like, I'm totally an International woman of mystery and a super competent and flexible spy, but totally not cool. I like, completely had a hyperventilation excitement party at the thought of good wine glasses the other day even."
April cracked up as she took off, setting an easy pace as she bounced from step to step. "I'm not a big drinker and Pyotr mostly drinks vodka, so I'll take your word about good wine glasses," she commented, toes landing on just the edge of a landing before she sprang to the wall in front of her, pulling herself up so she could sit on top for a second and talk. "And obviously you're just a different kind of cool if you're an international woman of mystery."
“Not sure if people who have no chill can be considered cool,” Jubilee noted, flipping over onto her hands to move along the lower balance portion of the course. Normally people would do it on their feet but she enjoyed the challenge. Besides, she also enjoyed the side-eye everyone gave her while she did it as well. Never, ever let it be said that Jubilation Lee wasn’t extra in every possible way. “And I like, have never had any chill. So how else is your universe different? Tell me you got unicorns there. That would like, absolutely blow Wade’s mind.”
Sure, Wade had disappeared in a puff of logic somewhere but that didn’t mean the knowledge that unicorns existed somewhere wouldn’t somehow reach him.
"Not unless you count the really squishy collectibles people went nuts over, sadly. Not that I knew about, at least." April watched curiously for a moment as Jubilee moved along on her hands, then took a running jump to the next tall obstacle. "You're doing this course on your hands, that's pretty rad. I think it's great that you just do what you do. Deciding everything is too pedestrian or whatever to enjoy openly isn't cool to me."
“Everyone’s got their reasons, kid,” Jubilee noted, pushing down with her hands to do a flip-up onto a small wall before tumbling down the other side to come back up on her hands. “And I’m a spy, it’s like anyone's guess who I’ll be at any given moment. Sometimes the only way through is to be completely myself while I’m here so hard that I remember it out there.”
April nodded, somewhat able to relate. "I-well. It took a while to figure out my personality separate from May's memories," she offered up. "I took a few years after we graduated to just do other stuff, figure out some of the parts that were me. Didn't help that we shared a room and pieces of our wardrobe and everything else at first. With the memories on top... same reactions and sayings, all of that. Like sharing a brain between two bodies."
"That can't have been easy,"
Jubilee's words held not even a hint of uneasiness or judgment as she started hand walking out onto the next part of the course, this one was a rope drawn taut between two blocks, and it bowed slightly under her weight as she moved. Not as much as say, someone like Kyle, but it still took some concentration to make it over.
"Is it harder or easier being here?"
"Bit of both. My world was a little kinder to mutants, and I miss my family sometimes. It's weird not having May at my back if I need her." She looked over the next obstacle for a moment before she started to hop across, feet and hands sticking lightly to the wall before she pushed off to the next jump. "But I'm just April here, and I don't have to share a bedroom and I can't hear everything going on in the house all the time. And most of you have been at least polite or helpful and nobody's expecting me to be anything but myself, and that's... it's really different. Good and bad. I think working with a team is going to be a big adjustment."
Jubilee didn’t answer straight away, concentrating on getting over a series of stepping stones that were slightly further away than what was truly comfortable trying to jump with only her hands. She’d designed it that way, of course. Anyone with a longer wingspan than she had would have been fine.
“Teams are a big adjustment,” Jubilee noted, and given that she’d gone from the X-men to X-force, she had a world of experience in just how big an adjustment they could be. “People are going to like, have expectations and you’re gonna have expectations and sometimes they don’t always meet well, and sometimes they do. It’s probably gonna be stupidly chaotic at first.”
April let out a thoughtful hum as she jumped sideways from a wall to grab a bar. “Hopefully I can work with them a bit before making a decision. Well, the X-Men, at least. No offense, but I’d be a rubbish spy. And I’m not sure about being a PI either, although I guess I do have some insight into how a detective operates.
“What do you think you're best at?” Jubilee asked, having made it to the next park of the track, and paused while she decided whether it was worth the effort to continue the hands thing or if she should just flip back to feet now. “Don’t think choosing a team now means you can’t move later if it doesn’t fit. I started as an Xman, after all.”
"Dad's.. well. Between his time as Spider-Man and working for NYPD, he's really big on not using lethal force if you can avoid it. Since I mostly stayed in Queens doing your average person crime fighting, I spent a lot of time pulling my punches and webbing people up. Maybe breaking a few bones or dislocating a joint." April shrugged, and let a flicker of black go across her arms as she tackled the next part of the course. "I'm pretty good at stealth, and I can get up high with my webs, so if I could figure out shifting into the full body form I arrived in I'd probably be useful for recon and cutting off exits. My webbing's pretty strong and lasts a few hours, which is nice for impromptu tying someone up. And I've got that whole enhanced thing going on, so fighting things that baseline humans would struggle with... I'm happy to help out with that too." She gave Jubilee a shy smile. "Pretty sure using your abilities to help others is hard-coded into the Parker family DNA at this point."
“That stuff is definitely important,” Jubilee noted, flipping back onto her feet to run sideways along one of the walls before flipping backward onto her hands again on the other side. It was cheating, sure but whoever said she wasn’t a rule breaker at heart? “But who do you know on the teams? Got any ride-or-die peeps yet? “
"Ah... Clarice and Kyle on the X-Men, and Pyotr of course. Be pretty weird to be sharing space and not be friendly." April mentally ticked through the people she'd met as she watched the other woman run sideways on the wall. "And... Clint, Alani, and Molly on Excalibur? I've met Garrison a few times, and Sooraya and Betsy, and Kurt. Arthur. Everyone's decent enough and I could see working with them given time, though Garrison's a bit of an asshole when he's running DR sims for you." She let out a huff of laughter at the last. "Damn flash bangs."
“I kinda got an advantage there. My eyes have weird ass mutations to stop me from blinding myself.” Jubilee used her hands to climb a line up to the top of a pyramid obstacle before turning herself over and curling into a cross-legged position on top. “You should ask to shadow them, get a feel for the teams. Worst they could do would be saying no, ya know?”
"Yeah, now that I'm done with school that's the plan. I don't want to shove in and end up a liability because people aren't used to working with me at all." April got close enough to the pyramid to not be yelling as they talked, taking a seat of her own on a half-sphere jutting out from the wall. "Go along on some... not milk runs, necessarily, but smaller stuff. Do some training, sit in on meetings. Whatever I have the chance to do."
“There’s always something going on, although if you ask us old folks for stories you’ll get a lot about field trip curses and people getting chased by dinosaurs.”
Jubilee leaned her head back and squinted at the blue sky. It was definitely getting warmer, but she wasn’t particularly fussed. She’d always preferred a bit of heat to a lot of cold. She figured it probably had to do with the fact she didn’t have a lot of padding to keep herself warm.
"Being chased by dinosaurs sounds like a terrifying riot. I wonder if I could web up a saddle for a velociraptor or something," April mused from her perch. "But it also sounds like a lot of crazy shit happens here, even outside the damn portal thing."
“We were always on the edge of chaos in this place, even before the different realities decided to get all fucked up,” Jubilee admitted with a wry smile. “It does make it a lot more fun though, other than the occasional heartbreaking trauma. Try to avoid those if possible, they pretty much suck.”
April’s face twisted a bit, voice wry as she replied. “Yeah, I’d like to minimize any more of that,” she agreed, tilting her face into the sun to avoid the complicated emotions swimming through her mind. “I suppose it’s probably inevitable, though, this place being a little zany.”
“Oh?” Jubilee questioned, having noticed the change in mood of her young companion almost immediately. She really did need to watch her mouth sometimes, it tended toward writing checks she couldn’t cash. “Why zany?”
"We have a dimensional portal, for one." April paused. "That might be my main argument, honestly. Oh, and we run paramilitary ops, sometimes against our own government because they want to kill us for a genetic anomaly? That's pretty zany."
“Dude, clowns are zany and sometimes terrifying,” Jubilee noted with a wry grin. “The term you’re looking for is ‘worrying beyond all reason’”
April shuddered at the thought. "Ew clowns, absolutely no. But if I don't call it zany I might lose grip on my form and get stuck in the scary one again. So it's zany. Not terrifying or rage-inducing or extremely worrying."
“Zany it is,” Jubilee noted with a smile. “That happen a lot? Getting stuck, that is?”
"I didn't know I had the full form until the incident that ended up with me here, so.... I dunno? But now that I'm done with school I should probably actually test it. See if I can get consistent at switching, see if I can choose not to shift some areas, that sort of thing. Mouth full of razor-sharp teeth is terrifying but awful for communicating."
“I’m pretty sure you could convince your large Russian suite mate to help you with that,” Jubilee noted with a thoughtful look. “I mean, sentient metal, you can’t get much more tooth proof than that.”
April let out a loud snort of laughter at the mental image. "Oh yes, just... stay right there until I decide if I want to give gnawing on metal a try," she got out between giggles. "When I shifted fully I was like... really, really, really pissed off. Almost ill with rage, because someone kidnapped dad for revenge over something that happened decades ago. I can't imagine Petya actually being able to make me that enraged. Or being dumb enough to stick around after, he's more clever than that dumb Russian farmboy act he likes to pull."
“Anger’s a pretty standard trigger, most of us had like, some kind of seriously heinous emotional issue going on when we manifested,” Jubilee noted thoughtfully. “You worried about your Dad back in your home dimension? Can’t be easy being stuck here.”
She shook her head, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them tightly. "No, not really. He's got May, and his job doesn't usually have him front and center for active crime anymore. And Mom and Benji. He's in good hands. I was... always an extra. A weird complication. I'm sure they were sad for a while, but the memories... that history's just not there. After a while, it'll probably be like that childhood friend that moves away or something, except in my case they're probably certain I'm dead."
Jubilee’s smile was understanding if a little sad. She didn’t have any family ties these days, and the ties she did have were always with the understanding that any one of them could die at a moment's notice or simply bad luck.
It made for intense bonds but it certainly wasn’t normal.
“Just because you were a complication, doesn't mean you were an unwelcome one,” Jubilee finally replied after she’d let the silence stretch for as long as seemed appropriate for such weighty topics. “And love doesn’t really ever go away, it just changes, becomes different. It’s okay if you’re not okay but it’s okay if you are okay too.”
"I am mostly okay," April said after a few minutes of silence. "The hardest part was when I first got here. I'd never been alone like that. But now I've got a roommate and it helps a lot. There's something going on, I've got someone to talk to, and the dog is happy to jump on me and bark. It helps, not being so alone. And it could be worse. I didn't get to say goodbye, but I got to help my twin save our dad. I saw the woman who'd tried to kill him cuffed and surrounded by SWAT. There are worse ways for us to have lost one another."
"I get it," Jubilee noted, and she did honestly. There were much worse ways, and if April could see it that way then far be it for Jubilee to say anything else on it. "Still, you ever need a place for Thanksgiving or anything, there's a bunch of us that tend to do some kind of random Friendsgiving, or you know, like, turn up on people's doorsteps with shockingly waifish good looks and expect to be fed. I'll totally teach you how to do the look if you want. You have to get the 'I'm about to expire from lack of food and I know you love me too much to let me die' eyes just right."
"Usually I just volunteer to help with chopping before or dishes after," she remarked dryly. "But sure, we can see if I can get the waifish doe eyes just right." She looked down at herself. "I'm not very good at the waif part of the look, Spidering requires too much energy to skip meals or protein shakes. And gods, I don't even ask what Pyotr puts in my shakes anymore, as long as I don't have to see him crack raw egg into it. Or worse, drink it from the glass solo." She gave a delicate shudder. "They taste fine. It's better than the bars we had back home. Super protein and nutrient dense, had the consistency of tree bark. Emergency rations only."
“I’ll do the Twiggy styling, you do the doe eyes and together we’ll take them by storm!” Jubilee noted with a grin as she stood from her spot. “Come on, I’m pretty much done here for the day and I want to get my coffee on if you want to come along?”
April let out a loud laugh, pushing herself up from her spot. "Coffee sounds great. Lead the way."
