Jubilee and Gemile: Da robur, fer auxilium

[x-jubilee.livejournal.com]

Date: Backdated to the Wednesday 19th January 2005
Time: 8:30pm
Characters: Jubilation Lee, Gemile.
Song lyrics: 'Angel' by Jewel
What Happens?: Gemile pays a visit to Jubilee's sleeping mind in order to show her a few things she's forgotten. Jubilee discovers a few things about herself and about Amanda.




Jubilee shifted on the Medlab bed, sighing softly in relief as she noted the lack of pain. The pain killers Madelyn had given her seemed to be working. Maybe she could get some sleep now, it had been a rather eventful day and she was dead tired now the pain wasn't riding her. She closed her eyes, willing herself into a short meditation that would hopefully lead to sleep.

There was a flicker on the edge of her mental vision, a glimpse of white and honey-blonde that disappeared as soon as she focussed on it. Not important. Jubilee's breathing slowed, deepened, the switch from meditative calm to actual sleep imperceptible. There was the flicker again, ahead of her... Jubilee grasped at it, but it eluded her, and she found herself in one of those endless hallways so common in dreams, doors set at regular intervals on both sides. The ones she tried were locked, however - she turned from making the attempt to see that flicker of white disappearing into one that was open, and she moved to catch the door before it closed. She made it, barely, but all there was on the other side of the door was darkness, no walls, no floor, nothing but an abyss. And then ahead of her, in the darkness was laughter, a child's laughter.

'Great, welcome to 'Alice in Wonderland: the home game'.' Jubilee thought.

Still, since there was only blackness all around her, it wasn't like she had anything better to do. She had a brief moment of curiosity as to why she could still see herself, considering the nothingness all around but shrugged it off. She headed off in the direction of the laughter, muttering to herself about weird dreams. If it kept going, she would definitely win the mansion award for 'Person most likely to need sleep therapy'.

'I'd like to thank God, because no award speech would be complete without someone thanking him.' Jubilee thought wryly.

Although it had always bemused the hell out of her that anyone would think a deity had so little to do as to be deciding the outcome of an award.

Ahead of her was a growing bright spot, at first nothing more than a less-dark sensation, then growing stronger until Jubilee could see it was a segment of a room - a corner, to be exact. The floor was bare, as were the walls - dusty floorboards and dingy plaster - and sitting on the floor, her legs crossed under her Indian-style, was a young blonde girl of no more than eight, dressed in a grubby dress a size too big and covered with an ugly brown pattern that looked like spiders. Her head was bowed, her gaze fixed on her hands lying folded in her lap... no, not on her hands, on her forearm, which was bent at an unnatural angle and marked with lived bruises that looked like fingermarks. Even as Jubilee drew close enough to see all this, a golden light enveloped the injury, and slowly the swelling and the bruising began to fade, the obvious break to straighten.

Jubilee wrinkled her nose at the sight, a bright flare of sympathy unfurling in her gut. She knew the pain of broken bones, but she guessed this hurt was made worse by the hands that had inflicted it. If she wasn't wrong, this young girl was Amanda. Damn Dr Strange and his damn magic, she didn't want to see these things. She'd made a determined effort to push Amanda's memories to a small dark corner of her brain.

Especially since the other girl wouldn't accept her sympathy, even if Jubilee had chosen to show it. Rejection wasn't something she willingly courted on any day.

The girl looked up suddenly, eyes widening as she looked at Jubilee, and she flinched away, trying to burrow into the corner, make herself as small as possible. "I'm sorry, please don't hurt me again Daddy, please don't..." she whimpered.

"Dude, I'm not..." Jubilee began, but was interrupted by the voice behind her.

"Healing, blossom? Well, well, well, aren't you the clever little minx..." Jubilee whirled to see the man she recognised from Amanda's memories as Rack, arms crossed over his chest, an almost benign smile on his face, but his pale blue eyes hard and icy. "But I can't be having with that now, can I? Do you have any idea how much power something like that takes? You're going to be useless to me for a good couple of days now, and you know what that means, don't you? You don't earn your keep. I paid good money for you, blossom, and I intend to get every penny's worth out of you." He advanced on the girl, stepping through Jubilee like she was smoke. "I'll give you something worth Healing, you ungrateful little brat..."

Jubilee stepped forward, aiming a blow at Rack's unprotected neck that might have killed him if her hand hadn't gone straight through. Instead, she simply stumbled slightly as her hand continued through his chest before she could straighten again. She gritted her teeth as she made a grab for his arm.

There had to be a way to stop this, didn't there? If this was a dream, there had to be a way to change things if she could only think of it. She wouldn't just let this happen, she wouldn't just stand back and watch a child be beaten.

"It's not a dream." The scene froze abruptly, Rack with his hand raised over the cowering girl, and Jubilee turned to look at an another version of Amanda, still a child, but older, perhaps eleven. She was dressed in a plain white shift, covered with bright red bloodstains, and Jubilee realised this was the flicker she had followed. "It's not a dream, at least, not a proper one. You can't just shove things aside and expect them to disappear. Those memories you were given? They're still there." The girl's expression was far too old for her face, with a tinge of hardness to it. "That was after the first Healing," she went on, nodding at the frozen scene. "After, we couldn't move for a week, couldn't go outside until the bruises went away. Deep down, where she doesn't really notice it, we remember this every time she does that spell."

"He made you think it was your fault, didn't he? That he only beat you because he had to." Jubilee replied, knowing intimately how that worked, even without Amanda's memories to add it it. "I'm sorry."

Jubilee looked down and started when she realised she'd raised her hand to the girl. An open gesture, an offer of comfort? She hadn't even realised she was doing it. It was just, there were so many times she'd wished someone would be there for her.

"We weren't good enough," the child said sadly. "Not for our family, not for him... not for where we are now. We try and try, but we always make a mess of things, get into trouble. And we can't Heal everything - it hurts too much. She has headaches almost every day now."

"Don't." Jubilee said, starting a bit at the vehemence behind the tone. "Rack was an unparalleled bastard that used you for power. Don't you dare measure your value on anythin' he said. As to where you are now...Dude, don't you know how much good you do?"

She couldn't believe she was giving Amanda, even a smaller version of Amanda this kind of talk. She wasn't fucking qualified for this, who the hell was she to talk to people about feeling worthless. Didn't she feel almost exactly the same, every damn day? But it hurt, to see Amanda feeling that way. She couldn't just say nothing.

Making a decision, she knelt down in front of Amanda, her hands reaching out palm upward but leaving the choice of grasping them up to Amanda. "She shouldn't be pushing herself that hard. She does enough, already. More then she should, if it's hurting her. They wouldn't want her to hurt herself for them...I wouldn't want her to hurt herself."

Where had that come from? She hadn't told anyone yet
that she wasn't going to accept Amanda's healing if she offered it. Hadn't even consciously made the decision till now. It was a surprise, to say the least.

"But you hurt her," the girl pointed out, not taking the offered hands. "You tried to take away what she cares about. Why should you care what we think?"

Jubilee dropped her open hands into her lap, examining the whorls of her fingerprints, stalling on an answer. Why did she care? She'd never liked Amanda, from the moment the girl had said what she had in the TV room. She'd gone out of her way to punish the girl, to cut her at every turn.

Truth though was needed here. Truth to herself, and truth to Amanda even if the other girl might never hear it from Jubilee in the waking world, or know of this memory dream.

"I hated her, because I hated myself. Every little thing in her that reminds me of me, and I couldn't see what I was doing for what it was. I look at her, and I see me. I care because I was wrong to do it. I was wrong to say the things to her that I wanted to say to myself but never did. I care because I can know you now, and I don't want to hurt you anymore. Because I don't want to hurt myself anymore. Because what happened to us, wasn't right. What we were told, wasn't the truth."

The girl who was Amanda and yet not gave her a penetrating look. "She doesn't hate you," she said. "She should, but she can't. For the same reasons. You'll need to remember that." Then a brief smile broke through.
"Do you want to know what I think?"

Jubilee looked up, somewhat startled by the change in tone. "Yes." she finally said, smiling herself in her surprise.

"I think you're both silly. You waste all this time trying to hurt each other, when out of everyone, you should understand each other best." Another impish smile. "But then again, I'm just a figment of your imagination. What would I know?"

Jubilee grinned wryly, seeing the sense in the statement and the amusement that she was being told simple truths by what was in essence a figment.

"We can't let go of survival. The things that always kept us safe don't work anymore. They hinder instead, and God why'd I never see that before now?"

"Because," the child replied with what was obviously great patience. "You're silly."

"Very." Jubilee agreed, suddenly wondering why the child was here. "You can't be here just to make me realise that. What was it you wanted?"

"I'm here because the memories are. When the teacher-man put them in your head, he put me in too. And when you locked them up, you locked me up. I'm here to make sure you see, and remember." The child gave Jubilee's shoulder a light poke. "You aren't very good at remembering lessons." Another image flickered into life behind her as she spoke, a much younger Amanda, barely more than five, struggling to read from an enormous book. Whenever she stumbled over a word or made a mistake, Rack gave her a cuff over the head. The image faded as the guardian-version spoke again. "We like the way they teach here much better, even if there are numbers."

"S'another of those survival things, I guess. Anger keeps you alive. Not good at having lessons stick when I'm angry. Course, I've also got a tendency of tryin' to break people who want to help me too. Tried and true method of makin' sure no one gets close." Jubilee murmured, looking down at the guardian-version.

A sound of pain whipped her head back up, and there something murderous in her eyes when she looked back at Rack. "Men like that need to be stopped." she said, remembering the moment before her parent's grave.

"They do," agreed the child, glaring at Rack. He burst into flames, crumbling into a smear of ash. "He was. But there are always more of him out there. There's always people who want power, and that's what we are - a power source. Someone will always be after us."

"You're not alone anymore." Jubilee replied. "You've got people who'll stand for you now."

Jubilee turned to the blackness all around, not looking at the child as she struggled with something inside. "Even...I would."

There, a vunerability exposed. The desire to care for the people around her, to be someone who could help. She was afraid of it, more then anything she was afraid they wouldn't let her help.

The girl smiled, and reached out, sliding one small hand into Jubilee's. "It's all about healing," she said seriously. "That's what saved us, from becoming like him, when he tried to teach us to. Healing makes you think about others. You can do it too."

Jubilee squeezed the hand, smiling suddenly. "Ya know, I think you're right. Maybe it's time I stopped fighting people so much, hey? Let 'em see a little of who I really am."

"Of course I'm right," the child said perhaps a little smugly. "I've only been stuck in your head watching things since the teacher-man put me here." Pulling her hand from Jubilee's she straightened, the white shift melding into into a simple t-shirt and jeans. "If we can do it, then you can."

Jubilee looked at the child thoughtfully. "Did you want me to free you? I'm, well, honestly I've got no damn idea how to but I could probably e-mail Strange or something. Although, considerin' the fact he told me never ta get messed up in magic again, he might not take to me e-mailin' him. Still, I'd do it, if you wanted out."

"I'm not really real, you know," the child confided. "A memory given an extra bit of oomph." She patted Jubilee's hand almost comfortingly. "Don't worry, it doesn't hurt."

"You know, once upon a time I had normal dreams, just like all the other girls and boys. Now if I'm not havin' people visit me, I'm gettin' sucked into their dreams." Jubilee replied wryly.

She sat down cross legged, having grown somewhat accustomed to the blankness of the place. Which she supposed might say something about her ability to adapt, or just that she'd seen so much that nothing much could phase her anymore.

"Now you know why you were told not to mess with magic," the girl told her cheerfully. "This sort of thing happens all the time."

All through the night I'll be standing over you
All through the night I'll be watching over you
And through the bad dreams I'll be right there, baby
Holding your hand, telling you everything's gonna be all right
And when you cry I'll be right there
Telling you you were never anything less than beautiful
So don't you worry, I'm your Angel standing by