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AFTER THE FALL written by SelDear
Between GenX #31 and #32, there was a big gap which left fans of GenX with a whole lot of questions: How did Jono, Paige, Angelo, Everett, and the Monet-twins escape from the sentinels? What was the response to the Monet-twins back at the school? How did Emma get back to the school and did she and Sean ‘have words’ about her behaviour towards Penance?
This fanfic doesn’t answer those questions.
One day, I’ll write something that does.
Jubilation Lee was glad to be back in the ‘real world’.
Even though the rain was trickling into her clothes over the collar of her trenchcoat.
Man, she thought, What a life!
She stared out over the gardens of the school.
Man, she thought again, I get kidnapped by some freak mutant-hater and his team of operatives, and the whole school falls apart… Her hands were getting cold, so she tucked them in the pockets of her jeans. Well, what with Mondo and Black Tom, I guess that the school was mostly fallen apart before Bastion caught me…but you’d think that the others could at least keep themselves out of trouble!
The others. All seven of them…six, she hastily amended. Mondo was dead - very dead. She shuddered, remembering the thing that had risen out of the ground to catch her, and the relief she had felt upon running into Bastion. This huge man who seemed to know what he was doing, and who had saved her from Mondo - or the thing that had been Mondo.
Well, of the other six, Penance was in the danger grotto. Recovering, said Cassidy firmly and fiercely in his inimitable Irish way, from an ordeal almost as bad as Jubilee’s own - although in an entirely different sense. Jubes still hadn’t been able to work out exactly what it was - certainly it was something to do with the fact that Cassidy and Frosty hadn’t had two civil words to say to each other since Frosty turned up at the school some two days after Jubilee had been brought back by the X-men.
She had inquired where Frosty and the others were once she realised that it was only herself, Banshee, and Penny in the mansion - oh, and that guy who seemed to drift around the school, never doing anything, never saying anything above a mumble or two…but he hardly counted in the scheme of things. Even Artie, Leech and Franklin were gone, although for some reason that didn’t seem to bother either Frost or Cassidy.
Once Sean had explained what had happened to the others after Jubilee had been captured by Bastion, Jubes had gone back up to the too-quiet girls’ dorms and peered cautiously into the rooms left empty by her vanished team-mates. She hadn’t cried at all. She was very proud of that. But she had bit her lip really hard a couple of times when it got lonely.
Lonely was bad after where she had been. Locked up without company for days on end, the only persons she saw the big man who had turned from saviour into captor and tormentor, and the girl who had turned from jailer into friend.
Daria had explained that the ‘room’ that Jubilee had been in had only been an illusion, but the illusion had seemed real enough, and Jubes now slept with the door open. She’d woken up the first night back in a sweat of fear, and had run to the door to yank it open and breathe a sigh of relief that she was at the school and nobody was keeping her locked up.
Penance had been edgy when Jubilee had first come back into the biosphere for company - although she had calmed down with a bit of time. But Penny wasn’t exactly what you’d call good company. It was cool to have someone to talk to who just listened, but if Jubilee was honest with herself, she missed Ev’s common sense, and Angelo’s pithy remarks. She missed Paige’s conscientiousness, and Jono’s moodiness. She even missed M’s snide remarks, although those had been getting less and less of late.
So this morning she’d been drifting around, bored of TV and videogames and never one for reading (that was Paige’s area), when the phone shrilled loudly in the lounge, and she’d picked it up, since she knew that Sean was reading to Penny in the danger grotto, and Frosty was in her office doing who only knew what.
"School for Gifted Youngsters, Massachussetts," Jubes had managed to get out inbetween gum chews.
"Chica," drawled a lazily accented voice, "How’s the weather over in Massachussetts?"
"Angelo?" she gasped, practically swallowing her gum in excitement, "Hey, man! Where are ya? The place has been like a morgue around here! What’s happened to yous all?"
"We’re in LA," Skin had told her, "Where’s Sean and Emma?"
Jubes was already running towards the danger grotto with the portable phone, her trenchcoat trailing behind her like a pennant. "They’re around about - something happened after you guys vanished and I got imprisoned - Frosty and Cassidy aren’t talking to each other…" She skidded on the floor by the entrance to the biosphere and ducked in, yelling for Sean.
"You got imprisoned?" yelped Angelo, "What? When? Was it the guy who caught all of us?"
Out of the bushes, Sean appeared at that moment, "Jubilee?"
"It’s Angelo on the phone with the others…"
He reached for the phone before Jubilee even had time to give it to him. "Angelo, lad, where are ye? Have ye got the others with ye?" A pause while Angelo replied, and Sean’s face became mystified, "Can ye get back here?" Another pause, "What d’ye mean? ‘a bit of a problem’?" The high brow wrinkled as Sean carefully listened to Angelo’s explanation, "Sentinels? Are ye all right, lad?" Sean’s eyebrows suddenly lowered and he leaned against a tree, "Ye did what?"
There was the sound of someone walking purposefully towards them, and Jubilee turned to see Emma making her white-clad way through the biosphere. "What’s upsetting Sean?" she inquired of her pupil.
"Angelo just called in from LA," Jubes replied, watching Sean’s expressions - his expressions would tell her a lot about what was going on over the phone. Irish wasn’t one to hide his expression - not like Frosty.
"What are they doing there?" Emma mused, her brow wrinkling gently over. "Black Tom was sending them to Krakoa - L.A. is miles off course from there…"
Jubilee shrugged, not looking at the White Queen, her eyes were too busy trying to read Sean’s face, "Guess Cassidy is finding that out."
On the phone, Angelo was doing a fair amount of very fast talking, and Sean was grunting along in response, although his eyes were troubled. "So what problem is it that ye cannae get back to the school?" he demanded at last. Jubilee could hear the tone of Angelo’s explanation even if she couldn’t make out the words, and her hair prickled on her neck as Sean sucked his breath in very fast. "D’ye mean to tell me that M…?" Angelo repeated whatever it was about M that he has said, and Sean swore. "But what…? How…?" Once again, Angelo had his reply, and Sean sighed, "Alright. Dinna worry, lad, we’ll send the jet in for you."
Emma hovered less than a metre away, tapping one white-shod foot impatiently. Her whole attitude screamed, Hurry up! Where are they? Are they okay? What are they doing? For a woman who’d spent most of her life stepping on all kinds of people to get her to the top, Frosty could be almost surprisingly maternal - in a Frosty kind of way, of course - when it came to the kids of GenX. Not clucky - definitely not clucky, just…protective. Jubes thought about that statement in terms of being taken off to Canada during the Onslaught saga in the US, then clarified it, over-protective.
Admittedly, Frosty’s first set of pupils, the Hellions, had been slaughtered by a madman who interrupted a showdown between the infamous Hellfire Club, and the X-men several years ago, so she had reason to worry.
Of course, that didn’t make it any less annoying when Frosty took it into her head to protect them from the wonderful world of flatscans.
On the phone, Sean and Angelo exchanged a few more small details, before Sean hung up, and stared out across the biosphere in thought.
"Well," Frosty said in tones that could have sheared through diamond, "Where are they and how are they getting back here?"
Irish looked over at her for a long moment, the stubborn jaw set even more pugnaciously than usual, before he came to some internal decision and said: "They’re in LA. I told them to go to LA airport, and you’ll send the Learjet for them."
"There’s more you’re not telling me," Frosty stated, blue eyes snapping.
Irish set his jaw again, "Send the Learjet first, and then I’ll tell ye."
"Might I remind you that I am in charge of this school and the safety of these students as much as..."
Sean had turned his back on Emma and begun to walk away, but he threw his words over his shoulder as he went: "...I didn’t see you worrying so much about their safety back in Miami when ye offered..."
Emma paced after him, her lips set thinly together, "We needed to know where the children were..."
"Are ye gonna send the Learjet, or are ye gonna let the children wait forever?" snapped Irish, coolly turning and interrupting her with one arched eyebrow.
The blonde’s expression tightened, and she stormed off to her office to order the Learjet to L.A.’s major airport to pick up the rest of the team. Doubtless she would beard Irish in his office later and demand the whole story from him.
Right now, Jubilee didn’t really want to know what had happened to the others. From the sound of it - sentinels in LA, and Sean’s exclamation about Monet, it wasn’t good. Yes, she was curious - ordinarily, she’d have bearded Sean for an answer as well, but right now, in some ways, she didn’t care. She didn’t have the emotional or physical energy to care.
Perhaps it was selfish of her to think that way, but too much had happened to her lately for her to immediately want to fill in the blanks.
She just wanted her friends back.
***
So Jubilee shivered in the wet cold. She couldn’t be bothered going in - and she wanted to wait for her friends.
The others were supposed to be getting back sometime soon. Emma had headed out to the airport to meet her jet plane which carried the rest of Generation X.
Well, not precisely the rest. One small difference. Two, actually. Sean had sought her out, and explained the situation to Jubilee after the limo had vanished from the sight of the school.
While she had been running from Mondo, the others had been taken by Black Tom Cassidy and sent to Krakoa. Somehow - in a manner that Skin had not detailed to Sean, they had managed to find themselves in L.A., met up with a few of Skin’s old friends there, and then actually fought a bunch of Sentinels and survived! Well...kind of, according to what Angelo had told Sean.
Sheesh, Jubilee thought as the rain dripped inside her collar. Perfect Miss M was twins!
Monet had probably had been the most secretive of the eight of them if it came down to it. Sure, Jono was reserved, and Angelo had his past, and they knew practically nothing about Penance except that she had been Emplate’s victim for God only knew how long, but Monet kept secrets. Like Emplate being her brother. And that diary of hers. And the way she just ‘tuned out’ of things every now and then. And her autism…
They might not know anything about Penance, but that was because Penance couldn’t communicate in such a way as to tell them about her past. Angelo’s childhood in El Barrio might not be public knowledge, but who would want their friends to know that they grew up toting guns and fighting gang wars? Jono might be reserved about his background, but he was scarred from when his mutant power exploded out of his body. Probably never really excruciatingly expressive to begin with, his accident had just caused him to withdraw further into himself.
But getting details about Perfect Miss M had been slow and painstaking over the time since the Generation X Team had come together.
Jubilee looked out towards the town, and through the murky grey haze of rain and mist could see oddly bright colours among the rooftops of the town. She studied it for a moment, trying to make out images, then gave it up as an exercise in futility. It was just raining too hard.
She sighed again, and buried her head in her arms. The rain was not helping her spirits, either.
There was a big ball of shame and regret in her chest that was making it kinda hard to breathe. All those ‘sessions’ with Bastion. All the information that Daria said had been gained from the simple association of thoughts and topics. Faces, images, associations, weaknesses. And that one odd image that Daria had told her breathlessly of during the flight across the desert. A skeleton of a man made of a strange dull metal standing while flesh crawled up over his ‘skeleton’, and the voice, rusty and deep, "At last…" Daria had even mimicked the voice to a certain extent, then added, "It sounded like Bastion - only really rough."
Daria. Just one more thing that Jubilee regretted. She shouldn’t have let Daria go off without her. Admittedly they probably would have been both caught, instead of just Daria, but it was unacceptable to Jubilee’s internal code to have left Daria to deal with the other sentinels. A one-time member of the X-men, no matter how young she’d been at the time, should never have left a friend behind.
I hope she managed to escape from the Sentinels, she thought, wistfully. Daria had been a friend when Jubilee needed one - even if she had been a sentinel herself.
She checked that thought, looking it over, That’s silly. What we are we have little choice over - I didn’t ask to be a mutant, and I’ll bet Daria didn’t ask to be a sentinel. Even a sentinel who attacks by disintegrating. Who we choose to be - now that we have a choice over. Daria chose to be my friend, and I’ll never forget her.
Her thoughts of friends were abruptly solidified as she caught site of Frosty’s limo down at the gates. She stood, anxiously, body unconsciously poised to fly down and hug every one of them - even Monet…uh…the twins…
This Monet-twins thing is going to cause no end of trouble, Jubilee thought, inconsequentially.
The white limo (why did everything of Frosty’s have to be white?) stopped at the bottom of the steps, and from the driver’s seat, the green guy flicked his hand in respectful and cheerful salute to the slim Asian girl on the steps. Jubes shot him a brief smile, then waited eagerly for her friends to emerge.
At last the door opened, and Frosty came out, holding the door open for the four-and-two-halves people that were the remainder of Xavier’s Generation X.
They stumbled out, dark shadows under the eyes of her team-mates - especially Ev, Jubilee noted as she flew into his arms and got a big hug for her pains. And stepping back and looking into his eyes, she realised that a lot of things had changed.
Not least of which was the way Jono helped Paige up the stairs when she stumbled from weariness, and how Paige didn’t shrug him off as she had been doing just after Jono came back from Paige’s home at Thanksgiving.
Even Angelo had changed - there were shadows in his eyes, the hard gleam of new and painful knowledge. In some ways, Jubilee supposed, Angelo was the oldest of them all. He’d seen the most of the world, and understood most of what the world could be like. Oh, at times he played the joker and the comic, but as one of the older team members and probably the one who had the most experience in the harshness of the ‘real world’, Angelo was certainly older than M, or even Jono who was chronologically the oldest of them all.
Angelo ruffled Jubes’ hair affectionately as he got out of the limo, "We missed you in L.A., chica," he told her, quietly, and then turned back down the stairs to help take up one of the two small girls who had been the person that, until a few days ago, Generation X knew as Monet.
Jubes peered anxiously at the girl Angelo carried as Ev turned back to take the other twin from Emma. The girls were identical - same black hair, same dusky skin, same features, same clothing - everything. They could have been young versions of the older Monet St Croix that Generation X had known.
The only difference between the two girls was the gold chains they wore around their necks - on one twin the pendant that swung from the chain was a blank gold disc, while on the other it was a crescent moon.
***
"So, chica," Angelo addressed her when he, Paige, and occassionally Jono had finished telling them everything that had transpired since Black Tom invaded the school. Ev had been suspiciously silent, although he had shot Jubilee one brief, almost embarrassed glance when Paige explained about the rusting old battleship they found their dreams coming true on. "What happened with you? What was this about being imprisoned?"
She hesitated a moment too long before opening her mouth, and Frosty beat her to it. "Jubilee was captured by..."
"Hey, I can tell my own story, Emma!" she interrupted, annoyed. "You know how Mondo went after me when we split? He caught up with me on the edge of the school grounds and...and he was going to kill me," she tried to say it calmly, but could feel her voice beginning to tremble. Sternly, she steadied her voice and continued through her story: rescue and capture by Bastion, imprisonment by Bastion and Daria, and befriending the girl who was a Sentinel. "Daria helped me escape out to the desert, and I got picked up by Wolvy and the X-men in their fight against Zero Tolerance, before S.H.I.E.L.D turned up and intervened with Zero Tolerance." She managed to get through the story without crying or anything, which was a major achievement for her. She didn’t tell them about the secrets Bastion had used her to get, or the illusion of the prison she was kept in. She hadn’t told anyone yet. She wasn’t ready to. Not yet.
Then the topic of the ‘Monet’-twins came up. What should be done with them? Who could be informed of this since "Monet"’s brother was a monster, her mother was dead, and her father had barely given two hoots about her since he sent her to the Massachussetts Academy.
In the end, it was decided that Sean would set off for Muir Island and Dr MacTaggert in the morning with all the collectible data about the twins in his possession. Given that Dr MacTaggert had the legacy virus, Frosty didn’t think it would be a good idea to expose the twins to the good Doctor - no matter how expert her opinions were.
Sean agreed. Jubilee privately supposed that he was relieved to be out of the house - the temperature between him and Frosty had gone beyond zero - it was currently somewhere in the vicinity of absolute zero. Probably a few degrees below that. And she still hadn’t worked out why.
Still, Irish would be wanting to see Moira MacTaggert again. He and the doctor had a romantic history - although it had been pretty quiet for the last couple of years.
"...and so Monet became these?" Jubilee asked softly of Everett some hours later as they peered at the two girls lying asleep together in the infirmary bed.
"Yes." Everett’s voice was troubled - he hadn’t spoken much while they were giving their account of what had happened in L.A. Angelo had been the one to relate most of it to Frosty, Irish, and Jubilee herself earlier that evening. Paige had filled in the sections that Angelo missed out, and Jono spoke up where he felt it necessary. "When she told me to synch my powers to her - on a base level - I understood what she was. It was...really strange...like suddenly seeing double... Not like...like the time Emplate co-opted me and I had to synch with her to get rid of his influence..." He suddenly hugged Jubilee again. "God, Jubes, it’s good to be home!"
"It’s good to have you guys home again," Jubilee told his shoulder, and meant every word of it.
*
It was good to have the others home again, she thought the next afternoon.
It wasn’t good to have everyone walking on tenterhooks.
Sean had been gone when Jubilee finally arose. Frosty was wandering around, not really talking to anyone. The others were all over the place - the stresses of being together every waking moment, and constantly being on the run for their lives had evidently been a bit much for them.
Ev was in his room, and asked her to go away when she came up to see how he was. She went away, hurt by his rejection. Sometime later, she’d talk to him - get him to tell her about what was sitting on his mind - and she’d tell him about the ‘sessions’ with Bastion, where the ruthless leader of the anti-mutant task force picked her brain clean of information about the X-men.
Sometime later.
Sometime soon.
Since Ev wasn’t talking to her awfully much, and there was no sign of either Jono, Angelo, or Paige anywhere around the school - probably they were being reclusive in their respective rooms - Jubes sat down in front of the computer in the den, switched it on, and waited for Quake to boot up. If anyone wanted some company, she’d be right here, melting her brains out through the video-game controller.
After a while, Jono walked in, plumped himself down on the sofa, and began softly strumming his electric guitar. It was kinda soothing in the background of the grunts and chuda-chuda of gun blasts from the game.
Sometime afterwards Angelo sat down on the floor behind Jubilee, and was giving advice until she passed the point that he’d gotten in the game. Then he watched for a few minutes, before he began distending his skin in huge sheets of grey.
Nothing was said. They were comfortable enough with silence right now - after what had happened before, just the company of their friends was enough. When Jubes did some exercises to rid her neck of a crick, she spotted Ev sitting by the window staring out.
"How long have you been there?" she asked, surprised and a little hurt that he hadn’t said anything as he came in.
Everett didn’t turn from the window, but he answered, "Ten minutes."
"Quake just makes the time fly by, don’t it?" Angelo said, hauling at his forearm with the other hand and yanking a great sheet of flappy grey skin off his bones. He waved the sheet at a revolted Jubilee, who turned back to the game. Blowing up monsters was a more palatable practice than watching Skin get down to basics with his mutation. And better than being ignored by Ev.
"Hey, y’all," Paige’s voice cut through the sounds of Jono’s strumming and the computer game. Her voice had dropped back into what Jubilee privately termed her ‘hick-town’ accent. She’d noticed that Paige tended to do that in stressful situations, and certainly the current atmosphere in the school was so tense you’d need a chainsaw to get through it. "Let’s go the the county fair down in the town!"
The soft thrum of Jono’s guitar continued, unabated. Jubilee kept playing. The flapping sound of Angelo’s skin sailed beneath the sounds of the computer game, but was still quite audible, and Paige sighed, annoyed with their lethargy.
"Come onnnn, everybody! It’s be fun! Ms Frost already said we can go."
Which meant that Paige had made up her mind that they were going, and would chivvy them until they acceeded to her wishes. Little Miss Southern Belle could get awfully bossy when she had her mind made up.
<Not interested, luv,> Jono declared, not looking up. <When you’ve a mug like mine, you tend to avoid freak shows.>
"It’s a circus, Jono - don’tcha know, with cotton candy, acrobats, and clowns!"
Jono grunted and kept going at the guitar.
Jubes sighed as Paige turned to her and began trying to convince her. There was evidently to be no peace until they did as Paige wanted them to.
It was going to be one of those days.
The End.
