Author's Note: There are two versions of this story, one titled 'Project Nightshade' written by Scurifer, and this version, titled 'Eternity In An Hour', written by me. How that came about is a long story; suffice it to say that my story inspired him to write his version. It should be coming soon; check for it! And please, let us know what you think of our respective versions via the review system or email, whichever is more convenient. Your comments help keep us writing more good stories for you all!Jaenelle
Chapter 1: Jubilee 2104
The cell was dark, and perpetually cold; a torture in and of itself. The little Chinese girl chained to the far wall arched her back away from the cold—concrete? stone? She didn't know—and tried to control her shivering. She would have wrapped her arms around her body, trying to conserve heat…but her hands were pulled over her head to the wall and shackled. The metal cuffs were pulled too tight, and inside the steel ball-like mitts on her hands, her fingers had curled into numb, useless claws that throbbed constantly, painfully, from their lack of circulation.
She was sure they were permanently damaged by now. After the days—how many?—of imprisonment, she could no longer feel the tips of her fingers pressed against the cold steel. Her face itched under the heavy black hood wrapped around her head; air came from a tube under her nose. Several times her captors had cut off air to the tube until she blacked out; they seemed to take special delight in tormenting her like that. And her feet hurt from standing all this time; she had been chained standing, and they hadn't let her down. Her legs wobbled under her, threatening to collapse.
The cold was also made worse by the fact that she was almost nude. She wore nothing except her bra and shorts. They hadn't—thank God—raped her, but with her arms shackled over her head she wouldn't have been able to prevent them if they had. Instead, they had taped electrodes to her skin, using electricity to shock her awake and keep her from sleeping. She hadn't slept since she'd come, nor had she eaten or drank. Thirst tormented her, so much so that she tried to lick her own tears off her face for something, anything, to ease the parched throat. Hunger was an ever-present, sharp pain in her belly.
She stared ahead of her into darkness. The hood had glassy, transparent lenses over her eyes, enabling her to see, but there wasn't much to see. Just unending, unrelieved blackness, broken only occasionally by one of her captors entering to give her the intense, agonizing shocks that kept her awake, or to change the tape in the machine whose headphones ran up to her ears. It said awful things to her; that she was filthy, dirty, that mutants like her were horrible abominations not fit to walk the earth with regular humans, and other such anti-mutant propaganda. She tried to block it out, but it was hard.
She was getting too weak and disoriented from the sleep deprivation; it was only a matter of time before she died from this abuse and from dehydration. She could only hope that, somewhere out there, the X-Men, particularly Logan, would find her. Not that she had much hope; she knew this place, this cell, well. She was back in the Hulkbuster base, and the man holding her was one who had participated in her capture and torture by Bastion before.
"I'm not going to touch your filthy mutie carcass," he'd sneered elegantly at her when he had come to see her. "Two of my brothers were among the people your friends killed when they broke out. I want payback. You're going to be the bait that brings them back here and I'm going to kill them. Then I'll kill you. You're not leaving here until you're dead, girlie." And now death was a real possibility. The X-Men hadn't found her here before; would they even think to look here for her again?
She started to slip into sleep again. It had gotten to the point where she tried to keep herself awake, desperately wanting to avoid the agonizing shocks they tortured her with, but her body needed sleep, demanded sleep, and she was helpless to stop her brain from shutting down. And the electrodes attached to her temples under the hood would tell them she was slipping into sleep.
Sure enough, the door opened. Jubilee didn't even have the strength to lift her head to look at the man entering, finding his way into the pitch-black cell by a flashlight. Her brain was desperately trying to shut down before the shocks came.
She jerked rigid, screaming in the hood, as the electric current arced into her body via the electrodes; one was on each kidney, one on her lower belly, two on her chest, one at the nape of her neck, at the top of her spine, and the two electrodes on her temples. Her aching legs and sore feet left the floor as she thrashed, trying to obtain release from the pain…but there was no escape until they turned off the electricity. Tears streamed from her eyes as she slumped, sobs shaking her body.
But he didn't leave immediately. Not this time. Instead, her door opened, and three more men came in. Then they shut the door. They were talking to each other, but because of the headphones and the heavy hood, she couldn't hear what they were saying. Then the first man, the ringleader, reached over and turned on the current again. She shrieked at the unfairness of it as they melted into the shadows and turned off the flashlight.
Several minutes went by. Jubilee could barely see for the tears streaming from her eyes, and she thrashed in her bonds, screaming in agony. And then, unbelievably, she saw a flash of light and felt a rush of displaced air against her skin. And like some twisted angel, Kurt was there, having teleported into her cell to free her.
Now Jubilee knew why the men had stayed. She tried to fight her pain, tried to scream to Kurt, tried to tell him to go, that it was a trap; she could see the men in the shadows behind Kurt, raising their guns. Her warning was muffled, as were her cries of agony; and he stepped forward, raising his hands to tear the horrible hood from her head.
She didn't hear the guns' sharp, staccato crack as the men fired; but she saw the look of agony and surprise and horror on Kurt's face as several bright red blossoms of blood erupted on the chest of his uniform. He stared down at his chest for a moment, almost as if in disbelief, and then crumpled almost in slow motion to the floor. Jubilee was helpless to do anything as the light went out of his eyes. She thrashed in her chains, screaming in pain and loss and grief and fury, and felt a terrible weight of guilt settle over her. It was her fault…
And then the door to her cell fell in, ripped off its hinges by a set of three adamantium claws, and Jubilee saw, through tear-blurred eyes, her Wolvie. And beside him, she saw Remy framed in the opening.
The men opened fire. The bullets smashed into Logan, and he reeled backwards for a moment, howling from the pain of the bullets smashing into his body, then he recovered and lunged forward, taking out the guards while Remy ran to free Jubilee.
Remy tore frantically at the restraints holding Jubilee, who was still writhing in agony at the shocks tearing into her body. Logan's attention was focused on Kurt, lying on the floor, ignoring the blood running from his own already closing bullet wounds. "No," Jubilee heard his grieved whisper as the hood came free of her head. She tried to go to him, to comfort him…but her body refused to cooperate. Her attention was taken up by the pain of returning circulation to her fingers, the electrodes ripping away from her skin, and Remy draping his duster over her cold shoulders. "Wolvie—" she tried to say, reaching out to Logan. He was checking Kurt for any signs of life, but she knew, and Logan knew, there was no hope.
Logan grabbed Kurt's body and hauled it up over his shoulder, leaving Remy to help a shaking Jubilee to her feet. Together they left the cell. Jubilee's tear-blurred eyes picked up the litter of bodies Logan and Remy had left behind them in the hall, the remains of what looked like it had been a nasty booby trap, and leaned against Remy as they got on the lift that would take them back up to the surface.
Ororo was waiting for them when they got there. Her eyes widened fractionally as she saw Kurt's limp form over Logan's shoulder, and she took to the air, hovering in the cavernous main room of the base. "Go!" She shouted at Logan, Remy, and Jubilee. "I shall cover your retreat!" Logan took off at a dead run for the open door, Remy half-carrying a stumbling, disoriented Jubilee. They reached the mini-jet quickly, and climbed in. "Come on, darlin'!" Logan turned to holler at Ororo. "Let's get outta here!" Ororo turned and started to fly toward them, and the craft. Just as she reached it, there was a sharp, staccato crack, and she fell out of the sky at Logan's feet.
Logan fell to his knees beside Ororo's body, staring helplessly at the spreading red stain on the left side of her chest. "'Ro," he said, cupping her face in his hands. "Hang on, we'll get ya back…you'll be okay…"
Ororo shook her head, the slight movement sending a trickle of bright red blood out the corner of her mouth. "No…not going to make it…" she gasped shallowly. Abandoning the effort, she reached up and took Logan's hand. "I…love you…" Logan bent over her, and she used her last bit of strength to haul herself upright and press her lips against his one last time. Then her head fell back limply, and her eyes closed. Her chest rose one last time, fell, and didn't move again.
"NO!" Logan howled in grief, shaking her. "No, Ro, come on, ya can't leave me, not like this, darlin', please…"
Jubilation Lee sat bolt upright in her bed, gasping as if she'd just run a mile. Her fists came up to her mouth, trying to suppress her scream of anguish, and the taste of blood filled her mouth as her teeth cut her knuckles.
She remained that way for a long time, sitting in her bed in her penthouse apartment and trying to gulp back the sobs. It had been over a century since Ororo and Kurt had died on the rescue mission to save her, but the nightmares kept plaguing her, and had never gone away.
"Oh, Logan," she said finally, whispering his name to her darkened room. "I didn't mean…I wish it hadn't happened, I wish I could go back and change it all." She drew her knees to her chest and rested her forehead on them until her sobs stopped.
She finally untangled the sheets from her legs and got up. Moonlight silvered her nude body as she crossed under her skylight on her way to her bathroom.
"Lights on, seventy-five percent," she commanded, and the lights came on at three-quarter power. "Water, cold, twenty percent," she said to the silver tap over the white marble basin, and a trickle of water obediently flowed from the tap. She cupped her hands in it, filling them with water, and splashed it on her face, then reached down and repeated the process. "Water, off."
She walked over to the cupboard in the wall and slid the hatch open. Pulling a towel out, she patted her face dry, noticing as she did that the cuts on her knuckles had healed. Studying it with detached interest, she then went back to the sink and deliberately bit down on her knuckles again. The cut healed even faster than before.
"Huh. Guess those nanites really are up to full strength again," she muttered to herself. "Wall: reflection." The wall obediently turned into a mirror.
Turning, she surveyed her back. The area of angry red skin on her shoulder, testimony to a near-miss from a laser blast, was gone. She studied the reflection for a moment. "Looks like I'm going to have to go back and get that side re-done."
'That side' was actually the petal of a huge nightshade flower. The flower was tattooed across her back, from one shoulder blade to the other. The flower's stem started from the base of her spine and went up from there, with leaves curling outward from the stem over her kidneys and ribs. All done in black; she hadn't chosen any color. The side of the flower on her right shoulder was gone, the ink obliterated by the nanites. They had repaired her skin to its former color; the tattoo was gone. "Too bad they can't engineer the nanites to leave my tattoo alone."
She sighed and turned around to face the mirror again. "Not bad for being a hundred and sixteen years old," she said, studying the youthful curves, the belly still as flat as it had been when she was running with the X-Men back in her teens. Her breasts were full, without a hint of sag; and the dark hair was as full and dark as it had been way back in the 'good old days'. "'Bout time, too."
She also felt better. The last mission she'd gone on, as a technology-enhanced mutant assassin 'leased' out to the government by the CyberTech corporation had ended in a firefight that had left her badly damaged. The nanites that Cybertech had imbued her blood with had gone about repairing the damage done to both her biological organs and her cybernetic components…but surface cuts and bruises had been pretty far down on the list when her major bodily organs needed repairs first. She had spent last week in a regen tube back at Cybertech while her nanites went about healing her body. She'd only been permitted to return to her penthouse apartment in an affluent DC neighborhood two days ago, and she'd spent most of the time sleeping.
Her thoughts returned to the nightmare. "Too bad I didn't have the nanites when Ororo and Kurt got killed," she said ruefully to her naked reflection in the mirror. "Could have saved them." Tears welled up in her blue eyes, and she blinked them back. Suddenly disgusted with herself, she snapped, "Wall: normal. Lights: off." The lights went out, the wall went back to being a wall, and she stepped out of the bathroom.
She paused beside one of the huge up-to-the-ceiling windows that dotted her apartment wall. Although a simple vocal command could return the windows to translucence or opacity, she still preferred to use old-fashioned, gauzy white lace curtains. "Lends an air of antiquity to the place," she said to any visitors (mercifully few) who commented on their presence. Truth was, she just liked them. Not all the technological advancements in the last century had been good ones, at least to her point of view. She paused beside one window, looking out over the city.
Her apartment building was along C Street and 14th Street. She could see the White House in the distance; not well, since the shield was in place over the six-story edifice, but she could still see it. Her eyes roved over the rest of the Mall, her mind reflecting on what had been there when she was thirteen and what wasn't there now. The Ellipse was still there; the Washington Monument was still there, albeit cloaked while undergoing restoration. The Department of Agriculture building was still right across from her apartment building; and if she went to the southwest window, she could see the remains of the old Jefferson Memorial site. The Tidal Basin was being expanded so the National Aquarium could use its water for a giant freshwater seapark, and the Memorial had been dismantled.
She sighed as she climbed back into bed and drew the blankets up. It was an affectation only, since the apartment's climate controls kept the apartment perfectly heated; but she liked the feeling, the comfort, in being able to pull the comforter up over her head. For a long moment she stared at the battered cowboy hat sitting on her dresser, tears threatening to erupt again as she thought about the man who had given the original to her over a century ago. This wasn't the original; but it was as close to being the original as she could have her replicator make it, even down to the stains and the tattered brim. And she would light a cigar beside it every once in a while so it even retained the same smell. Cigars and other smokable carcinogenic items were now illegal, of course, replaced by cleaner-burning, non-addictive substitutes; but if you looked hard enough, you could still find the old-fashioned cigars; and when you had as much money as Jubilation Lee now had (CyberTech paid her an almost embarrassing amount of money for being the first volunteer for their bio-nanite enhancement program sixty years ago) she could basically buy anything she wanted.
Except the one thing she wanted most.
She climbed back out of bed, grabbed the hat, and returned to bed, hugging the hat to her chest. She took a deep breath of the cigar smell, her lips curling in a fond smile before the tears started. "Oh, Logan," she whispered. "God…I'm still mad at you, but I miss you so much…still…where are you now?"
She fell asleep still holding the hat, with tears leaving dried tracks on her cheeks.