Interlude: Critical Thinking
Logan tossed and turned.
He and Jubes had returned from the cabin that evening, and, tired from the long drive, she'd gone to bed early. He was tired too, but something still nagged at him, and he couldn't sleep.
Xavier had to have known. He had to have been keeping an eye on the Academy; he had to have known the training wasn't going well. But even after he'd closed the school, he hadn't requested that Jubilee undergo any formal training in her powers. And that was bugging Logan. Scott hadn't brought up the subject. Emma hadn't tried to rectify her mistake. And Sean…well, Sean was only the latest in a long line of people who had been responsible for Jubilee's health, safety, and welfare…and he too had failed her in not mentioning the lack, or trying to correct it, before he'd died.
He slipped downstairs to the War Room. The mansion's security systems were set on automatic alert, so if anything threatened them in the night Cerebro would alert them; but Logan, with his natural distrust of machines (no matter how sophisticated they were) sometimes took it on himself to walk on down to the monitoring room, Cerebro's 'brain', at night. So no one thought it unusual to see him wandering down to the War Room at two in the morning.
He wasn't intending to go and watch the monitors, though. He wanted to see if there were notes in Jubilee's file. Xavier kept extensive records on each member of the X-Men, past, and present. He even the files on the members who had died, because dead X-Men tended to reappear. Jean had demonstrated that several times. Logan had never bothered before to look at Jubilee's file; he tried to avoid paperwork, and their relationship was such that any question he needed to ask her he would normally ask her himself, trusting her to tell him the truth. And she always did.
But this was something he couldn't ask her, and some instinct kept him from confronting Xavier, Scott, or Emma about it. He would have to figure this out on his own.
He pulled up Jubilee's file on the screen and settled in to read.
A long time later he sat back, returning the file to storage, and cursed fervently and at length in the quiet room. There was definitely no way he was getting back to sleep now.
Jubilee had the power potential to be an alpha class mutant. Maybe higher than Alpha class, if such a thing were possible. Almost a demigod, when you looked at the power potential curve. When Xavier had probed her when she first arrived at the mansion, what he'd seen had frightened him, and the first note in her file said that Jubilee's training would center on helping her control her existing powers. She would not be permitted to learn just how powerful she could be, because Xavier was afraid of what might happen if she had all the power and didn't learn any of the moral codes that had to govern power. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," Xavier had written in Jubilee's file. "She must never know how absolute her power is. She can't be allowed to turn into another Magneto, or another Apocalypse." And so Jubilee's training up till now had been limited. They hadn't set out to find out how extensive her powers were and helping her learn to use that, as Xavier had done with Scott and Remy; hers had been focused on control and limiting what she could do. After the mission debriefing when Jubilee had gotten upset and blew up half the Mandarin's house, the note had been re-entered, and flagged for Emma and Sean's edification when Jubilee went to the Academy.
Logan swore again. If this were anybody else, even him, he would approve; but this was Jubilee. His little pal, his sidekick, his partner. His lifeline, once he'd gotten around to admitting that to himself. She didn't have a mean bone in her body. Look at how she'd handled herself when they found her parents' killers; these were two men who had hurt her in the worst way possible (at the time) and he'd seen the hesitation, her conflicting emotions. She hesitated to kill in cold blood. And even if he had talked her out of killing them, it had still been her decision.
Xavier's decision to limit Jubilee's knowledge of herself to what she already knew because of any potential harm to herself had ended up hurting herself. Logan had seen Jubilee's power capabilities; she could have torn the Hulkbuster base apart from the inside out if she'd known she could do it. She could have freed herself at any time. She could have killed Bastion. But because she didn't know how to do it, she had been horribly abused, violated, and brutalized.
And the Church. The damn Church of Humanity. She could have freed herself; could have saved herself, Angelo, everyone with her. Instead, she'd almost died and she'd lost a friend she still obviously cared very much for. She could have done that…if she'd been allowed to have the knowledge that she needed to do that. And when Jubilee had been set up on the cross on the lawn in the dead of night, Charles had been away somewhere and Jean had slept shielded to try and control her burgeoning Phoenix powers. And they had failed Jubilee by not saving her, by condemning her to die a horrible death on the cross…and only brought her back after she had already flatlined. Because she was dead when Logan and Bobby had taken her down; Logan had been sure of it. It was a miracle that Warren's blood had been able to save her; it hadn't saved Angelo. Her limp weight, her pallor, her bruised face and body, the blood smeared all over her arms and feet; they'd been a mute testimony to how hard she'd struggled to free herself. And it hadn't done any good. She'd still died.
Logan didn't believe that Jubilee had the potential to become the Death Of The World. Maybe she did, power-wise, but she wasn't psychologically capable of that. It wasn't something he could pin down; it was a feeling, an instinct, reinforced by years of watching her. From that very first moment he'd seen her, a scared, skinny street kid helping a strange man she didn't even know off a cross that some very powerful, vicious enemies had nailed him to, and cared for him until he was capable of caring for himself again…he'd known, perhaps instinctively, that she would never be a remorseless killer like he was. She had too much humanity, too much compassion, to do that. Ever. Logan was sure of that.
Xavier was human; he could make mistakes. And Logan was positive that he'd made a mistake in Jubilee's case. Chuck had been horrified and aghast at Jubilee's condition after O:ZT had concluded; Logan wondered if Xavier had regretted his decision. Had she been taught to use her powers to the fullest extent they could be used, she would have been saved the torment Bastion had inflicted on her. Or the Church of Humanity; she would have been spared a long, horrible, slow death from starvation and shock and pain on that damn cross.
Jubilee would never become so drunk with her own power that she would forget the innocents that lived around her, people who were only trying to live their lives. Scott and Emma weren't as culpable of negligence as he'd originally thought, because they were operating on Xavier's orders. Logan couldn't blame them…and although he did blame Chuck for not seeing for himself that the woman Jubilee had become would never be capable of the kinds of atrocities Apocalypse committed, Logan wasn't going to confront any of them on this either. Instead, he'd show everyone they were wrong; that Jubilee's power wouldn't corrupt her; that she would hold back, spare lives and use her powers toward good ends, not evil, when things came to such a pass that she would have to use her powers or die.
And he wasn't the only one who felt that way. Jean's notes had been in Jubilee's file as well; she'd disagreed with Xavier so strongly she'd noted her objection in Jubilee's file. Jubilee was strong, stronger than she herself knew. Jean had been possessed by the Phoenix, that phenomenal cosmic-powered being who had wrought havoc with Jean's cloned body. She knew, better than anyone, what living with powers like that entailed; she knew the struggle to master the impulse to fully lash out in anger of fear or pain. And she had written, in her notes on Jubilee, that she didn't think Jubilee would ever be capable of that kind of unthinking, knee-jerk reaction. She had been closer, in many ways, to Jubilee than Logan himself had been. She knew that Jubilee was terrified of her powers getting out of hand, and indeed had made some attempt to try and control them when she was living on the street. Jubilee knew on some subconscious level what she could do; was terrified that she would lose control and become what Xavier feared she would become. And the simple fact that she was aware of that potential and actively tried to avoid it proved that it wasn't likely that she would become the villain Apocalypse was.
Ororo too had added her own notes. Logan had raised an eyebrow at that. Ororo was, at least to her tribe, a goddess. She controlled the weather, and that was a powerful weapon. Ororo could swamp New York City in a massive tidal wave and kill everyone in the city if she wanted to. But she didn't. And she, too, noted in Jubilee's file that she didn't believe Jubilee was capable of the kind of psychotic egomania that Apocalypse indulged in. In fact, Ororo had said that if Jubilee were allowed to reach her full potential, she could potentially become a huge threat to Apocalypse.
In other words, if Jubilee were allowed to develop to her full potential, she could kick Apocalypse's ass. Logan liked that idea.
He'd added his own note to the file; he didn't think Jubilee had it in her to become the Death Of The World, and he was going to prove it by putting the responsibility in her hands and see what she did with it. In much the same way her parents' killers had ended up in Jubilee's hands, and her humanity warred with her desire for revenge. And in the end, her humanity had won. He noted that he knew she would do the same in every situation in which a choice like that was presented, and he was damned if he was going to let her be victimized and brutalized any further because she might become a villain. She'd have to live long enough to become one, and she'd come close on two occasions to not even living to see her eighteenth birthday!
Notes made and a decision reached, Logan suddenly found himself yawning. Smiling to himself, he headed off to his room to get a couple hours of sleep…and then Jubilee's training would begin.