Chapter 8: The Island
Jubilee went from deep sleep to instant wakefulness. And sighed when she realized where she was.
And who she was with.
Logan lay beside her, sleeping with his head pillowed on a heap of palm fronds, snoring. She grinned widely, recognizing the sound even after so many years apart. She'd heard it often enough during her teen years to become intimately acquainted with the sound. Reaching down she gently stroked a lock of hair back off his forehead and back into place. Even after a hundred years he still wore the same hairstyle, and that one bit of hair still wouldn't stay in place!
His breathing hitched, and she drew back quickly, afraid she'd woken him. But after a moment his breathing returned to the shallow, deep breaths of sleep, and she hauled herself tiredly to her feet, inspecting her body critically.
The nanites were working at slightly slower than normal speed; this worried her. Normally wounds healed, if not almost instantaneously, then at least overnight. But one of the dictators' personal guards had fired at her the night before when they made their escape, and it had left a deep burn along the bottom curve of her ribs. She had almost screamed with the pain, managing just barely to stifle it to a gasp. Because if Logan heard…
She paused again, looking down at him. "All these years, and I'm still pulling your Canadian bacon out of the fire," she said affectionately, smiling down at him. "Ah, well. Let's see if we can 'rustle up some grub', as you used to put it when we went camping, huh?" She took a look around. The blue ocean lay before her eyes, with a few small islands just at the horizon. She shook her head. She must have gone farther than she thought she had.
The beach was rocky, rather than sandy. She paused just long enough to kick off the shoes she'd worn and mentally commanded the suit to flow down over her lower legs and bare feet. After a moment's hesitation it did, slowly, sluggishly. She ran her hand over her lower back, felt the charging/linkage port in her lower back, and cursed. The water had gotten into it; chances were good that some silt or debris from the ocean had gotten into it too. She was going to have to take the suit off and have Logan check it for obstructions.
When she got back.
She set off along the beach, examining the trees and surrounding flora for anything edible. She found a few coconuts, which she shook and tapped for edibility, and then spied a bush full of berries. She'd never seen them before, but then, she'd never been stuck on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, either. She stepped up to the bush and picked one, examining its firm reddish-yellow skin critically, then carefully bit into it. Its juice flooded over her tongue, sweet and flavorful, a moment before the sourness of the fruit closed her throat and caused her to start spitting and hacking.
She hacked, spit, stamped, and when she finally could speak again, swore colorfully in a handful of different languages. The juice was good, but the fruit was sour! Worse than a lemon. And she'd never liked lemons. Eyeing the bush distastefully, she gave it a wide berth and continued on. She was eyeing something in a tree she was fairly certain were unripe bananas and wondering what they would taste like green when a snort stopped her in her tracks.
Framed by a screen of green bushes ahead, she saw a small spring. Water. And apparently fresh, because there was a small wild pig standing beside it. It was snorting in a clearly hostile manner, and looking at her as if it might charge at her any second.
She didn't mind killing humans; but an animal, a dumb animal, was something else. She almost hesitated…and then the analytical part of her mind took over. After her tremendous exertion the night before, she was weak. She needed to eat, and so did Logan. This pig, as much as she might not want to kill something that hadn't hurt her, was a source of food. So. She took a step back, gathering the last of her energy reserves.
As she expected, that was its signal to attack. It rushed at her, and she took one step back, raised her hands to paff it…
And a dark shape came bursting out of the treeline, roaring as it caught the pig in midair on six-inch claws. By the time Logan halted his rush, the pig was a limp carcass, bloodily dead. He let the animal slide off his claws and grinned at her. "Got us breakfast."
"Hey!" Jubilee exclaimed. "I found it! You just killed it! I was going to bring it back to the campsite for our breakfast!"
Logan grinned. "Whatever ya say." He bent down over the carcass, wiping his claws on the bristly pig hair and retracting all but one. He slid the point of that claw in the thick skin under that chin and slit it from the chin all the way back. He slid a hand into the body cavity and yanked a handful of guts out, dropping them carelessly on the ground. "Wrap those up in some leaves. If Carey don' find us t'day, we can use 'em ta fish t'night."
Jubilee eyed the steaming, bloody, malodorous pile of offal distastefully. Logan paused, grinning in his skinning of the pig. "Hey. You can blow a man's stomach open but you can't handle a pig's innards?"
"This is different," Jubilee said, eyeing the dead pig with a look of distaste. "If I weren't so exhausted, if I didn't need to eat now to get my energy levels back up, I would have let it go." Logan huffed in laughter and deftly sliced off a section of hide, dumping the remains in it before wrapping a piece of vine around it to make a neat, if smelly, package. "Here, I got it."
Jubilee sighed and sat down. Logan finished with the carcass, and frowned at her. "Aren't we going back to the campsite?"
"Fresh water," Jubilee pointed at the small spring the pig had been drinking from, and Logan blinked. He hadn't even smelled the clean water over the heavy metallic tang of blood in the air and the overwhelming scent of salt water.
"Good thinkin'. Yeah, we'll make camp here." He looked at her. "Don't suppose you could blast a hole in the ground an' gimme a light fer the fire?"
Jubilee grinned as she aimed her paffs at the loose gravel at their feet. In a matter of a few seconds she had made an impromptu roasting pit, and Logan tossed in some driftwood and leaf detritus for her to set fire to. But she hesitated. "Logan, if the dictator's people are still looking for us, they'll see the fire—"
He shook his head, cutting off her words. "I was watchin' where we was going. We're at least three or four islands over. I'd actually be pretty surprised if we aren't in the Florida Keys."
"Back on home soil?" Jubilee grinned. "Great. So all we have to do is find out which direction we have to go and get to the mainland." She looked down at her side. "I need to get home and have Tom look at my nanites. They're not healing me as fast as they should be."
Logan sucked in a breath as he saw the large scorched hole in the side of her uniform. "Jubes. That must…"
"Hurt like hell?" she nodded. It did. "But I'm used to it. Speaking of which…" she started to unseal the edges of her suit and peel it off.
Logan returned his attention to the pig, spitting it and lowering it over the pit, trying not to look at Jubilee as she stripped down to her skin. He was busy turning the pig when he heard Jubilee's "Logan?"
"Yeah?" he said, not turning around.
Her silvery laugh stopped him. "It's okay, Logan. We're old friends. And I've gotten used to nudity." She came up to him. "I need you to check the linkage port at the base of my spine and see if anything's clogging the hole."
Logan started at her back. Her skin was smooth, unscarred; but at the base of her spine was a small black square with a hole in the middle of it. He squatted to look inside it, uncomfortably aware of the smooth honey-colored skin swelling out just inches from his chin, and looked in. "Seems clear," he said as quickly as he could, and turned away.
Jubilee sighed and started to put her suit back on; Logan couldn't help but watch this time. First a pair of skin-tight leggings, made of what looked like black spandex but that Logan was pretty sure was something else; and then an exercise-bra-like top. At the bottom back of the shirt was a patch of flexible stuff, and a long, thin probe. Jubilee positioned the probe right over the hole at the base of her spine and pressed it in. Logan heard it give a quiet but definite click as it locked into place. "What's that?" he asked when she was decent again.
"It feeds directly into my spine," Jubilee explained, picking up one of the coconuts and beginning to examine it for cracks. "I can control my suit with mental commands—look—" the fabric panels of the suit started extending themselves as she spoke, covering all of her exposed skin in minutes. "The stuff you see is actually an adamantium-vibranium alloy over a layer of Teflon-like stuff. Makes it harder for projectiles to damage me seriously. The stuff coming out is basic Teflon fabric. Not as invulnerable, but cheaper to use to cover whole areas of my skin without sacrificing too much of the protective purposes." She looked down at the suit, and the fabric panels started to retract again, leaving her skin bare to the heat of the sun. "But it's hot. And I don't have to worry about sunburn or sunstroke. The nanites mimic your healing factor almost perfectly." She carefully wrapped a tendril of plasmoids around the top quarter of the coconut, then set them off. The top of the coconut popped off as cleanly as if she had sliced it off with a knife. "The port can also be used to charge my nanites."
"'Charge?'" Logan made a face. 'What do you mean, 'charge'?"
"The nanites feed off my own biochemical energy, but if I'm using my plasmoids at the same time, they rely on their own electrical charge gotten from the rechargeable battery at the base of my spine. The battery is small, and if there's a lot of damage for them to fix, the charge gets drained quickly. At the CyberTech lab they have a modified electroshock machine that plugs into the battery and 'charges' my battery up so the nanites have a full supply to draw from if they have to."
Logan made a face. "Ya have ta get electrocuted fer these nanites ta work? Jubes, that's barbaric!"
"I thought so at the time, but I've gotten used to it." Jubilee's voice was quiet. "It's not like I hadn't dealt with it before. At least this time it's on my terms. I say how much, and how long. If I can't handle it all in one session, I make them stop and we pick up again the next day."
"What do you mean, 'not like you hadn't dealt with electroshock before'? Jubilee!" Logan was upset now, and turned his attention from the roasting pig to his former partner.
Jubilee was looking at him with pity in her eyes. "You didn't know what happened, did you, Logan. You didn't stick around long enough to find out." She stared at the coconut in her hands. "The men who had me at the old OZT base were human survivors of the base. Former guards. One of them was Bastion's close associate. He knew where the base was, knew how to operate all the stuff. He got a handful of engineers to get the base working again, and they kidnapped me and brought me there, hoping you would follow and they could kill you. They didn't touch me; they said they wouldn't 'pollute' their bodies with 'mutie filth' like me. They stripped me down to just my underclothes and confined me in a temperature-controlled room kept deliberately cold. They wrapped shackles around my wrists and alternated between hanging me until my hands were black with trapped blood and having me stand while hanging. They didn't give me anything to eat, gave me only a tiny bit to drink, and worst of all they didn't let me sleep. They stuck electrodes to my skin to shock me awake when I fell asleep. After almost a week of sleep deprivation, they put headphones on me and played a tape of anti-mutant stuff. It said awful things; I wasn't human, I was a mistake, an abomination, a dirty filthy mutie slut…I didn't deserve to live, and you guys were so tired of me that you weren't going to come rescue me…stuff like that."
Her voice went flat. "After the sleep and sensory deprivation, the pain, the shocks, all of that…I started believing what they were telling me. And then you guys came to rescue me, and I didn't feel like I was so worthless anymore. Then Kurt died right in front of me, and I learned that Ororo had died trying to cover us while we were escaping and I was unconscious…and you were so wrapped up in your grief over their deaths…I felt like I was responsible, Logan. If I hadn't sneaked out to the mall that day they wouldn't have gotten me. And when you turned to me that day in the library and accused me of being selfish, I realized you were right, they were right, and I really wasn't worth your time and energy. And then you threw the computer and it hit me…the pain was so bad, when I saw you reach down to me, I flinched away because I didn't want you to hurt me, didn't want you to touch me, anymore, because I was bad and dirty and all the things they said.
"Emma and Charles tried to talk to me about it, tried to get me to believe that they cared about me, they loved me…but when I woke up, you were gone, and I thought it was because you didn't care about me anymore, didn't love me. No matter what they said, how much they cared, they weren't you, and you were all I wanted. And I couldn't stand living there, remembering you, thinking that you hated me for what I did…and I left. I packed my stuff and went to live with Aunt Hope in L.A. Even after she died, I never went back. I couldn't. You weren't there, and it wasn't the same without you. Before, when you left, I somehow knew you would come back; but when you left that last time, I didn't get that feeling. And when I woke up and I didn't see you, and your room was empty, and your Jeep and the trailer and your bike and your clothes and your sword and everything was gone, it just hit me that you weren't coming back, and I had driven you away…" She sniffed.
Logan grabbed her in a fierce hug, feeling her body tremble against his. "Jubes, Jubes," he whispered against her hair. "Ya ain't bad, or dirty, or nothin' like that. I love ya. I always loved ya. Always will, too. I left 'cause I didn't think ya was gonna love me, after I'd gone an' hurt ya an' all. I felt guilty 'cause I blamed ya fer something that wasn't yer fault. It wasn't yer fault 'Ro an Kurt died; they decided ta come on the rescue mission for you. There was several things happenin' at once there, Jubilee, an' Scott couldn't go all out on a big rescue mission without compromisin' the other team. So he took volunteers for the old base. Ororo led, an' Kurt an' Rems came too, an' that was it. There was only four of us. Ya weren't ta blame fer what happened; in fact, Scott was more ta blame fer underestimatin' the guys we was goin' up against. He figured since Bastion was out of the picture, whoever this was that had ya was a buncha posers just usin' the old base fer a hideout. We didn't expect the armed welcome; we didn't expect ya ta be that far underground, in them lower levels Bastion built just for his own private use; we wasn't prepared fer all the stuff they threw at us. He cursed himself for not sendin' Frosty; she coulda told us how many people there were so we could bring reinforcements. By the time we got down to the lower levels, we were all of us pretty tired, an' we was only countin' on a quick snatch an' go. We weren't countin' on them guys usin' you as bait to get us. An' Kurt died cause we underestimated 'em. Wasn't yer fault, Jubes. An I was outta line fer blamin' ya for it."
"Then why didn't you explain it to me? Why didn't you come back and apologize, or explain or whatever? I would have forgiven you. You know I never could stay mad at you."
"I tried." Logan's voice was heavy with sorrow. "I came back about a year after I left, ta apologize ta ya an' try ta get ya ta fergive me. But you were already gone, and I…I chickened out, I guess. I didn't wanna face ya in L.A., livin' yer new life an' wakin' up old memories I thought ya wouldn't'a wanted ta dig up. So I kept an eye on ya at a distance, an' tried ta deal with it from there. I was afraid you'd reject my apology, reject me, tell me ya hated me an' ya never wanted ta see me again. 'Cause I realized how much ya meant ta me, how much I…loved ya…an' I couldn't bear ta even think 'bout ya…'bout ya not lovin' me no more…"
"Oh, Wolvie." Jubilee used the nickname she'd tagged him with so long before almost unconsciously, but it had been so long since he'd heard it that a lump rose in his throat. "I love you. I've never stopped loving you. Do you know," she looked at him with those big blue eyes he loved, "I even still have the old hat you gave me? Not the same one…but I got another one exactly like it, put the same wear spots on the brim, the same stains in the crown…and I even light one of those smelly cigars you used to like next to it sometimes so it keeps the same smell."
He laughed a little, reaching out to tweak her nose. "I gotta admit something. I still carry 'round a yellow duster. I even put a little pack of bubblegum in the pocket, so it would look like yours. Hope Carey, my little 'partner' this time, stops at the hotel an' picks my stuff up…but I think yours is pretty much gone. I don't think she'll be able to get to your suite to get your stuff; the guards will probably have confiscated everything in it. I hope ya didn't pack nothin' important."
"I was planning on a quick getaway," Jubilee said. "I packed lightly, and there's nothing in my luggage that I can't replace. I kind of figured this was going to happen." She snorted. "So Rennick won't have to worry about losing all that expensive equipment he told me to requisiton from the Armory."
"Who's Rennick?"
"Sam Rennick. My boss. He brings missions to my 'attention', and he's our link to the higher ups."
"'Our'?"
Jubilee grinned. "Tom and Carl are my friends, and my 'handlers'. Carl is like Hank, he's a doctor who cares for the biological parts of me. Tom's a nanotech specialist; he takes care of my cybernetic organs and my nanites and my charging systems." She sniffed deeply. "And unless I miss my guess, if that pig burns any more I'm going to have to have Tom replace my stomach after I eat that."
Logan laughed and went back to the roasting pit, turning the pig before it burned too badly on that side. "Carey's looking for us," he said. "Has ta be. I'll bet money on the fact that she was responsible fer the shield going down at just that moment. She slapped a tracer on my back right before I followed yer scream up the stairs. I think she was expecting something like this to happen." He cut into the pig's haunch with his claw. "Well, it ain't gourmet food, but it'll do. Come on, time to eat. Split another of them coconuts for me, will ya?"