The First Time
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Scott/Jubilee, Warren, Ororo
Summary: The first times before the first time.
The first time she saw the "Jubilation" line in Macy's she thought her heart just might burst right out of her chest. Her designs. Her name on the label. Her line of pre-teen clothes, for sale in a major department store.
All the residents of the Xavier Institute took the train into Manhattan to witness the spectacle. Students who didn't even know her basked in her reflected glory. Scott ("Call me Scott," he said, the day she graduated from F.I.T.) ordered her to stand in front of the racks, holding an outfit she had designed, while he took pictures. She had tried to act like it was all very stupid and childish, but the ear-to-ear grin on her face had no doubt given her away.
She had not thought anything could top that moment until she saw the child models strutting down the runway at her first show, inside a tent at Bryant Park, during New York Fashion Week.
Seventh on Sixth, the entity behind Fashion Week, had allotted her exactly one guest ticket to her own show. And of course it was only right and proper to give the ticket to Warren Worthington, the man who had made her triumph possible. It was Warren who had sat her down at the age of sixteen for a serious discussion about a career in fashion. She couldn't believe anybody other than herself took clothes seriously. But Warren did. It was he who had arranged the unpaid internship for her with Betsey Johnson, the internship that had turned into a job. She'd gotten into the Fashion Institute of Technology on her own merits, but she never would have thought to apply if Warren hadn't encouraged her to. And she never would have been able to attend anyway if Warren hadn't provided her with a partial scholarship.
Warren now owned fifty-one percent of Jubilation, Inc. ("Call me Warren," he said, the day they signed the contracts) and Jubilee couldn't feel angry about it. She knew there would be no Jubilation, Inc. at all without his financial backing and social patronage. It wasn't like it was a bad thing, to see the satisfied smile on his face as he lounged in his seat by the runway. It was good to feel she had justified the faith of a smart and powerful businessman. She hadn't disappointed; she hadn't fucked up.
Jubilee understood that really she had three groups of customers to satisfy-- the ten- to twelve-year-olds who yearned to be sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds, their parents, and their teachers. And maybe she'd sprain her arm if she patted herself any harder on the back, but in her own opinion she'd mastered the juggling act. Her designs were eye-catching, outrageous, and actually pretty damn silly, but not provocative. The kids who wore her clothes and shoes and carried her purses looked stylish without looking sinful. Adults might laugh, or mock, or roll their eyes, but the girls weren't going to get sent home from school, and no fathers were going to burst any blood vessels. Kids loved her designs and grown-ups could endure them; the secret of her success.
At the age of twenty-seven she could relate with disquieting ease to the hopes and fantasies of the middle-school crowd. She remembered her own pre-teen self as fondly as though remembering a daughter. She remembered the weekends in the girls' dorm at the Xavier Institute, sewing clothes from store-bought patterns, gossiping about movie stars and Mr. Summers, experimenting with hairstyles and make-up. She had started sewing when she couldn't find anything in the malls that met her exacting standards, and she had started making her own patterns when she had become dissatisfied with the patterns for sale.
When she was fifteen she had begun wearing her own clothes exclusively. Oddly cut clothes, made out of remnants of multiple fabrics, everything from silk to tweed to leather and plastic, bedecked with beads and bells and feathers and buttons and ruffles and shells. Ms. Munroe just grinned at her. Mr. Summers started getting that migraine headache look every time she walked into his classroom. Mr. Logan threatened to call Animal Control to come clean out her closet. Pretty soon Rogue and Kitty were paying her to make clothes for them too. One day a group of young girls stopped her on a street in Salem Center to ask where she bought her clothes, and at that point Mr. Worthington had started taking a keen interest in her little hobby. More than ten years later, she had vindicated his belief in her talent.
She'd given the ticket to Warren, as was only right, but when she walked down the runway at the end of her show, she was stunned and deeply touched to see Ororo and Scott sitting on either side of him. Trust Warren to score a couple more of the best seats in the house and to put Ororo and Scott in them. Ororo ("Call me Ororo," she said, the day Jubilee moved out of the mansion) had taught her how to really wear makeup, had taken her to the Cooper Hewitt and the costume gallery at the Met. If she could have chosen any three people witness her triumph, it would have been these three.
Backstage she had barely survived the ten-minute show that would determine whether she lived or died, professionally speaking. She had thought she might have a stroke or a heart attack in the months leading up to this moment, and yet when it was over she strode confidently to the end of the ramp to take her bow. And just as she had previously discussed with Warren, she straightened and flicked harmless streams of multicolored plasma from her fingertips.
From her vantage point on the ramp she could see the pleased expression on Ororo's face. Scott looked startled and Warren looked thoughtful. The crowd oo'ed and ah'ed, and the fashion press went crazy. Her trademark wraparound sunglasses came in handy as the flashbulbs erupted like lightning.
Jubilee would never have denied that she was a mutant, but the reality was, no one ever asked. The subject simply never came up in any of her business dealings. Unlike Hank or Kurt or Scott, she could pass. She knew she was taking a chance, coming out like this so publicly, when she had just found a foothold in a volatile industry, but she did it anyway. It was a unique contribution she could make to the cause, even it wasn't the most noble or heroic way to support mutant rights –- not like being an X-Man.
Scott and Ororo didn't lead the X-Men anymore. After the Professor's death, Scott had withdrawn to focus on running the school, and Ororo had morphed from teacher to political activist. Bobby Drake ran the team now, and God knew he had the perfect cover. No one ever would suspect an accountant of being a superhero in his spare time.
The years had wrought a lot of changes among her compadres. Bobby and Rogue had broken up. Bobby was now dating Kitty, and Rogue was dating a Cajun who had blown into New York on the winds of Hurricane Katrina. Ororo had married Kurt Wagner, Logan screwed a neverending parade of big-breasted bimbos, and Scott. . . . Scott had desultorily dated over the years, starting maybe a year and a half after Dr. Grey's death, but none of his relationships ever seemed to go anywhere or last very long. The breaks between relationships lasted longer than the relationships themselves.
Scott and Ororo attended the cocktail party Warren sponsored for her after the show in the library behind Bryant Park. Due to her little demonstration of power onstage, the room was packed with people who wanted to see her up close, talk to her, interview her and photograph her. Ah, but would department store buyers still buy from her? That question would go unanswered until morning.
Ororo seemed to enjoy herself, but Scott skulked nervously around the fashion press and the celebrities who always clustered around Warren. Eventually he went to ground by the hors d'oeuvres table and stood there sipping one club soda after another. Plenty of people thought Scott Summers was a recovering alcoholic, but Warren had told her once that Scott didn't drink because he had a family history of alcoholism. Absurdly she had immediately thought of the Professor rather than Scott's biological family.
So Scott hung back, sipped club sodas, ate a few of the less caloric delicacies on the table, and watched her work the room until most of the crowd had dispersed. Only then did he approach her.
"Jubes, this --" Words seem to fail him for a moment. He gestured around the room. "This is amazing." He looked down at her and said warmly, "I'm so proud of you."
She felt tears blurring her eyes. "Thanks. Thank you."
"I wish I could say I helped you on your way, but all I ever did was send you back upstairs to wash the makeup off your face."
She laughed, then.
"So I guess we should get out of your hair. You must have another party to go to."
She didn't. She had nowhere to go but back to her lonely studio apartment. She had no one to share the rest of the night with. She had no plans except to pick up some take-out and sit in front of the TV. She was suddenly depressed. Was this what it was like for actors after the premiere?
The younger Jubilee would have pretended she had places to go, people to meet, men to fuck. But she felt too tired and unhappy to play those games anymore.
"No," she said, and shrugged.
"No?"
"I'm just going to go pick up some dinner. I'm starving." She was indeed starving. Like a bride, she hadn't gotten the chance to eat any of the food at her own reception
"Didn't you get anything to eat?"
"No." She glanced over at the hors d'oeuvres table. It looked like a plague of locusts had struck it. No doggy bags for her.
He took her hand. She half-expected him to bow over it, like Mr. Darcy. "May I take you to dinner?"
She supposed if she could see past the opaque glasses she would see pity in his eyes. The younger Jubilee would have been too proud to accept the invitation.
"Thanks," she said.
They said goodbye to Warren and Ororo, and Scott explained he'd catch a late train back to Salem Center. They got their coats from the coat-check and stepped out of the grand marble foyer of the New York Public Library into the cold night.
Scott crooked his arm and she slipped her own arm through his. When she was seventeen she had thought Mr. Summers a relic. At twenty-seven Jubilee found herself charmed by his old-fashioned courtliness.
"That was really something, what you did tonight," Scott said as they walked down the steps of the library. "Letting people know you're a mutant, I mean."
She shrugged again.
"It's going to be on New York One, you know, and it could get picked up by the networks. Might hurt your sales."
"Guess I'll find out tomorrow. See if the buyers come knocking, or not."
They turned the corner onto 42nd Street.
"You didn't have to do that."
"Yeah, I did. Shit, I gotta do something. It's not like I'm out there risking my life, like Bobby."
Scott stopped walking. He released her arm, but only to turn to face her and take both her hands in his.
"Don't you ever downplay what you do," he said seriously. "What you do, and Allison, what you two do is as important as what Bobby does. We don't just need soldiers and politicians. We need fashion designers and rock stars too. You can help change public opinion in a way that Ororo may never be able to. Warren understood that a long time before I did." He smiled. "Guess that's why he gets the big bucks."
Jubilee laughed awkwardly. She gripped his gloved hands.
He let go, of course, but once more offered his arm.
Arm-in-arm, they strolled west on 42nd Street. Jubilee's mood steadily lightened. At Times Square she steered south down Seventh Avenue, because tonight of all nights she wanted to walk past F.I.T. Tonight she wanted to parade down Seventh like some Roman emperor, savoring her victory over life, the universe and everything.
Scott did not question her decision to walk down the fabulous, famous avenue that in cold hard fact was grimy and litter-strewn, and at this hour, desolate and distinctly dangerous-looking. He did not suggest they take the subway or hail a cab. He seemed content to walk, block after block, without a specified destination. Once this would have been highly out of character for him. It was one of the ways in which he had changed after Dr. Grey's death.
Tonight the heartless city seemed an unaccountably cheerful and friendly place. Jubilee remembered the deeply depressing, cold, dark, winter evenings of her twenty-fourth year, and twenty-fifth, and twenty-sixth. Years of hard work and high anxiety, punctuated by relationships with a series of jerks. She and every other girl at the Institute had been jealous of Dr. Grey, but she hadn't understood until she was older exactly how much cause she had to be jealous. The more idiots she fucked, the more idiots who fucked her over, the more deeply she fell in love with Scott Summers, who never noticed.
She loved him. She loved everything about his uptight upright self. She had always been infatuated with his good looks, but during the lonely nights in her cramped apartment, she didn't necessarily find herself dwelling on sexual fantasies starring her former teacher. More often she found herself remembering the way he seemed to blaze with purpose when he put on his team uniform. Cyclops was passionate and committed and powerful. And Scott the schoolteacher was just as dedicated and self-sacrificing as his alter-ego, but he was much less dramatic about it. Jubilee remembered the small gestures, the little kindnesses, the attention paid, the time spent. Scott wanted to take care of people; she'd sensed that from day one.
She'd been homeless after the death of her parents, homeless and on the run from the social workers who had wanted to send her to a group home or even back to relatives in China. She had been living in a mall in Southern California, living on scraps people threw out in the food court, sleeping hidden under racks of clothes in department stores, washing up in the public restrooms, stealing clean clothes to wear. And one day in the food court she had been approached by a tall red-headed lady and a man wearing dark glasses. She hadn't gone off with them because of anything they'd said. She went off with them because she had instantly fallen in lust with the man who, most depressingly, had turned out to be the redhead's boyfriend.
She wryly supposed she was still infatuated with Scott's good looks. The years had been more than kind to him. The gray hair at his temples, the lines starting to show on his forehead and around his mouth, only seemed to add strength and dignity to his face. He was handsome, now, not ridiculously pretty. He looked a lot more comfortable in his skin, but he seemed less approachable. An air of melancholy seemed to smother him. That was another one of the ways in which he had changed after Dr. Grey's death.
"So where am I taking you for dinner?" he asked finally, breaking their companionable silence.
She knew exactly where she wanted to go. "One If By Land, Two If By Sea."
"That's the name of a restaurant?"
"Yep." Only the most outrageously romantic restaurant in Manhattan.
"What kind of food do they have there?"
She had no idea. People went there for the atmosphere, not the food.
Not one of the creeps she had ever put out for had taken her there.
She stopped suddenly. Jerked to a halt, Scott turned and looked questioningly down at her.
"Look," she said, and she drew in a deep breath. "I want this to be like a date." She exhaled. Her breath hung mistily in the cold autumn air. "I want this to be our first date."
Scott looked at her as though she had just spoken in Sanskrit. Despite the sinking feeling in her stomach, Jubilee refused to look away. Because what the fuck excuse could he come up with for refusing to date her? She wasn't his student. She wasn't his employee. She didn't live at the Institute. They weren't teammates. And Dr. Grey had been dead for years. No, he didn't have a single polite excuse for turning her down. He'd just have to come right out and say it. Sorry, Jubes, I think you suck.
Scott looked away first. He looked down Seventh Avenue and said, in a bewildered voice, "You like me?"
Jubilee refrained from beating him about the head with her purse. Only because she might knock off his glasses. I love you, she thought. I love you. I love you. I am crazy mad in love with you.
"Yeah, sorta," she said casually.
He looked back at her. His mouth twitched. "Sorta?"
"Yeah, sorta."
Scott looked off into the distance again.
"Well," he said. A moment later he said, "Well, I think that means you're paying for dinner."
Jubilee swallowed. Her heart pounded violently. "I hope you like Big Macs."
"No," Scott said meditatively, "I think I'm in the mood for. . . something really expensive."
He tugged gently on her arm. They started walking again, down the gritty avenue that led through the heart of the Fashion District.
"Hey, nobody ever warned me you have champagne taste."
"Well, that's because I never dated a rich and famous fashion designer before."
"You got the famous part right, anyway." Jubilee couldn't stop smiling. She smiled and smiled. People walking by glanced curiously at her. "Hey, you know what, there's this dive in Chinatown, I used to eat there all the time when I was at F.I.T. Get a huge bowl of noodle soup for a buck fifty."
"No. I want filet mignon."
"Forget it. I gotta save my pennies for our second date."
Scott turned his head and smiled down at her. The killer smile nobody had seen much of in all the years since Dr. Grey's death.
The cold wind blew down the avenue and spun the litter unromantically around them and she didn't even notice. The first time Jubilee knew that smile was all for her, she thought she just might swoon like one of those ridiculous pre-feminist heroines in a Harlequin novel.
"Noodle soup it is," Scott said. "And I guess we better get a cab. You're not walking all the way to Chinatown in those silly shoes."
Their first argument was about shoes.
The End