Housekeeping - Story: You'll notice I've taken some liberties with the Forgiven and their ideology. While I love the idea of the Forgiven - I do feel Marvel could do more to make them interesting. So, as this fic continues I'll be introducing more bits of my version. (No, this doesn't mean it'll be a vamp focused story in the future. This fic still has a mystery at its core.)

This chapter is basically part one of chapter 6, I wanted to be back with Mattias and Jubes by now, but circumstances (see below) and an overworked beta prevented it. Don't worry, we should have some Doc/Jubes action next week.

Oh and a reader asked about an odd little "thing" they noticed concerning the Doc and Jubes in the last chapter. Yes, that might just be on purpose…;o) (There might even be another "hint" in this very chapter.)

General Housekeeping: So some of you are checking your calendars, and you're like 'Wait a minute, this isn't Thursday...this is Sunday! That hussy is four days late. Boo-urns!'

Yeah, I know I'm late. Look, every few months the right side of my back tries to painfully succeed from the rest of me. This week the pain medication made me very loopy. When I went back later to re-read what I had written, it was BAD! (Raizo sounded kinda like Yoda….'Drink or drink not, there is no sipping.') I had to rewrite of the whole thing.

On to more important things, thanks goes too Vethrill for another great review, Paradox Predator, faerlan20 and Divinity1 for following and Jade Wildcat for the fav. I personally respond to all reviews, so don't be shy and get in touch. :o)

Enjoy!

Chapter Six: Fell on Black Days

The flight home was hushed. Only the low din of the Shi'ar engines hummed throughout the jet, and if anyone spoke it was only in a whisper. It was an unspoken tradition, this silent vigil. Like a family keeping watch over one of their own.

As exhausted as the team was, no one slept on the way back. Their injured team-mate was a stark reminder that as rewarding and thrilling as wearing the X was, there was always the danger that someone you shared breakfast with, trained with, jeered the opposition with, might not be there the next morning.

Their vigil came to an end with the familiar whoosh of the Blackbird's vertical thrusters disengaging and that slight bounce as the landing gear met the ground. They were home.

As the ramp lowered, the mutants were met by a concerned Ororo and Hank, who was pushing a gurney towards the jet. Wolverine was the last to step off the plane, and he noticed the usually radiant weather goddess had dark circles under her eyes, and that her companion's fur appeared to have been hastily smoothed down.

Nodding to them in greeting, Logan did not step into Ororo's welcoming embrace, instead laying the small bundle in his arms onto the gurney, taking care not to accidentally bump the sleeping vampire in case she woke.

As Hank began the lengthy process of checking vitals and fastening restraints, Storm turned the remaining mutants.

'You did good work tonight. Go and rest.'

She wasn't at all surprised to see Logan and Bobby pretend her dismissal order didn't apply to them as they followed Beast into the emergency medical elevator.

Down in the medlab, as he locked Jubilee in a containment chamber, Hank said a silent prayer of thanks to Asclepius, the Greek god of doctors, when Logan didn't protest. There was no doubt that the Canadian trusted and loved his protégé, but even he feared that in her current state she could pose a real threat to the students upstairs.

On her seventh cup of java into her night shift, Cecilia volunteered to wash and dress Jubilee – her years as an ER resident, not to mention her bio-forcefield powers, making her the perfect candidate in case the vampire woke.

It was mid-afternoon when Jubilee finally stirred from her drug-induced coma. Her body felt sluggish, needing more time to work through the tranquilisers, before it could properly heal bruised organs and knit broken bones.

But the haze of drugs and pain couldn't dampen the familiar sensations that were stirring deep inside, forgotten feelings that were like a glowing ember begging to be fuelled into a raging fire. Feelings waiting to seduce her with promises of excitement and heightened passions. All she had to do was completely submit to its seductive warmth.

It felt as if a part of her was being reborn, and if not for the sorry state of her body, Jubilee would have screamed, laughed, hollered and ran till her throat bled and her legs gave in.

She finally felt alive!

But along with this rediscovered lightness of soul came another urge. One that was far more primal in nature, a growing gnawing hollowness that would soon need to be sated.

Stretching out on the bed, Jubilee opened her eyes and looked around the room. It was pretty barren; the only furniture was the bed she was in and a bedside table, upon which stood the one thing she craved more than anything else: a plastic bottle filled to the brim with thick, irony deliciousness.

She grabbed the bottle eagerly and, not bothering to open the cap, sank her sharp fangs into the side and sucked.

Watching from the observation booth, Hank McCoy felt his skin crawl. It wasn't the way the vampire had downed the blood that caused it, but the utter enjoyment with which she drank.

The girl in the containment room was a stranger. She looked like the firecracker, but it wasn't her. It was as if Jubilation Lee had step out of her body and something alien had moved in.

Next to the blue doctor was a dishevelled, sleep-deprived Bobby Drake, whose slim shoulders slumped at the sight.

'Well, she went straight for the blood,' he said, the disappointment in his voice palpable. 'What do we do now? She's obviously gone full… well… you know…'

Unable to bring himself to say the word, he made a fang-like gesture with his fingers, before shoving his hands into his pockets.

'For now Logan's blood should placate her desire to feed,' said Hank, as he tried to rub an elusive spot from his glasses with his handkerchief, before plopping them back on his nose. 'It should suppress some of her more… aggressive inclinations.'

They fell silent once more as they watched the girl wipe the last drops of blood from her mouth with the edge of her cotton scrubs.

When she was first turned, Jubilee had survived on a steady diet of Logan's blood for months, depending on its miraculous X-factor to keep the predator at bay. The mutated haemoglobin had worked like a charm, but she was a shadow of her former self, her once sparkling personality dulled.

Standing apart from Hank and Bobby, Logan's eyes bore holes into the reinforced two-way glass that separated him from his surrogate daughter.

'I'll phone Raizo, hear if he's willin' to come talk her down,' he muttered around a Cuban cigar.

Bobby saw, trapped between Logan's white knuckles, the unmistakable thin leather strap of Jubilee's wooden Forgiven Cross. The night before, Cecilia had wordlessly handed it to Wolverine after gently prying it off the vampire's pale skin, where it had left a black cross-shaped brand. The remaining X-Men all knew what that mark meant in theory, but no one wanted to say it out loud.

As a member of the vampire sect known as The Forgiven, Jubilee should have been immune to the cross. A symbol of grace, crosses only burned Forgiven vampires who willingly strayed from their path. But now, after three years, it appeared Jubliee had finally stumbled and given into her baser nature.

The risk had always been there, of course. Raizo, the Forgiven's leader, didn't offer a cure to those who chose to join his sect, but rather a drastic change of lifestyle. Most vampires didn't survive the first month on Raizo's radical restrictive diet, the lack of human blood driving most over the edge.

'The first few days, I begged Raizo to let Visigoth stake me,' Jubilee had said, confiding in Bobby in a rare quiet moment soon after her return to the X-Men. 'It was like quitting heroin cold turkey. I would've done anything to make it stop.'

It was the dead of night, and not in the mood for sleeping, they had snuck onto the school's roof. It's must've been freezing out, but neither of them cared. When they were younger, they'd spent a lot of time together on that roof, whether planning their latest prank or comparing notes on life as the youngest X-Men. He'd preferred to lay back and gaze at the stars while she, usually on a sugar high, would tumble and bounce around the roof tiles, not caring that they were four storeys from the ground.

That particular night, though, she had curled up next to him with one arm outstretched upwards, tracing the outlines of the constellations with her fingers.

'Was it worth it, though?' he'd asked, hoping she'd give him the answer he wanted.

'What?' she quipped. 'Not having to follow Logan around like a hungry puppy or my newfound ability to accessorise with an ultra-swanky cross?'

She paused her tracing of Orion's belt to tap the small wooden symbol around her neck.

He rolled his eyes at her. 'That's not what I meant and you know it.

'I'm here, aren't I? I might not be the firecracker anymore, but I'm also not some mindless junkie. I'm all me. Will a part of me always miss the thrill of the chase, the way the world glows right after?' – she turned to him and her red eyes shone bright in the moonlight – 'Maybe, but I've found something a million times better to live for and I'm never going back.'

'And that is?'

Her reply was one word: 'Shogo.'

After her snack, Jubilee felt the world grow foggier. The saturated colours she'd perceived before were now dim and faded.

She didn't get a chance to ponder this new development as the door to the containment chamber slid open and a tetchy Wolverine stalked in. To Jubilee's dismay, her only route of escape locked firmly behind the craggy loner.

Logan didn't greet her, instead leaning against the chamber's smooth metal walls, arms folded, eyeing his protégé warily.

As the silence stretched out between them, his steely gaze was fixed on her. The Wolverine was making a point. It was a challenge, a subtle reminder that he was the alpha in the room.

Annoyed at his almost smug defiance, Jubilee let out a low snarl, pulling back her lips so he could get a real good look at her impressive dental work.

Logan snorted, unimpressed.

She snarled louder, and again he refused to rise to the bait. Frustrated, she grabbed the empty bottle at her feet, placed every drop of super-strength she had into the wind-up and hurled it at the short man's head.

Logan didn't even flinch as the bottle hit the wall an inch from his head and exploded, sending shards of bloody plastic flying everywhere.

If she were thinking clearly, Jubilee would've realised that a mutant with a healing factor and adamantium-laced bones had little to fear from blunt force trauma or plastic shrapnel.

'You needta work on your aim, kid.'

'I'm not your damn "kid"!' she spat back, fully aware of how petulant she sounded.

'You sure as hells actin' like one.'

'Isn't there a redhead somewhere you should be trying to screw?'

The insult was meant to sting, to strike a sore spot. Jubilee had been around Logan long enough to know his weaknesses, which buttons to press to get a rise. But he'd been prepared for it. He knew she'd want to piss him off, hoping he'd fly off the handle into some rage. An angry, unstable animal was easy to control and the demon in her craved dominance. But Logan wasn't planning on giving her the satisfaction, and she drew backwards in defeat.

'How much of last night do you remember, kid?'

Jubilee's eyes dropped to the floor as she tried to remember the night before. Digging through her distorted memories, what she found felt foreign and disconnected. Even worse was a bothersome thought hiding in the corner of her consciousness, urgently begging her to remember.

What it wanted her to remember Jubilee could not imagine, she chose to ignore it. But as she concentrated, one memory slowly started to become clearer, till its brightness eclipse everything else.

When Jubilee looked back up at Logan her red eyes were glowing with an unnatural brightness, and he didn't need to ask to know what memory she was reliving. Her pixie-like face was twisted by joyous satisfaction and pure lust.

She was back in that pipe-lined room, sucking on the neck of the Jersey Stalker.

'I called Raizo,' said Logan, fighting to keep his voice and gaze steady. 'He and the rest of the Forgiven will be here in a few days.'

Upon hearing that name, Jubilee recoiled from him as if she'd been slapped, guttural growls erupting from the back of her throat.

Was this creature really the girl he had sent out onto the pier less than 24 hours ago? Logan wasn't so sure anymore.

'Raizo and his damn rules,' Jubilee hissed. 'It's like being stuffed in small box without air.'

'You were fine with those rules yesterday mornin', darlin'.'

'I was a fool! Last night it felt like coming home. I was warm and awake for the first time in months…' – her voice grew unnaturally earnest – '…everything was so bright, so loud, so alive…'

'None of that's real, kid. That's the addiction talkin'. '

'How would you know? You never truly knew what it was like. Cyke and Nemesis took it from you and now you wanna take it from me again.'

Agitated, her words came in manic bursts: 'The blood in that bottle… was your blood… you and your fuckin' mutant blood… I hate it… and I HATE YOU!'

Fuelled by anger, Jubilee lunged at her friend talons-first, but was slowed by the mutant blood coursing through her system. Logan easily deflected her blows and threw her back on the bed.

When she moved to jump him again, the Canadian brawler extended his claws.

'We both know I won't hurt you, darlin', but I can slow you down long enough for Raizo to drag your ass back from hell.'

Inching slowly backwards, Logan called for Hank to open the door. As it closed behind him, he could hear Jubliee pounding desperately on the reinforced metal.

True to his word, Raizo arrived a day and half later, with Visigoth and Inka in tow. Never one for meaningless small-talk the elder vampire turned down Ororo's offer to rest after his and his companions' long journey and asked to be shown immediately to his wayward student.

Jubilee's containment cell was wrecked. The bed lay in pieces on the floor next to the limping side table, bed linen torn and strewn across the room. The walls were decorated with thousands of faint scratches and splatters of blood.

In the middle of the chaos paced a greyish ghost-like Jubilee, her hair, an oily mess, her clothes close to falling apart.

'This is not good,' said Inka, shaking her cloaked head in disbelief from the relative safety of the observation booth. 'She's almost completely converted back.'

'Yeah, kid's been fighting us every step of the way,' said Logan. 'Rockslide and Drake had to hold her down to get some blood down her gullet. She nearly flew the coop yesterday, too, before I knocked some sense back into her.'

Sensing Logan's faith in his surrogate daughter waiver ever so slightly, Inka rested a reassuring hand on his arm.

'The path of a Forgiven is not always smooth and untroubled,' she said. 'At times we all falter. Jubilation might be a mere infant by our measure, but she is also strong of heart. It's not how we fall that shapes us, but how we stand…'

'That's all well and good, Inka,' Visigoth interrupted. 'You just keep spouting that Hallmark crap, and let me handle it. Let's see her try and stand after a taste of this.'

The brutish vampire opened his cloak aside to reveal his beloved mace.

The sudden sight of that spike weapon prompted Wolverine and Beast to surge forward – but Raizo moved between the X-Men and his second-in-command, raising his left hand to silence any protest.

'I do not believe violence will be necessary in this case. Logan, did you bring what I ask for?'

With one cautionary eye on Visigoth and his mace, Logan reached into his breast pocket, pulling out something the others could not see to and handing it to the Forgiven leader.

'Thank you. Now I believe it is about time I had a word with Jubilation.'

As Raizo entered the containment cell, Jubilee recoiled to the furthest corner of the room. Instinctively she raised her hands to paff the elder vampire – a reflex action in cases of extreme emotional distress.

Raizo could not help but grin at the infantile display. While he had never known her in her younger years, when she still possessed her mutant gift, he had heard the tales told by Madripoor Hand ninjas about a certain feral and his explosive sidekick.

'Now Jubilation, we both know that particular tactic will not work.'

'Stay away from me!' she yelled as Raizo took a step towards her, and she tried to sink even further back into the corner.

'There is no need to be alarmed. I will not hurt you.'

'Screw you, I'm not letting you get into my head again.'

She pressed her hands to her ears, desperately trying to block out the siren sound of his voice.

Raizo took another step forwards. 'I believe you have lost sight of your true path. This mindless thing is not you.'

'It's what I want to be. It's what I was meant to be.'

Closer still he moved. 'Maybe, but have you given any consideration as to what this might cost you?'

Jubilee screwed her eyes up tightly. 'Cost? This won't cost me anything. I'm taking back my birthright. I'm not some Twilight wannabe. I was sired by royal blood. You and your toothless, starving vermin stole that from me.'

'Ah yes, forgive me, your majesty' – Raizo dipped in a mocking bow – 'I nearly forgot I was in the presence of royalty. Sired by the great son of Dracula himself. Tell me, how is Xarus faring these days?'

'Screw you,' she growled.

Raizo took one more step and was now standing right before her. Jubilee stifled the tiniest of whimpers as the demon inside her cowered in the presence of the elder statesman.

'If you continue down this path, it is true that you will gain much: power, adoration, wealth. But I can promise you will lose something priceless.'

Jubilee closed her eyes tightly and for a moment she thought Raizo would try to touch her. She jerked back in anticipation, but instead she felt something land lightly at her bare feet.

When she dared sneak a peek, she saw that Raizo was already making his way towards the chamber door, without sparing a single glance over his shoulder as he left.

Tentatively, Jubliee reached out a thin, pale hand to pick up the small square paper Raizo had dropped. On one side of the glossy paper was written a place (Beach, SoCal) and a date (15 May 2014). She recognised Logan's angular handwriting instantly.

Intrigued now, she turned the paper over to see the other side. It only took a second. She recoiled in horror at what she saw and dropped it as if it was poison.

Everyone in the observation booth, with the exception of Raizo and Logan, stared down in amazement as the rage-fuelled vampire crumbled before them, wrenching out soul-baring wails.

Hank moved to one of the monitors to get a better look, to see what had caused this sudden change in the girl. Zooming in on the paper, he wanted to kick himself for not having thought of that simple solution earlier. It was the only thing that could have brought her back from the brink.

There on the high-definition screen was a photo of a delighted Shogo gummily smiling at the camera as his mom held him close to her.

Hank started towards the door control, moving to comfort his young broken friend, but was stopped by Inka.

'Give her a minute.'

Inside the chamber, the fog in Jubilee's mind was now lifted, and she looked up at the observation booth for the first time since her imprisonment.

Her voice sounded unnaturally quiet as she whispered: 'Raizo… help me, please…'