Disclaimer: I don't own any characters except Irbis and several innocent short-lived bystanders; everything else is Marvel's only.
6. Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas
Irbis frowned as Jubilee surreptitiously grabbed the cup from the neighbouring table. A group of teens had just left it, not bothering to take the trays away.
"I can't believe you're…" Kitty laughed, as Jubilee winked. "You cheapskate!"
Irbis tucked the shopping bags under the table. She didn't really want to have anything, and Kitty had just wanted to sit down for a bit before they finished off the Christmas shopping, but Jubilee had been complaining of thirst for a while now and so they'd gone up to the fast food restaurants area.
"What is she doing?"
"Asking for a refill," Kitty laughed, and turned to enjoy the theatre.
"So gross," the teenager was now proclaiming loud and clear. " You put your finger in it. I saw it! Yew!"
"She never pays for a drink if she can get away with pretending she wants a refill."
With the widest smile, Jubilee joined them.
"You sure you don't want one," but she was already putting up her feet up on an empty chair nearby and relaxing, sipping gleefully through the straw.
And Irbis just couldn't help thinking about Creed. The girl's ease, confidence and self-entitlement (so similar to Creed's, really) flushed her as if she had the very man in front of her. Irbis used to be like that, confident. She used to enjoy having the world's eyes on her, admiring and respecting her. She used to either lay low in order to be invisible, studying the folks around her, or burst forth and command the world! The only thing that used to make her self-conscious was the possibility of blundering badly in public. Even when she was in a stubborn this-or-nothing mood, she tried to be as discrete as possible, to avoid reproach, although she might still send said reproach to hell if it was to have things her way.
Ever since arriving in this world of mutants, though, she had become something else entirely: shy, self-conscious, afraid. Always afraid. Oh, and ashamed, let's not forget that one. Because she knew it was wrong, how she felt about Creed. If she hadn't promised him, she should just ditch him. And yet well she knew that, even if she had promised him nothing, she still wouldn't have ditched him just like that. No. It shamed her to no end that she didn't really want to get rid of him. A sociopath, a monster, a… a handsome, strong, irresistible man. What a shame!
Shaking her head in a vain attempt to get her obsession off her mind, Irbis looked around. There was a blond guy smooching some girl on the other side and Irbis's mind immediately compared him to Creed: the slightly different hair colour and size, the slim unimpressive body, the lax affection he was showering the girl with… it all seemed to her so unlike Creed, it almost revolted her.
"So, what's missing?" Jubilee asked, glancing at the paper bags. "We got plenty already!"
Holding back a sigh, she wondered where he'd be spending Christmas Eve… Would he go to Wausau? She hoped not! She'd hate for him to go there, expecting a relaxed homely Christmas packed with sweets and cakes and… and instead coming home to an empty house. If only she could have thought of an excuse to leave for the holiday… But the X-Men would find it strange, no doubt. And anyway, the man had been away, lost in his killing business for almost three months now! What if he was too busy to stop by Wausau? She'd be completely lonely – abandoned! – in the Wausau house.
"Hellooooo!" Irbis looked at the grinning girl, startled. "Day dreaming about your Mike much, huh?"
Irbis smiled coyly. Pay more attention to your friends, she censured herself. And why should she worry about the man so much when he clearly hadn't worried enough not even to send her a text message checking on her? But as she walked behind the two girls, she felt lonely. Friends, she called them. But it wasn't like the friends she used to have. Her choir friends, her highschool friends, her university friends, her horse-riding friends, her bar friends… She could spend the entire week going out in the evening, each day a different group of friends! Laughing, dancing, singing, playing… living. Even the men over at the bar where she went with her grandfather, where they played fado. She was the youngest, most people there being in their thirties, forties, seventies, but she was welcomed, she laughed at their jokes, they celebrated her playing… Ah, good old days. Good old friends. All gone now. Forever gone.
"Hey, Isabel, what do you think, huh?" And Jubilee showed her a set of red silk lingerie drowned in tiny black bows. "Is it her face or what?!"
She hadn't caught who that present was supposed to be for so she just smiled, forcing a non-committed chuckle. Kitty laughed and called the teenager crazy, but yeah, why not! She couldn't wait to see her face! Whose?, Isabel wondered. But who cared, anyway? Jubilee and Kitty were the only two people she got on with, and only because of the motormouth teenager. She drowned the last sigh and forced her mood up. The girls were her friends, she insisted, freshly made ones.
"Sorry, I just remembered something," Kitty and Jubilee looked back. Forcing herself to relive the confidence she used to feel with her friends, those now lost to her, she grinned and pushed the bags she'd been carrying for the girls back into their hands. "I need to buy something… can you give me twenty minutes? I meet wid you in de entrance, ok?"
Jubilee smirked, curiousity picked.
"A little something for Mike? I knew you…"
Irbis lifted a demanding hand that stopped the girl.
"Twenty minutes, Jubes. Widout games." And knowing well enough who she was dealing with: "You don't follow me, understand?"
Kitty laughed and the teenager stuck her tongue out.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let yourself be… la-ra
The MP3 player had been regurgitating that song for over three hours now, but Irbis wouldn't be able to understand the rest of its lyrics in a thousand years. Not that she cared much about it right now: it was the sad, bleak melody that had first attracted her and that was what she had her heart set on memorising. By tomorrow morning, she figured, she'd have it committed to memory. Then, if she felt like singing to it, she'd just invent some Portuguese lyrics.
She wondered lazily how Creed would react if she asked him to help her make sense of the lyrics. He'd call her stupid and moron, naturally, but would he help? Her fingers essayed playing the song on her bed covers. It was easier to adapt a song she liked to the piano – learn it, basically – if she was actually playing, but she didn't want to reveal to the others she could play.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas…
She new what merry Christmas meant – you can't not know it no matter where you live in the world – but it sounded like a sad little Christmas in the song. She essayed a enjoy your sad Christmas in Portuguese but it din't quite have the same sound. For a moment she considered checking out the real meaning of the lyrics and actually learning them. Bruna did that all the time… she had been in the choir, just like Irbis, but her love was English pop music (as in English-lyrics pop music). Of course, Bruna was good at English. Irbis would often learn the melody and accompany Bruna either at the piano or at the girl's guitar. Every now and then Bruna would also teach her the lyrics… a few of them Irbis didn't even care to know what they meant, she'd just learn them by heart, confident she was producing the right sounds thanks to her friend's indications. If the merry little Christmas song had stupid lyrics that didn't match its melody's mood, Irbis could always learn them as is and ignore whatever they meant. Of course she needed someone to help her and correct her when she said the words wrong.
Would Creed have done it? Well, assuming he liked the song, that is, otherwise he surely wouldn't. Unless he heard her and got annoyed at her mistakes and started correcting her. Yes, that would be the way to go about it.
The knock at the door had Irbis freeze, breathing caught at the throat.
"Isabel?"
Ah, it was Jubilee. Like duh (to use the girl's expression), who else could it be? Switching off the music, Irbis opened the door, noticing the piece of cake on the girl's hands.
"Thought you might want some. Are you sure you don't want to come down and join the fun?"
Irbis opened the door wider and welcomed the girl in with a sorry but I'm fine here. Just to be on the safe side, she had lit up a couple of candles on the desk, next to an image of Our Lady. Jubilee laughed, unamused, when she saw it.
"I can't believe it's really true." She put the plastic plate down on the desk and rolled her eyes. "You're really spending the night praying, then? I mean, for real?!"
Irbis swallowed down the smirk at the girl's expression and made herself as virtuous as possible. "It was a tradition in my house… Presents only in de morning, because de night is to think about Jesus Cristo."
It wasn't a lie. And her Grandma Lilia did light candles in her little home altar and pray a whole rosary before they went to the church, at night, and again after returning. But Irbis wanted an excuse to hide from the joy downstairs. She didn't fit there, with all those people she hardly knew, Kitty and Jubilee aside. Worse, though, it was her first Christmas away from home, from family. She could almost feel herself back at her aunt's house… her Aunt Paula had a detached house with the large basement transformed into a garage that could hold up to three cars and nicknacks on top of it. It was all transformed into one huge dining room for the family, with the grownups crowded around the long crooked table, uneven benches for a seat… and the kids prancing about a smaller table, less crooked and with chairs, to avoid the game of trying to topple the bench and everyone on it. She still remembered the first year she'd been allowed at the grownups table… And yes, she would be praying most of the night: one prayer for each person she had left behind. Shaking her head to hold back a sudden urge to cry, Irbis went to the desk and opened its drawer.
"Well, you are here so… I bought two… is not really presents, just a little thing. For you and Kitty."
Jubilee blushed, speechless for once.
"You shouldn't have…" she droned out, not picking the two little gifts. "I didn't… I mean, we didn't…"
Serious now, Irbis insisted. "I don't want presents, Jubilee. I bought dis because I want to give you and Kitty, not because I want to receive something, you understand? Now please."
The girl hugged her all of a sudden and Irbis felt like crying again. There was always a big pile of presents, every Christmas. Not that one person got a lot… well, with so many cousins and aunts and uncles, the children did get over half a dozen but… She remembered how she and the other children were the ones who distributed the presents around, come the morning, over breakfast. It was always a long breakfast because you waited eagerly for the person to unwrap the present and say something before you could run back to the pile for more gifts. She remembered feeling so excited over the smiles – even the pretend ones. Oh, and opening the presents for the adults! And then, when she started being too old to distribute gifts, when she was twelve or thirteen and there were a bunch of eight year olds to fulfill her old task, she had taken over the next task: giving the kids the presents and informing them of whom to give them to, enforcing the rule of waiting for the unwrapping, for the smile, for enjoying that person's happiness.
"Thank you," Irbis forced a happy smile, as happy as she could muster. "I'm very happy dat you think of me and bring me cake. Thank you."
Jubilee was embarrassed and shrugged the thankfulness away before leaving. As she closed the door, Irbis got the MP3 player from her pocket and played the song again. Then she got her mobile phone and sat on the bed. She should try to get online and write something on fer Facebook account, as well as on Mike's. She sighed, wondering if Creed had a Facebook account.
"Merry Cristmas," she wrote and sent the message.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas…
With a sigh she looked at the imageof the saint and crossed herself.
"Please, my Our lady, watch over all of them." She said in her native Portuguese, as a prelude to the individual prayers and already thinking about some less close friends or family members (like the cousins who lived up north and only came down once every two or three years) who might end up not getting their prayed due.
"Every single one of them."
Irbis sighed and gave in.
"Including him… even if I know you disapprove."
Fair warning: there will be a two week hiatus before I restart posting. See you then.
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