Running for Home - 17. October 16, 2021

October 16, 2021

I ended up hanging with Jubes almost all day today. She tried to recruit me to help her with shopping for some new Hallowe’en decorations for the School this morning, and of course I tried to beg off. I mean, seriously, why the fuck would she have thought I’d be even remotely interested in helping with something like that? It turns out it was just a lame excuse to get off campus, just the two of us. She said she’d pay for lunch, so I made a big deal of sighing and relenting like she was completely ruining my plans for the day. It was the opposite of the truth, really. I’d been itching for a reason to get away.

We did end up going shopping, after all, but more for ourselves than for the School. We had a good time. Well, I did at the very least. She was a lot more low-key than I was expecting. I wasn’t exactly sure what was up with her so I asked. She just said she was tired of having to play the bubbly, uplifting role that everyone constantly expected. Part of her just wanted to be alone, but she knew she’d just spend the whole time ruminating over everything that was bothering her. So she asked me to come along as much because she needed the company as because she knew I’d ‘get it’ without going all Mother Hen on her. It was a big moment for me, when she said that. I’ve had a lot of anxiety of being back at the School, about working with these people who were once friends and teachers, later enemies, and now something I don’t know where to place. But there was Jubilee, looking at me over that table of late fall sweaters she was browsing and showed me her vulnerability. Not just that, though. She showed it to me because she felt safe with me. Jubilee trusted me.

We didn’t really talk much for the half hour after that. She needed the quiet, I think, and I needed the time to process it. A couple weeks ago there was a part of me that started realizing that some of my colleagues here might be accepting me. Maybe enough that I might be able to make some friends again. Someday, eventually. With my history here and my betrayal to Magneto’s side, it will be an uphill battle. But for things to progress this much, this fast… Even coming from Jubilee, it was a shock to the system.

We ended up getting some greasy burgers and fries for lunch at this pub next door to the mall. The food was so good, but so bad at the same time. I could practically feel my pulse growing sluggish and arteries clogging as we ate. We were chatting relatively cheerfully, but after a while she went silent again. She started pushing ketchup around on her plate with a fry, deep in thought.

She asked me where I was for the six years after I disappeared from that maximum security mutant jail, before I resurfaced as a writer almost seven years ago. I sucked in a deep breath. I didn't really know what to say. I'm not supposed to talk about it. It was top secret to begin with, and once I was disavowed and later brought back it was supposed to become a time in my life that never existed, beyond the event horizon of one big black hole. But it's hard to erase something that left such deep scars, such deep... It's hard to think about it, even now, seven years later.

But Jubilee trusted me, and I was starting to realize that I need someone I can trust again, too. I can't keep living like this, alone and only relying on myself. Even with Dom, it was never… I thought I trusted him, I really did. But I think after we got our pardons, after Iraq, I never really forgave him for abandoning me to save his own ass. He could have saved me, saved both of us if he hadn’t been such a fucking coward. I really and truly believe that, so I guess deep down I never really trusted him again. Or perhaps I did, but when I was willing to rebuild it he instead crushed it with his willingness to go back to crime. After he got out of jail two years ago my trust was probably broken beyond repair, but I was in denial. I was just taping up the cracks. Fuck, I didn’t even have any super-glue left to really try and fake it.

So I told Jubilee. I was vague on details, of course, but I told her enough that she could have a vague understanding of what I went through. I told her that our team members were hand-picked by Mystique. Told her how the government sent us on covert missions that they edged closer and closer to suicide. I told her that we lost people, killed in action in Scotland, in Kuwait, in Iraq. I told her how they abandoned me when that final disastrous mission fell apart. I told her how I was disavowed and languished in the dark depths of a secret jail for months before Mystique managed to get me freed, in defiance of her orders. I didn't tell Jubes what had happened to me while I was in there, what they did to me to try and get me to talk. She didn't ask me for any further details because she could see it would be too hard for me. I told her about the pardon. She already knew I'd got one, but didn't know how I'd managed it.

We got up and started shopping again. We needed a break from the heavy stuff, and apparently Jubes thought that the best way to cut the tension was by dragging me into Victoria's Secret. She proceeded to tell the sales associates that I was her boyfriend and I needed lessons on how to pick out lingerie for her. It was a nightmare. Of course I started arguing, and they tried to coddle me until I yelled in their faces that I'm gay and if the front of that thong wasn't going bulge out enough to just barely cover a guy's package and still leave at least a tiny bit to the imagination, I didn't give a fuck how sexy it may or may not look on Jubes.

Of course, that provoked even more laughter from everyone. Bitches. So I decided I'd try and turn the tables on Jubes and asked her who it was she’s trying to impress. I guess that was a bit of a mistake because she just sighed and the wind kind of left her sails. She's not seeing anyone. As we left the store and began to wander around the mall again she told me that she hasn’t even tried to date in a long time because of what’s happened to her. When she had tried, she couldn't bring herself to continue beyond the first couple dates.

Years ago she’d had serious feelings for a guy named Everett Thomas, Synch, at the end of high school. I didn’t know him. I guess he came to Xavier’s shortly after I left. He had his eyes on Monet St. Croix, though, and it had hurt. If Monet treated Everett anything like she treated pretty much everyone else – the stuck up rich princess act – then I have no idea what this guy saw in her, other than her tits. Well, maybe she was just a little bit beautiful and smart too, but still. Anyway, Jubes said Ev tried too hard to be the hero once and ended up dead, blown to bits by a bomb that Emma’s bitch older sister had planted.

Jubilee’s next serious relationship happened while she was living in L.A. after graduation. Get this, she actually tried being an actress for a short while. She said she had some great stories about the acting life, but she’d tell me another time. Anyway, I guess she fell for some guy named Shane. She found out later that he was the leader of a gang. He ended up getting shot by some rivals after his boys busted up one of their dealers. I have a suspicion that Jubes may have been in on that bust-up, but I didn't want to press. Jubes also had some on-again, off-again feelings for her friend Angelo Espinosa. They had flirted a lot, and were even roommates for most of the time she spent in LA, but they had never crossed the line to attempt a relationship.

Angelo was dead, too, killed by crucifixion along with a bunch of other mutants on the very lawn of this school. It was an attack by the mutant hate-group the Church of Humanity. Jubilee had been nailed up too, but was one of the survivors. It weighed on her heavily. To make things worse, when she went to visit the cemetery Angelo had been interred in, soon after the funeral, they were in the process of exhuming his body. The assholes who ran the cemetery didn't believe that Mutants should be laid in the same sanctified earth as normal humans and had a fit when they found out the recently interred were all mutants. They even tried to sue because they weren’t notified the corpses were mutants, but thankfully the case was thrown out of court. Angelo and the other victims ended up being cremated and the ashes scattered in the lake behind the School, but the incident shook Jubilee to the core.

Part of the reason Jubes is only serving as an emergency reserve X-man is because she doesn't trust herself to deal with the vilest bigots and problems anymore. Her powers weren’t just plasma fireworks anymore. She's leveled entire buildings in sheer fury during some raids on the Church and its militia, the Purifiers. She didn't know if there had been anyone inside, and in the midst of the battles she hadn't really cared about their lives. It was best for everyone that she not be a team regular until she could get past her trauma.

Jubilee turned to me at that point and gave me a sober smile. She said that understood so deeply now the anger, no, the rage that I'd felt in the wake of Stryker's assault on the School. She understood why Magneto was able to convince me to join the Brotherhood. She understood why I still stayed with them, even after Alcatraz. The rage, the hate, it takes a long time to go away. I disagreed. It never really goes away. I pointed out that you can come to terms with it, but an ember of it will still be there with you for the rest of your life. She agreed, but she said she still has a long way to go.

It took me years but I truly think I’ve managed to move past hating non-powered humans. Well, like I was just saying, moved past it as far as I’d ever be able to. The hate has given way to more of a blanket distrust. Not paranoia, but just… distrust, vigilance, caution. It seems kind of bass-ackwards that I, a mutant of catastrophic destructive potential, would find myself more anxious about non-powered humans than other mutants, but that's how things are for me. The therapy after being rescued from Iraq has helped a lot with both the hate and the paranoia, and the writings I’ve published in response to my shifting views have been cathartic in ways I’d never imagined.

Jubilee told me that she wasn't the only one that shared her feelings about me. All of our closest friends did. There was that word again – friends. She said Piotr understood. His anger over the human-mutant experimentation that destroyed the lives of his brother and sister ran deep enough that it had come so close to boiling over into utter hatred that he left the X-men to live with Magneto's Acolytes for a period until he could come to terms with himself. Rachel understood. She came from an alternate timeline where anti-mutant hatred had grown to the point of mutants being hunted down and either executed on sight or placed in concentration camps if they were weak enough to be controlled and enslaved. Rachel was taken as a child and brainwashed into being a mutant hunter, capturing and eliminating the very people with whom she belonged. Jean-Paul understood. He was an abused orphan, and was taken advantage of as a teen by a predator dangling the carrot of love. He knew what it was like to have your sense of self-worth inflated to immense proportions only to crash when you realize it was all a sham. Xi'an understood. She was an orphan, too, a survivor of brutal under-age rape and was forced to participate in crime by her warlord uncle and brother to protect her younger siblings until the X-men helped them escape. She and Jean-Paul both understood feeling betrayed by those who were supposed to care and protect you, that there was no one left to turn to, no one to trust, and feeling like the only option left was to lash out.

Jubilee looked up towards the skylight and took a deep breath. She said she probably shouldn't have shared some of that stuff because they weren't her stories to tell, but she figured they'd each understand. She said they’d all read my writings and opinion pieces in the news about the continuing toxic effects of fear, resentment and hatred on the mutant community despite the advances we’d made, how it has now turned into a generational problem like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and race relations in America. They’d read my work supporting a new Third Way approach to mutant-human relations. It might not be what Xavier’s dream was, but this School was no longer Charles Xavier’s school, and they had all grown up. Dreams were nice, but they had much more realistic expectations and goals now. There was still a huge uphill battle to fight, but it wasn’t the same fight it used to be. Then Jubes turned and looked at me with these serious but soft eyes and said “Johnny, you’re not alone, not anymore.”

I started to choke up. I'm glad we were near the mall entrance where I'd parked my car, because I rushed the hell out of there and barely held it together until I had the driver's door closed behind me. I completely lost it, bawling into my forearms against the steering wheel. It’s hard to describe exactly what I was feeling in that moment, beyond being completely overwhelmed with my emotions. There was the expected self-flagellation and self-loathing – did I deserve this? Could I really ever be forgiven for that long period of rage and betrayal and nihilism? For the crimes, the lives lost? Some in the name of hatred and revolution, others in the name of self-preservation? There was the relief, that they weren’t just putting up with me for Emma’s sake and weren’t including me just to prevent some possible meltdown they suspected I might have. There was the comfort that they might actually understand why my path went the way it did, even if they didn’t agree with the specifics of my choices and actions. There was vindication, that my work, my serious journalistic work, had been read and thought about and maybe even well-received by the people here – and if that can happen here, it could happen anywhere. And there was, for the first time in a long time, hope.

Hope.

Fucking hope.

I… I can’t write any more about this, not right now. I’m turning into a mess again just thinking about it.