Work Text:
The Sisterhood Of Teenage X-Men
Hisako barely had time to armor up before the yellow-clad human missile crashed violently into her, knocking her to the ground. Her armor protected her against things that could cause dire injuries, in general, but didn't completely block the effect of kinetic force -- she still lost her breath with a "Whuff!" as she hit the ground.
Her assailant... proved to be a young adult woman, a few years older than Hisako herself, dressed in a yellow trenchcoat. "Hi, Hisako!" Jubilee said cheerfully, as if she were not sitting on top of Hisako, or had not just knocked into Hisako with such force that even her armored form hadn't saved her from toppling over. "Didn't know you guys were back already."
"Hi," Hisako responded, somewhat out of breath. How had Jubilee pulled that off, anyway? She no longer had any kind of powers, and when she'd had them, they'd been explosives and fireworks, not super speed or... whatever that had been. "What are you doing?"
And then she saw the pink, shiny rollerblades on Jubilee's feet. This explained much.
"Practicing," Jubilee said. She got to her feet and offered Hisako a hand. Presumably, if roller blades were involved, Jubilee had not acquired new superpowers through some nefarious means and gone insane as a result and was not in fact attacking the X-Men. She was probably just being, well, Jubilee. So Hisako let her armor fade, and took the older girl's hand.
"Practicing for what?"
"Roller derby!" Jubilee half-walked, half-skated backward. "You should try it!"
"I don't know," Hisako said. "You're probably a lot better at it than me, and you just crashed into me."
"But it's totally easy to learn! Come on. I need you to be on my team!"
"Team?"
"Come on, don't be a stick in the mud. Try it!"
"I don't have any skates."
"I bet you'd fit mine. And they're not called skates, they're called roller blades."
"I heard that the company doesn't want anyone to call them roller blades. You're supposed to call them inline skates."
"Yeah, because that's not totally lame or anything." Jubilee snorted. "They're victims of their success." She sat down on the floor, removing her skates. "Look at us, Norm Osborne's totally ripping off our name so he can have his team of X-Men wannabes, and are we suing over it? No! Because if you have an awesome name, other people are going to use it like it's a word, and you lose your trademark just because you were so awesome. Rollerblade needed to come up with a lamer name if they wanted to keep it. Like Kleenex. Does anyone see Puffs Plus complaining that you can't call a tissue for blowing your nose a puff? No, because no one does, because that would be dumb. Puffs only wishes they had Kleenex's problem." Skates removed, she handed them to Hisako. "Come on! Try them on, it'll be great!"
"I don't know..."
"Is there anything else fun to do on this rock?"
"I was gonna go to my room and study."
Jubilee made a face. "By definition, studying is not fun. So you had nothing fun lined up to do instead, admit it."
"Well, yeah, but--"
"So go on! Try on the skates! It's a new skill for you to learn! You know, Wolvie told me about one time Kitty Pryde fought Magneto with roller skates? They weren't roller blades back then, because you know Kitty is completely too old for roller blades to have been around when she was a kid."
It was odd that Jubilee should mention Kitty Pryde, of all people. Maybe she felt the same way Hisako did. Hisako had read enough of the X-Men's history to know that she, Jubilee and Kitty had something in common -- they were the girls who had been X-Men as teens at times when the rest of the team was made up of adults (or at least college-age late teens), and they'd all been protégés of Wolverine. Hisako felt as if they formed some sort of weird sorority. But she'd never had the nerve to mention it to Kitty, who had been intimidatingly competent and adult, to the point where Hisako could hardly imagine her ever having been a teenager. Let alone wearing roller skates. Let alone fighting Magneto in roller skates. How would that have even worked, anyway?
She hadn't had much chance to talk to Jubilation Lee, since the older girl was no longer a mutant, no longer an X-Man, and had only recently become a resident of Utopia. It was apparent from their brief interactions, though, that Jubilee was nothing like Kitty. In fact, Hisako was starting to feel that she, herself, was more mature than Jubilee, despite the age difference. "How exactly could anyone have fought Magneto in roller skates? Weren't they made of metal?"
Jubilee shrugged. "Ask Wolvie. Or ask Magneto, since apparently he lives here now too. Don't you think that's totally bizarre, by the way? I mean, I managed to get over Frosty throwing herself at Cyke, but Magneto joining the X-Men is just freaky." She looked down at Hisako's feet. "Come on, you haven't even put them on yet! Just try it, I bet you'll love it."
Hisako sighed. "Have you ever been tested for ADHD?"
Jubilee just laughed. "You know you are going to try on those blades sooner or later. They're calling to you, Hisako... they're singing in your mind... 'try us... try us... you know we'll be totally awesome...'"
"If roller skates were actually singing in my mind, I think I'd have to go report it to the Professor or Ms. Frost," Hisako said, but she put the skates on. Maybe she shouldn't do this; maybe she should be trying hard to be her own person, to differentiate herself from Jubilee and Shadowcat. But the fact that there was, in fact, a defined role for "teen girl X-Man who's friends with Wolverine" actually made her feel somewhat better, somewhat less lost and out of her depth. She'd always wanted to be an X-Man, but the fact that she was one of the few left with powers after M-Day had thrust her into a position of prominence on the main team that she hadn't felt ready for. What the hell was a teenage girl doing going to alien planets to stop their inhabitants from blowing up the Earth? She was utterly out of her league here.
Except that she did have a league of her own... the one that Kitty, lost now in saving the Earth from the Breakworld's attempt to destroy it, and Jubilee, now powerless, had both belonged to. And she couldn't make friends with Kitty or seek her out as a mentor, not now that Kitty was light years away, but she could make friends with Jubilee.
Jubilee helped her to her feet again. "Okay, now the thing is, you can't fall over as long as you're moving and keeping your balance," she said. "If you stay still too long you have to learn how to balance, but as long as you're moving... whoops." Hisako, despite her attempt to keep moving, had fallen over.
"I think there's something off about your instructions there."
"You have to move the right way. But it's easy once you get the hang of it! You just move your legs like this..." Jubilee attempted to demonstrate, but without roller blades on her legs, attempting to move as if she did have roller blades proved slightly hazardous to her own balance. She didn't fall, but then, she was well-known to be one of the more acrobatic X-Men.
"That's not helping."
"Look, just try it. You'll get the hang of it quickly, I promise."
Hisako did not get the hang of it quickly. The second time she fell over, she began to seriously wonder why she was doing this. The third time, she actually said so. "Why did I let you talk me into this?"
"Why don't you armor up?" Jubilee asked, as if the basic problem here was just that Hisako was getting hurt when she fell down and not that rollerblading was vastly more difficult than she had led Hisako to believe.
Hisako tried to picture herself, in her armor... in rollerblades. No. "Because it'll look stupid," she complained.
"Stupider than hurting yourself?"
Stupider than letting you demand that I try this when I don't even want to and I know I just look like a complete idiot? On the other hand, if she was going to look stupid when she tried to rollerblade because she was awful at it, and she was going to look stupid when she fell down, did it really matter as much if she also looked stupid because she was doing it in armor? Anyway, Kitty Pryde had fought Magneto in roller skates. Or so Jubilee claimed, anyway. Hisako thought that maybe she would confirm that story with Wolverine. Though not with Magneto, because the idea of actually talking to Magneto was terrifying.
"Fine," she said in an aggrieved, put-upon tone. She summoned her armor and immediately fell over, having not been balanced properly for the sudden extra weight. The armor protected her from physical damage, though, so instead of scraping her knee or feeling a sense of shock and dizziness, it was more as if she'd just tumbled onto a bed.
It wasn't easier to roller blade with the armor on; in fact in some ways it was harder, since she wasn't entirely used to how her balance felt with the armor on when she was walking, let alone roller blading. But at least falling over no longer hurt. And with that aspect of it removed, she was able to take a few more risks, develop more confidence, and before long was skating around with reasonable ease. Except for the part where Jubilee hadn't ever taught her how to stop.
She nearly mowed Jubilee down in her attempt to do just that. "Whoa!" Jubilee grabbed Hisako's armored arm as she dodged out of the way. "Next lesson, stopping!"
"Shouldn't that have been the first lesson?" Hisako complained, but it was more pro forma than anything else. Actually, this had been fun.
"That's what gravity and friction are for," Jubilee said. She put an arm around Hisako's neck and gently pulled, directing Hisako like she might tug a shopping cart. "We need to get more people on our team--"
This was the second time she'd said 'team'. "Our team?" Hisako repeated. How was there supposed to be a team involved in this?
"--and we need to talk to Wolvie about some equipment. Hey, are you old enough to buy beer?"
Hisako shook her head. She wasn't sure what she was negating, though -- the buying beer, which she was not old enough to do, or the concept of roller blading teams, or everything. And at some level, she wasn't negating any of it (well, except for the beer). Jubilee had, apparently, some sort of wild and crazy idea that involved teams, and equipment, and probably more than one person rollerblading, and Hisako wouldn't have any interest in any of that except that Jubilee had invited her to be the first one aboard. She could grumble, just to make sure Jubilee knew that she wasn't Jubilee's sidekick or anything, but Jubilee was plainly driving this train and Hisako was definitely going to come along for the ride. She'd had very little interaction with the older X-Men outside the ones on her specific sub-team -- she knew Ms. Frost and Cyclops and Beast and Wolvie, and she knew her agemates on the trainee teams. Being taken under one of the older X-Men's wings as a buddy, a partner in crime, when that older person wasn't a full-fledged adult like Wolverine but someone closer to her own age, like a big sister... that was fun, and it really didn't even matter that Jubilee wasn't technically an X-Man, or a mutant, anymore.
"Okay, but I'm not going to call you nee-san," she mumbled under her breath. Jubilee, babbling about her roller derby plans, didn't even hear her.