X-Men Visiting Hours

She spent M-Day in a daze. She felt it when her powers shut off, felt the change in how her body worked now that it didn't need to power her energy conversion. She tested it, just to be sure, but she knew the results before hand. She couldn't even summon the slightest gleam of coloured lights, much less any of the more useful aspects of her powers. She watched the news, but the only thing she really took in was that it had happened all over the country. She eventually forced herself to eat something and went to the Galleria Mall, seeking some sense of comfort or closure in her old haunt. That was where her life as a mutant began, it just seemed right to go there at its end. She cried herself to sleep curled on the floor in the abandoned mall, only to wake up screaming and retching long before morning. She'd dreamed of death, the deaths of people she loved. First, it had been friends she'd lost since her manifestation- Blink teleporting time after time after time to destroy the Phalanx and destroying herself in the process, Ev's crumpled body after Adrienne Frost's bomb exploded, being captured by the Church of Humanity with Angelo, the glimpses she'd caught of him while they both hung crucified on the mansion lawn, watching him die in the medlab, then watching as his body was exhumed from a family plot paid for before he was born because the cemetery didn't want mutants buried there. Then she had dreamed the deaths of other mutants she knew - Logan convulsing as his body succumbed to adamantium poisoning minus his healing factor, Monet tumbling out of the sky as she lost her power of flight, Paige getting caught mid-husk, Kitty de-powering in the middle of a solid object, and finally Jono's blood spilling across the floor as his powers winked off. In the dream, she had grabbed him and screamed for someone to help him. She'd still been able to feel his blood pooling across her hands when she woke up and she barely managed to scramble to the nearest potted plant before losing what little food was in her system.

She knew that logically Jono was unlikely to die that way. If his powers winked off, his body would probably be just an empty shell, no blood to spill, no bacteria to cause decay, nothing more than an incredibly realistic unfinished sculpture without his psi-fire to animate it. But her dreams had been worst case scenarios, even she could recognise that.

After three nights, she had decided to call the mansion, knowing she couldn't go on like this, hoping that she could verify that they were safe. Except Jono, they all were. Now she dreamed of lost friends and losing Jono every night. She doubted she'd gotten more than three hours of sleep a night since M-Day. She tried throwing herself into her work when she got back to New York, but the dreams continued. She knew Scott would have told her if Jono had died, but she had to see him to believe it. By all rights, even with the technology available at the mansion, he should have been dead immediately when his powers turned off. That they had managed to get him hooked up to the machine before he suffered brain death was a miracle.

The first time she visited Jono in the hospital, the nurse on his floor seemed more ready to check her in as a patient than to let her see him. A pleasant fifty-ish matron with brown hair shot with silver, the nurse bustled the unknown visitor into a chair and all but forced a cup of hot soup on her before allowing her to so much as state her name or who she wished to visit. After gaining the information necessary, and admonishing the young woman to finish the soup and not move a muscle until she came back, the nurse left to call Scott Summers for permission for Miss Jubilation Lee to see the floor's most unusual patient. When the nurse returned, Jubilee apparently passed muster and looked less likely to collapse at a moment's notice as the older woman informed her she would be allowed a short visit on the condition she promised to go home and have a good hot meal and a night's sleep.

When they entered Jono's room, Jubilee went silently to the chair beside his hospital bed and grasped his hand under the nurse's careful attention. Apparently reassured that Jubilee would not disrupt the machinery through clumsiness or intent, the nurse left them alone. Jubilee managed to keep a hold on her emotions until she was alone with Jono, but as soon as the nurse had disappeared into the hallway, she sobbed out her relief at finding Jono alive and the tension of the past several days. She wasn't aware of falling asleep in the chair beside Jono, but she awoke several hours later to find visiting hours over, a tray of food on the table beside her, and a hospital blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

She ate the food, folded the blanket and draped it over the back of the chair, stopped by the nurse's station to find a different woman on shift, and finally went home. She managed to sleep uninterrupted the remainder of that night and thought that seeing Jono alive, even in the machine, was sufficient to assuage her nightmares. She would go back, she had to, Jono was still alive, possibly even conscious at times, and she couldn't leave him alone in the darkness with only occasional noises from the hospital staff and the constant sounds of the machines he was hooked up to.

She didn't go back the next night, but worked late, trying to catch up on the things she'd lacked the concentration for while suffering lack of sleep. When she finally got home, she fell into an exhausted sleep, only to wake once again with the dream that had haunted her ever since her short conversation with Scott. Perhaps seeing Jono again would prevent the nightmare as it had the first time. She had been planning to wait until the weekend for another visit, but it appeared she needed to see him as much or more than he needed her to visit.

Her second visit was both easier and harder than the first. Apparently, the motherly nurse from two nights ago had made a notation on Jono's records that Jubilee was a permitted visitor. Knowing what she would see made it harder to walk in the door, but this was Jono. She'd never been scared of Jono, and she sure wouldn't start now when he needed her. She sat down beside him and began talking, telling him news of the mansion, about her own response to losing her powers, about working for use your voice, about the state of the world post M-Day, and about anything else she could think of. The nurses exchanged brief pleasantries with her when they came in to monitor the readouts and keep the machines running. She ignored the odd looks that she received from some of them, well aware that Jono's condition would be extremely creepy to most people, it was even to many mutants, and that they must wonder why she was taking the time to visit him when he couldn't possibly wake up and might not even be aware she was present. When a man she had not yet met came in, Jubilee was expecting to ignore him beyond the generic hellos every other conversation had been limited to so far. She registered that a difference in attire that suggested he was probably a doctor rather than the nurses she'd seen until now, and that he seemed calmer in Jono's presence than the others had, but her attention was primarily on Jono until the man spoke.

"I see Sleeping Beauty is awake this time. I'm glad. It's good for Jonothan to have someone talking to him. He has far too much time alone with his own thoughts as it is. If we are ever able to help him have some form of life away from these machines, it will do him no good to be unaccustomed to sensory input."

Jubilee blushed sightly and turned to him. "It's been a difficult two weeks since M-Day. I hadn't meant to fall asleep here."

"Think nothing of it, miss. I'm sure that your presence was beneficial to Jonothan. I know that the nurses are used to seeing friends and relatives asleep at the bedsides of loved ones. No doubt it made it easier for them to remember that no matter how unusual his case, Jonothan is just a young man who needs our help. Just as I'm sure your presence tonight has reassured the staff who have seen you. I am Daniel Easton; I'm Jonothan's supervising physician," he finished, extending a hand to her.

Jubilee shook it with a smile. "Jubilation Lee, essentially his bratty little sister. Please, call him Jono, nobody calls him Jonothan except our former teacher."

"I would not call you a brat, Miss Lee. It seems to me that Jono is lucky to have found a sister like you. I have seen biological families less loving to their own than you are to him."

"Please, it's Jubilee. I'm allergic to formality."

He smiled, "Then in the interest of preventing an allergic reaction, you may call me Daniel."

Jubilee gave a soft chuckle, the first time she had laughed since M-Day and watched Daniel gather the materials necessary for the machines. "I thought nurses usually did the routine care except in the case of procedures and drugs requiring a doctor."

He looked at her, laying out the packets by touch. "Generally, yes. I make it a point to be familiar with the needs of my patients, including their routine care. You do not leave one in any doubt that laughter in the best medicine. You are positively transformed when you smile." He turned back to his task, missing her blush at the compliment.

"There hasn't been much to laugh at recently."

"I can only imagine. It seems to be a difficult time for all mutants, but especially for you who have lost your powers," he said, finishing with the machines. "I shall leave you to return to entertaining your brother, Jubilee. I must continue my rounds."

Jubilee watched him leave, feeling more comfortable in the hospital than she had at any time before meeting him. The next time anyone entered the room, it was one of the nurses informing her that visiting hours were over.

The next day when she came in, there was a pile of books at waiting for her at the nurse's station with a note from Daniel saying 'in case you run out of things to talk about'. Over the following week, Jubilee gradually became a fixture of the ward housing Jono. No one made much of it, but all of the staff who had previously seen her on their shift simply failed to send her home at the end of visiting hours. Some of the night nurses continued to send her home for a few hours sleep in a real bed out of concern for her. Everyone was visibly more relaxed when caring for Jono. It didn't take much thought to realise that Daniel's assessment had been correct, her presence served to normalise Jono. Instead of a body that by all rights should not still be alive, he was a person, with someone who loved him and a life to return to, however irrevocably it had been altered. Following Gayle's visit, portions of which she later learned had been heard by most of the ward, a cot appeared in the room and no one bothered to send her home at night. By the end of her second week visiting Jono, Daniel was bringing her dinner every night he was on shift and the nurses were covering the other nights. Jokes were made that she should be drawing a salary for the time she spent there. Jubilee started returning home only to shower and change clothes before work. Life went on.


End file.
