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To
Forget The Pain
by Bounce Rated PG-13 Summery: Jubilee must learn to cope with a disabilty. Authers Note: Yes. It is entirely possible to have pain without any symptoms. Disclaimer: Marvel owns Generation X and Jubilee. I don’t. I am not making any money from this. Note: I am going to apologize for this story in advance. It’s nothing but angst and is far to self-pitying. Blame it on the fact that it’s late at night and I had a lousy day and wrote this listening to maudlin music. Someone once said that suffering builds character. Times like these when all the world seemed to be nothing but pain she knew that man was wrong. Knew that pain did nothing but drag on and on, wear you out and wear you down. Leaving you nothing but a dried out shell, to damn tired to go on, to fucking sore to do anything but cry. She’d ignored it at first. Odd pains in her wrists and ankles, after training, at night. They went away. They were never too bad. Then they didn’t go away anymore. They stayed. Then sometimes they got worse until all the world seemed to disappear in a haze of pain. She told Sean and Emma then. When it got so bad she wasn’t able to go five minutes in training without so much pain she could hardly walk for days after. The doctors said “It isn’t arthritis. But anti inflamitries might help.” “Physiotherapy might ease things a little.” “Orthotics might cure it.” “Maybe this new round of test will help clear things up.” They were wrong. Every time. And sometimes it seemed that the whole world was nothing but pain. Emma and Sean asked her to step down from her position in the team. She knew she had too. That weakened as she was she put all of the others lives at risk. So she did. She went along with them and quit the team and her heart broke into a thousand pieces. They said “Sometimes people get pain without anyone knowing why.” “Sometimes pain that we can’t find the cause of is created by stress.” “Sometimes we can’t do anything to cure it.” She laughed, bleeding inside when they said that. She dealt with her stress just fine. Hadn’t she escaped from Bastion, watched Wolvie be torn apart by Magneto and slowly, so slowly, put himself back together again. Hadn’t she dealt with everything fine? The attacks on Generation X and the X-men, seeing her friends, her new family almost die again and again? Of course she laughed when they said that. If she reacted any other way she would have to think, to admit she was doing it to herself. That it was her fault she was in so much pain all the time. That she wanted it to be this way. No one sane could accept a theory like that. She learnt that there are whole new levels to despair. With every failed diagnoses, every night the pain got so bad she could hardly think for it she learnt that there were whole new levels of despair you could sink to. She got angry when her friends tried to help her and hurt when they listened to what she said but not what she felt and ignored it all. She learnt to lie, to smile and shrug it all off. To say “No I’m fine. It doesn’t hurt at all” when she wanted to scream with the pain. And her heart broke into a thousand tiny pieces every time she said it. And Jubilation Lee started and looked up at Everett. “Huh? What’d ya just say? I wasn’t listening.” And Jubilee laughed at his answer and for a moment Jubilee forgot the pain.
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