babyimafirework:
“Laboratory analysis. This wad’s been in my pocket long enough to be the missing link and you’re passing it up without so much as a cursory inspection.” Her mouth quirked up in a grin, then faded as Jubilee had a rather shattering afterthought. “That missing link… That’s still a thing, right?” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees, legs still straight out on the coffee table, and waited for an answer from the best single smartest person she knew. Way smarter than Professor X. Unlike the Professor, for all his wonder and greatness, the Doc could understand people, too.
Jubilee sat up and stretched her arms high. That was a tougher question than it seemed. “We’re good,” she said, finally, with a nod. “It’s been a fucking rollercoaster. You know, mutant with a baby coming through! But we’re really, really good. Especially now that we’re here. I can tell.” She snapped and a firework of pink and purple glittered up towards the ceiling. “With you and Laura, and that Martian chick with the room service, things are looking up.”
“I’d like you to meet him, you know.” Jubilee beamed. “Right now if he weren’t sleeping. I’ve never been into the whole ‘Ohana means family’ bullshit, but you’re pretty much the closest we’ve got. You are Laura now that Logan is…” She shook her head free of the thought. “If anything were to happen to me, I’d want to know that Shogo had a place. Had people. He’s not one of us, physiotomically, but he’s mine. You’re just gonna love the fuck out of him, Doc.”
There was a sleepy baby huff from the monitor. Jubilee leaned in for a few seconds, then leaned back. “He’s playing us.” She cracked her knuckles, absolutely crackling with lights at the thought of her baby. “Tricky little menace. What have you been up to? How have things been on the slightly less sleep deprived side of things?” She pulled her legs in. “God fucking damn, Hank, you’d better be less deprived than me. Otherwise things are about to go to shiiiit.”
Ah, the missing link. Hank simply waggled a hand, expressing, as succinctly as he could, the questionable state of the concept. The X-Men, on the whole, spent fewer course hours on the history of human evolution than the present state of it. As manifested in the classroom, especially. Those lessons did have to take priority.
Ears perked to the soft sounds of that baby monitor - he couldn’t help it - Hank let Jubilee have herself a good think. And grinned, satisfied, when the answer arrived. That burst of jubilation did a great deal to convince him, actually. The link between state of mind and mutant manifestation wasn’t missing at all, and Jubilee, she was clearly shining bright. As he’d hope. Even if he couldn’t necessarily agree that their situation was, on the whole, looking especially up... the more of them there were, together again, the better. So far as he was concerned. A bit codependent, perhaps. But just a bit. And functionally. He’d like to think so, at least.
“Oh, obviously. On all counts.” Hank’s smile only grew, warm and gentle and completely, absolutely sure Jubilee was right about that. Maybe he couldn’t, wouldn’t, promise that nothing was going to happen to her. But he could promise this much: that he, personally - a sucker for babies, since he’d sat them around Dunfee to help pay the bills - would love this child she’d decided would be hers. And, that Shogo could count on everything the X-Men had to offer: a place, people. What they’d been - imperfectly, yes, but what home, what family, was perfect, or could be, under their circumstances, as hard as they’d tried - to each other, and every new generation that came through the Mansion’s doors.
He glanced to the baby monitor as Jubilee did, then, as she relaxed, added: “Ah. I suppose I’ll manage to wait a little longer.” Couldn’t cost little Shogo a good night’s sleep. On that subject... Hank waffled. “I suspect so. Though - well, you’ll see. Probably soon.” Probably, yes; he’d left Amarilis in one of her post-meal naps, sprawled across a bookshelf back in his room. This crepuscular period they were in was one of her times, though. She’d lurch awake soon enough, rip into the scratching tree he’d built for her, then, loudly, urgently, come looking for him. A predictable pattern. Comforting, at this point. “But, yes, yes, I’ve been well. And all over,” he sighed, frankly, cracking his neck. “There’s so much to get done. Everywhere! You’ll love this, though: you’re just in time to test run our new and improved Danger Room, here. If that’s not too terribly nostalgic.” The smirkish curl to his smile allowed for the fact that not every X remembered the Room so fondly as he did, but. He had said new and improved for a reason.












