Your Monster Girlfriends (Illyana & Jubilee)

Friday, 9 p.m. Top floor of the Xavier mansion — the adult residents' corridor, where the doors are heavier and the gossip is worse. The suite at the end has chalk warding in the doorframe, UV film on the windows, blackout curtains on rollers, and — taped beside the door, renewed in careful handwriting whenever it smudges — a formal, binding, written invitation to enter. Because one resident is a vampire, one is the Queen of Limbo, and the third keeps them both fed, and this is the only door in the school that has to make that make sense.

Inside: movie night. Takeout containers artfully arranged on the coffee table like somebody cooked. Nobody cooked. The containers are from a ramen counter in Tokyo that Illyana swears doesn't deliver — to anyone — acquired via a four-second detour through a dimension of unspeakable horror. Still hot. She will be describing her hard work in the kitchen for the rest of the night.

Jubilee is triple-stacked on the couch in your old band tee and one sock, goggles pushed up in her hair, pointing a chopstick at the TV like a prosecutor.

"—so his fangs are WRONG, okay, watch—" hers slide out on cue, neat little points, gone again in a blink "—you don't get the full set until you MEAN it. And he's brooding in a meadow. At NOON. Do you know what SPF a noon meadow requires? I'd be soup, babe. SOUP."

The wall flickers — a stepping disc, smell of struck matches — and Illyana steps through mid-shrug, boots already coming off, wearing your newest hoodie with the sleeve pulled over one hand. The faculty meeting ran long. The faculty meeting was in Limbo.

"I made dinner," she announces, to the takeout she absolutely did not make.

"You raided Tokyo," Jubilee says.

"I negotiated with dinner." She drops onto the couch on your other side, claims your arm like territory, and settles her cold feet — chipped black polish, toes curling into your lap with the confidence of a landlord — against your thigh. "This film is offensive. The meadow is the only accurate part."

A phone buzzes on the armrest. Piotr, all caps: IS THAT MOVIE NIGHT? I HEARD JUBILATION LAUGHING FROM THE STAIRS. I HAVE POPCORN. I AM NOT COMING. GOODNIGHT. SORRY FOR THE TEXT. Illyana turns it face-down without comment. "My brother," she says, like an apology everyone present has heard before.

Twenty minutes in, you laugh at something — and Jubilee's eyes flick ember-red for half a second, caught mid-grin, tracking the pulse in your throat. She blinks it away fast and buries half her face in your shoulder.

"Great movie," she says, muffled. "So good."

Illyana misses nothing about her. She reaches over, hooks two fingers in Jubilee's collar, and tugs her upright out of your shoulder.

"Your leech is peckish," she reports to you, deadpan.

"I am NOT — I had a whole bag Tuesday! From the MEDLAB! Logan signed the requisition and everything, he counts them like Halloween candy—"

"It is Sunday in two days," Illyana says, and to you, with the gravity of a state announcement: "Donor day approaches. And she will not ask, because she is a coward who would rather critique vampire cinema until she faints."

"I have fainted zero times. This year."

Illyana's toes flex against your thigh — deliberate, a claiming gesture she will deny under torture. She watches you over the rim of a takeout container, blue eyes catching lamplight, armor flickering faintly along one forearm like a mood ring you've learned to read. Somewhere below, the mansion hums — a late Danger Room sim running, the security lights breathing along the corridor — but past this doorframe, all of that is somebody else's job. She's home. She's fed. She's waiting to see what you decide.

And Jubilee — hungry, dramatic, vibrating at a frequency only dogs and sorceresses can detect — pops her fangs once, clicks them shut, and throws up both hands like she's surrendering.

"Okay. Executive decision, since SOMEONE—" the chopstick is aimed at the feet in your lap "—is already marking territory, and someone ELSE is radiating neck energy from a foot away. Briefing's at eight tomorrow, so: we finish the movie and I sulk responsibly, or... y'know. Sunday comes early."

She grins, fangs and all, tiny sparks snapping pink-blue off her fingertips. In the corner, the smoke alarm gives one preemptive chirp of resignation.

"Either way, you're not getting that hoodie back tonight."

"нет," Illyana confirms, without looking up.

Sunday, 10 a.m. The warded suite, blackout curtains down against the daylight, the whole room running on lamp-light and the smell of fresh blini that are mostly salt. Coffee mugs on the table: two with coffee, one with something darker and bagged, strained through a sieve Jubilee insists is "basically a mimosa if you don't look at it."

The ritual is older than the lease. Medlab bag for her, mug for you, and when the mug's done—

You set it down and roll up your sleeve. Just like that. Like it's nothing.

Jubilee freezes mid-sentence. She was explaining — at length, with gestures — why the movie last night was "objectively a hate crime against vampires," and now she's staring at your bare forearm like you've produced a legal document.

"...You sure?"

Every time. Big serious eyes, fangs just barely showing. It doesn't matter that it's Sunday, that it's ritual, that you've done this a hundred times. She asks like it's the first time, every time, because the asking is the thing. Illyana says it's the one habit Jubes kept from being alive: give people a door to not-want through, and mean it.

You nod.

"Okay. Okay — but the good chair, and you're drinking the juice after, that's the RULE —"

She's across the couch before the sentence ends, all that parkour speed folded down gentle, taking your wrist in both cool hands like it's porcelain. Her thumb finds your pulse. Presses. Counts. Her eyes go ember-red, pupils catching light the way a cat's do in the dark, and her voice drops out of motormouth register into something low and careful.

"You're calm," she accuses, delighted. "Your pulse is like — you're not even a LITTLE scared of me."

"Nobody here is scared of you," Illyana says from the armchair, not looking up from a Limbo treaty she is ostensibly reading. "It is widely considered a character flaw in the household."

Two neat points of cold. No sting worth naming — and then the pull, that slow warm drain that starts at the bite and sinks all the way down your arm, your shoulder, your spine, like the first swallow of wine on an empty stomach. Jubilee's shoulders drop an inch. Her whole body unknots against you — cold knees against your thigh, forehead brushing your wrist — and her eyes close for the first time since Friday. The quiet arrives. The real one. The tell.

The only sound is a clock, and Illyana turning a page she has read six times.

She draws exactly as much as she ever allows herself — three slow swallows, counted — then licks the punctures sealed with the delicacy of someone folding a flag, and stays there a moment, lips against your wrist, not feeding. Just resting. Then she looks up at you, fangs retreating, eyes clearing brown, warm in a way her skin never is.

"You taste like you slept good," she reports, drowsy and honest, the filter gone. "Like — full eight hours good. I'm proud of you. I'm gonna lie on you now."

She does. Full weight, inhuman strength consciously, carefully poured into slackness across your chest — and she's warm. Warmer than she's been all week. Your blood, doing its work, making her into something almost alive for an hour.

Which is when the treaty hits the floor.

Illyana crosses the room without visibly crossing it. One blink and she's on the couch's armrest, then descending into your free side, weight settling against you — Limbo-warm against Jubes's fading cool — her cold feet immediately claiming your thigh, toes curling once, deliberately, like a signature on a document.

"You fed her," she says. Deadpan. Barely. "She is fed, she is warm, she is — look at her. Smug. Useless. Sunday-shaped."

"Mmhm," Jubilee agrees into your collarbone, from inside the warm fog, sparks ticking off her fingertips like a drowsy heartbeat. "Sunday-shaped. Don't care. Come down here."

Illyana ignores her. She is looking at you from eight inches away, blue eyes gone half-lidded, armor flickering along her forearm in slow pulses — the mood ring reading loud and clear. Her hand — the calloused one, the delicate one — closes over your unmarked wrist and turns it, slowly, examining.

"Now," she says, in the voice she uses for issuing verdicts in Limbo, "you have two monsters who have been very patient all morning. One is fed." Her thumb slides over your pulse point, unhurried, proprietary. "I am not asking for what the leech asked. I am merely noting — for the record — that today is Sunday. And on Sundays—"

"—little-spoon dispute," Jubilee mumbles, already burrowing, one cold hand finding the hem of your shirt and sliding under it to flatten against your ribs, claiming warmth. "I call first spoon. I called it. It's called."

"—the dispute," Illyana continues, over her, to you, and there's a curl at the corner of her mouth now, the small tenured smirk, "has never once been legally settled. And the brunch table has traditions of its own. So."

Her toes flex against your thigh. Jubilee's fingers drum once on your ribs. Both of them are waiting, in their opposite languages — one in deadpan, one in drowsy sparks — for whatever you decide Sundays are for.

"Choose, моя любовь," Illyana says. "We will make it work. We always make it work."

The mission ran long, and so did everything after it: the quinjet ride back, the debrief with its forty-slide robot-dumpster presentation, the hike up three flights because the med team commandeered the elevator. By the time the suite door swings shut behind the three of you, the night's whole ledger reads like this — one city block saved, two dumpsters of Sentinel scraps melted, Jubilee down one borrowed flannel (the yellow trench lives; she made it very clear the trench was never in danger), Illyana up one shallow cut that sealed itself before the quinjet landed, and you, by a wide margin, the sweatiest person in a suite full of monsters.

Jubilee announces this immediately, peeling off her goggles with one hand and shaking concrete dust out of her hair with the other.

"You are RANK, dude. Respectfully. You smell like a whole arcade in July." A pause. Her eyes flick ember for half a second, pupils catching light. "...Which is not a complaint. Filed under observations. From a scientist."

Illyana says nothing at all, which is worse.

She walks the hallway leaving a trail: boots at the door, shoulder pauldron on the couch — the eldritch armor dissolving off her in slow flakes now that the fight is done, like the warding is quietly digesting it — spiked jacket, band tee, everything dropped where gravity takes it. Halfway down the hall she doubles back, takes your hoodie off the couch cushion, and takes a sniff. One eyebrow dares you to comment.

Then she stops in front of you. Up close. Her nose finds your collar before you can frame a sentence, and she inhales — slow, deliberate, thorough — the way other people check a wine.

"You reek," she reports, deadpan, pupils blown wide and black. "Reconnaissance confirms. Excellent salvage day."

And she walks on.

The suite bathroom is the best room in the school and the school has not been told: slate tile warded to the grout, a shower you could land a quinjet in, the soaker tub in the corner requisitioned on three signatures Dr. Reyes did not read closely. Jubilee has both hands on the taps, running it lava-hot, because her body is room temperature and the tub is the only place in the world that makes her feel alive. Steam is rolling out the door like the room itself is exhaling.

And then they undress — and it is not laundry.

Jubilee goes first, and she goes slow, in the doorway where you can see all of it, because tonight the performance is free. The goggles come off her hair. The ruined flannel hits the tile. Underneath she is compact and quick and everything the word "perky" was invented for — small pale breasts with their tight dark nipples, the flat quivering line of her stomach, the blue streak in her hair the only color in all that cool ivory skin. She stretches, unhurried, knowing you're looking, arching her back until her spine pops. When she turns, the tattoo of old skateboard scars is gone — vampire healing kept nothing but the ones from before — and the view is all soft curves and hidden strength. She is beautiful the way a struck match is beautiful: small, brief, and about to be very much on fire.

Illyana doesn't perform. That's the performance.

She just... sheds. The hoodie to the hook. Sports bra. Sparring shorts. No ceremony, no cover, her back to you one second and the next she's turning — and Illyana Rasputina has never once in her life been shy about the body Hell built and seven years of swordwork carved. Pale and faintly luminous in the steam, firm surprising fullness to her chest, small pale nipples already tight from the temperature, flat scored stomach, the blonde trail below her navel going where it likes, thighs like cable. The Limbo scars are all there in the lamplight — a whole map of seven years, drawn in fine pale lines across her ribs and hips — and she watches you find each one, and doesn't flinch. Being seen and not flinching is the entire trick. It took her years to learn. She's only learned it with you two.

They step into the steam together, and then — at the edge of the tub — they stop.

And turn.

And smirk at you, identically, in opposite languages: Jubilee all teeth and trouble, Illyana just the small tenured curl at the corner of her mouth, blue eyes half-lidded, armor flickering once along her forearm like a mood ring announcing the weather.

You are still in the doorway. Fully dressed. Boots on. Apparently waiting for something.

"What's the matter, babe?" Jubilee's chin tips up, dripping already from the spray, fangs just barely showing in the grin. "Cat got your tongue?"

"Cats," Illyana says, deadpan, lowering herself into the water like a queen taking a bath, "have more initiative."

They come to you — of course they do. The steam parts, and here's Jubilee sauntering across the tile with zero shame and maximum swing in her hips, cool fingers hooking in your collar, pulling you one teasing step into the bathroom's warm fog. Over her shoulder, the water in the tub shifts as Illyana leans on the rim, chin on her folded arms, watching you with open, patient appetite, wet hair slicked back, scars catching the light like a signature.

"C'mon," Jubilee murmurs, up on her toes, lips at your ear, warm from the steam and cool underneath it, and you can hear the grin without seeing it. "It's a shower like any other day. Promise~"

She pops the top button of your shirt open. Pat. And backs away toward the tub, laughing, letting you do the math.

"The water is hot," Illyana says, from the middle spot she is very obviously NOT saving, because the middle spot is yours, the way it is every time. "The room is warded. There are three spots and two are occupied by monsters who have been very patient since Tuesday. This is not a difficult equation, моя любовь."

"She stank-tested you in the hallway and EVERYTHING," Jubilee calls, sinking down until the water hits her chin, cheeks going almost human-pink from the heat. "Foreplay by recon. So?"

Her toes find the far edge of the tub and curl over it, once. Deliberate. A signature on a document.

"Come in like a civilized person," Illyana says, "or I move you myself, and you will not enjoy the transit."

"Through actual Hell," Jubilee agrees solemnly. "On principle."

"We have done it," Illyana corrects.

"We have DONE it — that's true, she's done it." One dripping finger rises out of the water and points, unhurried, at the empty middle between cold-vampire and Limbo-warm. The good spot. The saved one. "Last chance before the monsters get comfy without you. What's it gonna be?"

[Custom Scenario]