If people think Jenny is cranky and bitter as a young adult, they should wait a couple decades.
Some timelines end better for her than others, something she’d had to accept a long time ago. And it wasn’t that the bad endings outnumbered the good endings, but that they were much easier to get to. All they required was her to just give up.
This, as it will prove to turn out, is one of the bad endings. And not just for her.
The story goes like this: the Avengers were supposed to help her, but even with some of the most brilliant scientists on the planet and off, no real progress was being made fixing her condition. After a while of that, one has to wonder if it’s because of apathy rather than any lack of ability. Jenny took matters into her own hands, studying medicine and genetics, deciding to fix herself, since no one else is gonna do it. Along the way, she even finds that her powers are useful in oncology, as her control of radiation is finer and more focusable than any machine. But it’s useful only to other people, not to her. She can save lives, but can’t feel the hugs of gratitude from the child she saved. She can’t have visitors over; her home is the only place she can be without her suit and over the years, it’s become saturated with radiation (albeit contained, though living inside a nuclear bunker, as nice as the packaging was, had never been her dream home).
After years of failure to eliminate her powers, she finally has a break through and figured out she could do it. Shut off her powers. But there’s a catch: it won’t help her. Jenny has been producing radiation of different varieties since she was fifteen. Effectively, she’s a nuclear power plant combined with an atomic bomb, plus an x-ray clinic attached to a tanning salon. That amount of radiation doesn’t just disappear once no one’s actively creating it. And if she did disable her powers, that leftover radiation would probably kill her.
So she gives up.
She’s not going to dedicate her life to helping other people with no reward for herself and she’s not going to live in discomfort inside a containment suit for their sake either. Is it selfish? Yes, absolutely, but fuck it. She’s been selfless for long enough, she decides. So she trades the suit for comfy yoga pants and a tank top and steps outside. Feels the sun on her skin and the wind in her hair. Sees the world directly instead of through a lens.
And knowing it’s only a matter of time before someone comes at her with a strenuous objection to the massive radiation leak that she is, Jenny takes a walk downtown.
