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This is the crux of the matter: Jade has held planets in her palm and fought to kill, she has died and been reborn and she is a god, was a god, and there is nobody who understands, except for Rose and her friends, her—everything, Rose and John and Dave.
Laying on the bed she shares with Rose, legs up against the wall, head resting on the warm pillow of Rose's thigh, a little too warm—a sheen of sweat from the sun pouring in the window—lazy and happy, she is diminished from her godhood and very alone in the world they recreated. Except for Rose. It could be just the two of them in the world, even with the inconsequential sounds of traffic and a lawn mower irritating the edge of her hearing.
She thinks, it should be hard to remember that she has felt the life dissipate from her frame, evaporating with the hiss and pop of a drop of water in hot oil. Like this, she shouldn't be able to believe that she is the same girl grown up, that she knows what blood feels like—more viscous than water, and hot—running down her arms. Even hotter than the sunlight bathing her.
It isn't hard at all, though. Jade fiddles with the whispery-rough fabric of the hem of Rose's skirt, thinks about the coding on her latest project, thinks about needing to pay the bills, thinks about harassing John into making pancakes for breakfast next weekend, and she is the same girl who—finally—stood triumphant in the middle of a hollow, gutted universe, and unmade and remade it. She has tasted the blood of the world in her mouth, bitter and hot.
“I'm going to talk John into making pancakes for us next weekend!” Jade says, brightly, raising her hips just enough to let her shirt slide down her torso, letting a thin line of cool breeze slide between damp fabric and skin. Rose makes an irritated noise at the extra pressure, momentarily uncomfortable where one of Jade's shoulders presses into her legs, the bone sharp even through her skin.
“Last time he made a mess on purpose because he wasn't the one cleaning up,” Rose says—not a negation. Just a smile with a cutthroat edge that's only blunted for the three of them. (Less so for John, who's the blade of an ax, brute force and the crushing blow, and more likely to blunt another blade than be hurt by it.) Rose is a strategist, looking for an angle or edge.
Jade nods thoughtfully, or would if her neck wasn't propped up. It's mostly just a bob of her chin. “I'll make him host and then we can just leave.”
“He'll view that as an act of aggression violating the tentative peace treaty,” Rose says. “I'll need to review tactics for the inevitable backlash.”
Jade laughs, a little too loud, ungraceful. “Ugh! It'd be easier if he didn't want the prank war to continue.”
“I miss it when you could just shrink him,” Rose says, not meaning it at all—but also needing to say it. Because when it's the two of them, the four of them, they don't need to censor themselves, and the words dissipate like smoke, but—like smoke—are not unmade, simply so diffuse that they're effectively invisible. It's another soothing layer of nacre laid over the injuries deep inside them, and they are all pearls, organic and hard, something beautiful built around something alien.
“I can still make him back off,” Jade says, with a hint of half-silly pride, because John is an asshole, still, and she won't bow to him, even in the middle of their worst fights, not unless she thinks he's right, or that it would be right to. “Maybe Dave will join our side!”
“You scare Dave,” Rose tells her, sweetly, and Jade laughs—because she does, a little bit, but Dave has died over and over. She's mostly human now—not very frightening, by her standards. Or by his, because she's just human, but she scares him a little bit anyway. They're all too grown into each other for safety, for comfort—a tangle of old wounds, the open faces of wounds sealed together, like a chimerical tree, branches grafted together.
“Okay, okay—I could just bargain. He'll think it's worth it for an extra vote on movie night.”
“I'll feel him out,” Rose says, fingers pressing against Jade's shoulder like an absentminded kiss. Although it might be calculated—in part, in whole, or in whole but covering up an impulse Rose won't give herself up to without analysis, estimation, a careful weighing of vulnerability.
Jade lets herself settle again, toes tapping against the wall, very lightly. She still knows that the wall is almost all empty space—like everything, almost—and once upon a time she could have made herself slip through it.
Rose settles back to her reading—a new psychology book. Jade believes her when she says that a writer must know her characters from the inside out. Jade also knows, from what's said and unsaid, that it leaves Rose feeling safer—a gossamer web of expected outcomes, forewarning and insight into the ways that minds work.
(She is no longer a seer. Jade does not want to be anything that can be taken away by someone else, not ever again. She was a god once. A witch. Matter danced to her will.)
Jade dozes for a while, her sleep schedule still off—it has always been off—and she's rarely as exhausted as she once was, and that makes it harder to sleep. Slow hunger does distract her enough to finally drag herself back waking. “What do you want for dinner tonight?” she asks, thinking about the vegetables in the backyard—lettuce about to bolt, the last peas, the very first summer squash the beginning of a tidal wave of zucchini and pattypan. There are peaches on the counter, skin so delicate and water beading on the soft fur, hairy to mimic human skin without any common origin.
There's no answer. After another moment, Jade looks up.
Rose's lips are tight and upset, tension in her shoulders and something sharp and beautiful in her eyes. Jade wants to kiss her eyelids—wonders idly if it would leave a shadow of Rose's eye make up on her lips—and Jade is a good person, for all that that means—not much. 'Good' falls apart like overripe fruit, a dropped peach. Like the deepest-sea creatures brought up to the surface and broken by the difference in pressure, like a Carapacian hit hard enough. Rose does not think there's any good in her own self, or not enough to measure up. Neither of them are always kind. But Jade thinks kindness is stronger than goodness.
Jade smiles half-sleepy as Rose turns her head to meet Jade's unselfconscious gaze.
Rose had all their teenage years—all the years of the game and all the years they had to repeat, traumatized and too-old—to sharpen her claws on adults who couldn't quite figure out if she was sincere.
(The truth, as Jade knows it, is this: Rose doesn't believe in sincerity, but that doesn't mean that what she says isn't true. The truth can be tied up into a bow, and knotted. Emotions are explosive, and feelings are like reactive elements, pure sodium making water burn, and they must be carefully hidden and stored. Jade knows what good doesn't mean. Even good things can be damaging—there is no malice in an explosion. No greater purpose, either. Just rapid oxidation, the breaking of bonds.)
Jade watched Rose undermine professors in her classes, a smile on her face, watched relationships go up in flames or suffocate. Jade was there while Rose dismantled fanfic writers that filed too many edges off of Rose's favorite characters, brought down with intent and cold, bladed resentment. A honed scalpel. A forged thing. A god.
“My editor again,” Rose says, with a smile that Jade can recognize as a threat display, showing teeth. Lit up—a being of Light—and bright and beautiful. People cut themselves on her. They burn up. There is nothing good or bad about the candle flame that burns a moth.
It doesn't matter. Not a damn bit of it. Jade has lost herself, her friends, her guardians, everything. She has juggled civilizations. Tasted the dimensions of a vast and alien universe, master of all of it. She took apart her grandpa and pulled out all the inner workings, stretched his skin—just so—around a frame. She can still remember, how she could see where the skin was distended by pulling too hard to separate it from the layers of fat and meat beneath. There's the small nick in his hand, a little dim-sized hole that grew bigger as her grandpa dried, where her scissors slipped when she was slicing through the connective tissue tying the layers of the body together. Or there was. Her grandpa doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't make the delicacy of human skin over the unexpected resistance of the rest of the body any less real.
She held the potential atoms of everything in the universe in her hands. So there is no flicker of sympathy for the woman quietly cutting at Rose's career. Everything has choices and consequences. Hers are immaterial.
This is the linchpin, the axis around which the confused, disorganized events of her new life are arrayed, deprived of the narrative that almost consumed her: Jade has been through too much and done so much—not too much, because she has done what she needed to—and she doesn't understand people, in the same distant, uninterested way that she doesn't understand the appeal of certain foods. But she understands Rose.
Rose loves deeply. Not as fiercely as Jade—Jade will bare her teeth and rip into flesh and shout. It upsets people. Jade is not tamed, not a domesticated creature—she grew up feral and destroyed worlds. When she stops playing by the rules they expect, it startles people—scares them, because she's soft until you hit the bone of her. Fragile flesh layered over marble, like the coat of velvet on a deer's antlers, skin scratched off in bloody sloughing shreds, no longer needed for circulation, food and oxygen—the bone dying. A pearl within the softness of an oyster. A new world rising out from the middle of the old.
Jade bites at any hands that grab at her. It's not her fault if they don't take her warnings seriously—her laughing eyes and smiling mouth and messy clouds of hair, brightly colored hairbands wrapped around her wrists, bouncing and magnetic. Rose doesn't bite, not literally—Jade hates anyone who touches her without approval, will make it clear just how much—and her teeth are never bared like Jade's, hidden more convincingly under the veneer of a smile. Rose had more practice at being human than Jade did.
Jade has watched Rose, a god in her own right, kill and die and grieve, seen her desperate and violent and unhinged, taken apart and dismantling herself. Keeping together all her broken parts with sheer force of will and habit, and a refusal to yield.
“What are you going to do?” Jade asks, curious.
“Nothing until the book's released,” Rose says, a polite non-answer that Jade doesn't mind pushing through—she knows that Rose knows that she's straightforward, direct, sometimes pushy.
“So she's a good editor?”
“No,” Rose tells her, crisp and haughty and not really meaning it, Jade thinks. If she was too inept—if she was too effective at hobbling Rose's career—she would be gone by now. “I don't like her. It's too late to just get the project handed over to someone else—”
Jade's met Rose's editor, at a party. She's a nice woman, inoffensive.
Rose hates her. It's been growing for a while, Jade thinks, the way that things tend to develop with Rose—roots growing underground, invisible, and the apparent absence easily overlooked. Like something dormant, mistaken for dead. Jade can't say she really understands it!
“I'm going to ruin her,” Rose says. She means it. She doesn't even really hate the woman—like Jade, she knows that hate is usually too strong a word for this silly little universe, where all the corners are knocked off and rounded, where nothing matters very much unless they try.
“How?” Jade asks, interested. Rose is a strategic thinker, and most of all when it comes to other people—the equations of social situations that have always escaped Jade's understanding. The sort of math that she can't make work out even.
“Here,” Rose says, pushing a notebook over towards her—Jade scrambles upright, jostling the bed, to read over the pages of Rose's printing, not elegant cursive when she's writing exclusively for herself, and the pen pushing too hard into every page so it leaves marks on the pages underneath.
Her plan is comprehensive, and humiliating, and it will ruin the editor's career.
Rose watches her read, inscrutable, and when she's done—careful not to flip the page, because Rose has the language of privacy written on her bones, because Rose thinks in terms of power and boundaries and limits and secrets—she turns to look at her.
“You know, about this part—I bet it'll be even more obvious in a casual setting! Want to have a dinner party? It'll make her even more paranoid.”
Rose smiles, the light catching the blade of a knife, a little flushed in bright sun and late afternoon warmth, and Jade leans in to kiss her. They mastered the world. Jade will help Rose bring down her target, a pair of hunters, hobbling their prey still unawares, too smart and too vicious and too wild, and damaged down deep and victorious despite it all.
Jade kisses her again, before she has to go start dinner. And she knows that Rose is a knife, a candle, the inimical plasma of a star. Jade has killed for her, and she'll cook them dinner and play the good wife, and bare her teeth and bite when she needs to. The two of them. The four of them. All alone, gods of an unwitting world.