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and people see stars sometimes and some people raise cadavers
but not me; i see the sun is made of string
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1.
"--think you'd understand, better than anyone," Aradia says, so very soft, like rainfall and the brush of leaves in the wind. She has a voice made of stained-glass and windchimes and to Jade it is music, it is colour! It is every sense rolled up into one inexplicable firework of feeling and it sets off shooting stars in her stomach always, still. "Time, space, it's all relative. Always there. You can feel it in you, can't you? The world, all worlds, every star being born and every star dying. The planet turning under your feet."
"That I can," Jade says, slinging her rifle under her arm, grass dry and thick scratching at her legs through her trousers--combats, camo-green. Skirts and dresses are nice but not proper adventuring clothing! Tights especially are a very genuine risk; getting them torn and caught on a branch while running from a hungry predator? F-. Bad end, aim to avoid at all costs. "It's-- I don't know, indescribable, really. You'd know."
Aradia looks back at her, lips twisting in the sweetest little smile, eyes so warm and Jade sees them and Jade sees life: fire and earth, rust-reds and dirt-browns, gardens full of flowers and soil-sowed and crows calling and the sun setting, the sun rising, dew on blades of grass and dribbling down leaves and life, an endless cycle of it. Jade sees life. "Yes, I suppose I would."
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2.
Jade's ears twitch, in the quiet. It would seem like silence to anyone else, she imagines, but--to her it is something like factory film pulled over all the noise in the world, a wall of hush between her and sound and it is all so far-away and yet so clear! Like she can hear from everywhere in the universe at once, like she is everywhere, and she supposes that she kind of is. In the distance: grass bristles, the breeze whistles, frogs croak. Jade's ears twitch with it all, large and furry and so very sensitive.
Her rifle rests beside her on the forest floor, every crinkle of leaves underneath its metal as she set it down caught ringing in her ears, and she breathes, breathes steady and deep. At night, sometimes, she dreams of darkness and silence and it is the most wonderful thing! It is like fresh air where she has been intaking nothing but pollution and has not even realised it.
The thing is that there is nothing inherently wrong with being omnipotent, there is nothing inherently troubling about knowing the shape of anything you could imagine without ever having to look; but there is a reason that pesky little things like "knowing the secrets of the universe" are often portrayed as being able to drive a person out of sanity, and that is because Jade, from firsthand experience and all, thinks that they in reality probably could. Sometimes it is all just a little too much to deal with, too much knowledge, too much sight, too much light and sound always. Too much.
"Aradia?" she calls out, although only softly because even with her eyes closed she knows that Aradia is exactly six foot three inches away from her, and will likely be able to hear anything Jade says clearly unless she is deliberately very quiet. "Aradia, I can see the world. I can see space."
Aradia folds a hand over Jade's, where it rests to her side. They brush the dirt just barely and the whisper of it scuffing holds through the silence, holds in Jade's head, and it is both a soft embrace and a sharp pinch. It all is. "I know, Jade," Aradia says, so gentle, all dandelion-milk and sweet honey and grass and life and her voice, sometimes, is the only thing that does not feel like infinity. It is floaty and yet so inexplicably solid, so real! Jade hears it and her mind does not immediately go to dissecting the slopes of it, the shapes of the throat and mouth in all living mammals and perhaps some reptiles and amphibions also, does not take it apart. It is a piece of driftwood to cling to in an endless current. "I know you can."
Jade squeezes her eyes shut as tight as they could be. "Do you see time? Do you feel it?"
"Always," Aradia tells her, fingers curled around Jade's loosely, all long and bony and warm, warm-blooded. Aradia feels red but it is a shade that does not scream, not overly vibrant, not electric; it is earth-toned, chalky and warm, near soothing. "I see timelines, all timelines: everything that was and will be and could have been and could be, all of it crossing over and tangled endlessly, gathering into this absolutely unfathomable mess like a yarn-ball the size of the universe itself! I suppose that I see... string, more or less."
"Oh," says Jade; Jade whose mind right now is a million light years away and also right here, Jade who simultaneously is hearing bird-song and gun-fire, stars dying and stars being born. Her mouth twitches up into the makings of a smile despite it all. "So do I, I think."
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3.
They run together. The ground underneath their feet is steady as anything but Jade can feel the turning of it as they move, can feel the distance they cover, every centimetre, millimetre; and with it Aradia feels every second, every nanosecond. They feel the world together and they run! They are currently being chased by some kind of creature that Aradia breathlessly informs Jade is known as a lusus, native to Alternia ("so what is it doing here?"--"isn't not knowing where half the adventure lies," and Jade thinks, this is why I could love you, and why perhaps I already do), and its steps behind them are like thunder, like waves crashing. Its roars curl into Jade's stomach and send chills up her spine, and it is barely a line's breadth away from being magic.
They run and they run, feet like flitting over the ground, and they could fly away in a second's notice maybe but where would be the adventure in that? Instead they run, hands clutched in each other's so tight as though they are broken-halves of a whole that are connecting again, as though they fit like nothing else ever has. Time and space and a billion lives and worlds all made of string! And now they are tying their pieces together.
They make it because there is no way they wouldn't have, not in any world or timeline that could ever be. They collapse in on each other at the end of a path of dirt and mud-grass and it is in their hair and over their skin and their clothes are beginning to tear in a place or two but it does not matter! None of it does. Jade leans her head into the crook of Aradia's shoulder and laughs, soft huffs of it that spread breath over Aradia's skin, so warm. They hold each other in the dirt and let their laughter entwine like string, like string.
"Aradia?" Jade says, ears twitching, Aradia scratching curiously at the base of them where fur and hair meet--it's actually quite a nice feeling, if a little sensitive.
"Yes?"
"I'm going to kiss you now," Jade says, mouth spreading into the brightest smile, slow and easy like a hot-knife into butter, "Just wanted you to know that!" And she does, and when she does, for a moment, she cannot feel the world turning; she cannot feel infinite light and sound and colour boiling in her blood. She feels Aradia's lips, teeth, tongue, her saliva, all of it meeting with hers and for a moment, just a moment but a wonderfully long one, Jade's veins and arteries stop being the string of the world.