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(here’s the moral and the story from the guy who knows)
Rose, on first and second and all hundred thousand subsequent glances, looks like a girl made of sugar paste: pale, brittle, rounded sex doll joints and pin up mouth. Her gestures are telegraphed and choreographed by the previous motions, as smoothly as the Royal Ballet. Her lipsticks are rich girl rich pigment that leave thick smears on her coffee cups and on Jade’s cheek. Her open eyes are still as closed as a slammed door. It could be a Seer thing-when she’s with John and Jade and Dave, her eyes show all the futures likely and possible, and it makes her unsettling to look directly in the eye. The vivid purple seems less the dye of royalty and more the rotting of a long dead body.
Jade watches Rose, when she notices and when she doesn’t. Rose becomes predictable; when she puts on the hundred dollar eyeshadow that was Mrs Lalonde’s last Christmas gift, she’s about to disappear for the rest of the day and come back breathing heavily with a shiner. Her lip heals, and she never talks about what she does, but Jade knows that with every punch Rose is tearing the Game a little further from herself.
(i’ve lived a lot of different lives)
Jade wakes up as the wrong person over and over and over and over again. Things shift, inside her head: with space powers comes an intuitive grasp of how things work. Evidently this includes people, because she starts looking at people and then seeing how they tick as clearly as she’d ever seen a thing in the clouds. The strangers stick in her brain and interfere with herself. She won’t eat mac and cheese because the old woman at the Chinese place got food poisoning from it twenty years ago. Beer is suddenly delightful. She buys dark green lipstick near St Patrick’s Day, for a half-remembered alien friend with no place in this new Earth. She wears it to a bar, but the skeevy man in the corner lends himself to getting aroused whenever she wears it afterwards. It’s not a surprise. Jade has a dead place where she used to feel shock. Her purchases are unconsciously influenced by the appearances of whoever is around her; her apartment becomes a strange jumble of furniture and clothing shifted between flat surfaces, because bare walls are terrifying when you don’t have much.
It’s nothing to do with how distinct Jade is from everyone else. Jade is an Eccentric with Eclectic Interests and she has an extremely well defined sense of self. Everything around her is shifting, but nothing is really changing, and she’s becoming more attuned to her surroundings.
She visits Rose when it becomes too much; Rose is easy to be around and Jade won’t take on bits of her, probably because Rose tore the Game apart and rebuilt it in her image. She’s familiar and comfortable, if not entirely safe to be around and prone to screaming blackout grimdark fits when her period rolls around. It’s a Sburb player occupational hazard; Rose has screechbleeds and Dave slips back a few seconds every time he listens to 4/4 music and Jade takes on aspects of strangers and John sometimes makes tornados when he’s drunk.
She doesn’t let Rose ever question anything. Rose’s eyes look a little less dead, like a garden dried to mud bricks smoothing over the cracks. The seeds are sleeping in their little germination comas still, but they’re there.
“Things are getting better, I think,” Jade says cautiously one morning, when she’s retching off someone else’s hangover. Body language can be a real bitch when you read it that well. Rose smooths Jade’s hair back again and starts a different, more complicated braid. The heavy polished stones that Rose weaves in say I am weighed down by my failures. Jade pukes hard and pats Rose on the exposed skin of her knee.
(i hear the songs from the places where i was born)
Jade hits a dragon at a thousand meters. It drops to the village, where they chop it up for a month’s dinners. Her home is on a hill, far above the village, because the meaning is all in the length of the journey. The longer the trip one is willing to undertake, the more important the end goal is. Jade knows this is true in any possible situation-she knows it in her bones! She is a very old woman, with achy-ass bones, and they always tell her truth. It always rains and it always shines and the world keeps on rolling and her bones never say otherwise.
Things happen for a reason, she knows. Her bones are as aware as the rest of her that she was instrumental in their session’s failure. It doesn’t bother her much anymore. Importance in failure is as comforting in dark times as importance in success; what really matters is the mattering. She turns at the sound of her driveway’s gravel. A tall woman, rich girl rich pigment slash of a mouth, a familiar scarf around her waist, although it never carried fruit from the market-if it’s meant to be, it will happen. It may be, it will be.
“My heart has a lot less wrinkles than my face,” she says fondly, thinking of the memories turned blurry dream times she has shared with this woman.
“I have never doubted it,” Rose says, taking her hand and letting Jade take some of her weight in return. The fruit is a lot heavier than it looks. She stands, chin tilted firmly, spacer pinup girl mouth open to show predator teeth. There are only so many ways Rose could ever stand. This one is as familiar as Jade's own palms. She looks like to call the sky down on the world again, soothe her pain and her rage in fire and strangling shadows.
“We failed, and we died. Conquering heroes receive wine when they turn homewards; I thought perhaps grapes on the vine were appropriate for failures in a strange place,” Rose says with a wry smile. She pulls the grapes from her scarf and offers Jade a handful.
(show me someone who says they’ve got no baggage, i’ll show you someone who’s got no story)
Rose has the answers. The villagers seem to find her easier to approach than Jade, if only because Rose doesn’t seem to know that when she sits among them to give answers she is deeply impugning her own reputation among them. No one truly important makes themselves that easy to access. This is why Jade keeps her distance; this is why the people offer Rose the forgiveness she craves and denies. They pity her for her glacier heart and caramel soul.
Friends meet by chance, when it will happen. It may be, it will be.
“Rose, really, it’s been ages,” Jade says cheerfully, leaping adroitly over the canyon of three lifetimes worth of memories and dreams and mistakes.
“I haven’t made myself easy to follow,” Rose says, delicately biting into a piece of liver.
“Oh, it’s never been hard to get places,” Jade says with a blinding grin. Her eyes are like sea glass: beautiful and smooth and so brittle. This is a woman who has the ability to cross the universe in a tick and a tock, and who has never wanted it for more than a convenient way to sightsee or visit a friend. Rose turns her head, getting to her feet.
“Please allow me my solitude,” she says and leaves without looking back. Jade follows behind, close enough to keep watch but far enough to follow the letter of the request if not the spirit. Rose expects this, and the ice in her chest is weighted further by the comfort of it.
(we are shining, and we will never be afraid again)
Time passes, as it will. Jade’s bones tick the days, as they did in her second life and now in her third. She is older now than she was before, but the universe is older, too. Her windows are floor-to-ceiling. The light is glorious and warm on her skin. It reminds her of her very first childhood, worlds and away from any the children here experience. They all know who she is-bogeyman, medic, tutor, and night terror.
They leave the fear behind eventually, but not the early respect. Jade likes it a lot. She has a reason now for pumpkins that scream and dishes that clean themselves like magic and the cactus by the gate that interrogates visitors for fun.
John visits often enough to have a permanent room, with blue blankets even though his eyes are grey this time around. Dave comes by now and then, enough to have a mug with ‘World’s Best Dad’ in cursive on the front stored in the cabinet that actually gets used. Rose comes by rarely, if at all, and only when cajoled with sad emoticons. Dave acts like he can’t bear to stay, but lingers for months; Rose really can’t bear to stay, and flies out the door as soon as she can.
Rose stays away for years, once, though Jade wishes desperately they would all make this home. John stays, and later Dave joins him in his room, but there is no sign or Rose for a very long time. Children wander through the house, and when Jade’s worry has faded into a habit, one of them comes leading a woman with a split lip and two shiners in heavy monk robes.
“I’m sorry-” Rose says, the blood on her lip shining and her face utterly wretched. “I’ve come home, I wasn’t sure what it would take before I could but now-I’m here for real, now, it’s all settled in me.”
Rose is so tan, with a monk’s white tattoos beading the skin of her collarbone and vanishing under her robes, and her hair is so faded, and she is touching Jade like she might break. The seeds are sprouting; the winter is over. It is, it will be.
“Welcome home! About time,” Jade says, and folds Rose tightly into her arms.