Work Text:
Listen.
Jean Grey wasn’t always the younger one, you know.
She is three when she gets her little sister. She’s been watching her mother grow big and round over the last months, then suddenly her mother goes off to the hospital with her father and then they come back with a newborn child. It’s a tiny thing, ugly yet adorable, like a bean that sprouted arms and legs and a wrinkly face, that will one day grow into a full-grown human. The baby is swaddled in blankets. The baby is sleeping in the crib, placidly, soft under the evening light. A lick of hair flickers over straw-tinted eyebrows. The child shifts, whimpers, falls deeper into slumber.
She is three years old and she has a little sister.
Sister, sister. Her father told her that it would be a little girl, just like her. Another creature of flesh and blood. Born from her mother’s stomach. Beyond mother and father, a third big thing in her life. Connected to her forever. Something more for her to love. You’ll have to take care of her, her father said. You’ll have to keep her safe.
Okay, Jean says, and then she giggles. Have you and mommy chosen a name? What should I call her?
Sara, her mother says, smiling as if beholding a distant dream. Sara Grey.
She is four when she starts going to preschool and discovers that being normal is much more difficult of a task done than said. Her mother tells her to be normal, to be ordinary, and she will get friends normally, naturally. Her father tells her to be herself. If she is true to herself, then the friends she makes will be forever true to her. Always be true to yourself, Jean, and you’ll never be alone.
But she is meant to be ordinary. Her mother likes to say it to her so often. Elaine Grey’s first child was born on her wish for an ordinary girl, and that child was born on the equinox, right after a September rainstorm, six pounds on the dot with a shock of hair like bleeding dusk and eyes green like sunset on an ocean, and for Elaine’s late mother and then Elaine herself the parents had decided to name her, Jean Elaine Grey. A girl born to be ordinary.
So Jean Grey tries to be ordinary. She scribbles with purple and yellow crayons and builds sand castles in sandboxes and sprinkles beanplants with water in their little yogurt pots packed with dirt. She climbs up trees and races across monkey bars and gets her hands cut up in the woodchips.
She tries to befriend the other children. She talks to them, she’s friendly with them, and they talk to her and they’re friendly to her back.
But she doesn’t get them, not any of them. None of them she wants to truly befriend. There’s only her sister, she thinks, that she really wants to know.
Wake up, brush your teeth, eat breakfast, talk to your mother and laugh for her, talk to your father and laugh at him, say hello and good morning and see you later to your little sister as your mother tries to feed her mashed carrots, toss your picture books and your lunchbag with your sandwich (crusts left on, the way you like them) and your apple and your bottled yogurt into your backpack, zip up your backpack, tie on your own shoes—yes, honey, you’re old enough for that—let your dad walk you to school. He passes by Jean’s school once every few mornings on his way to the bus station: they live north of New York City, in Annandale-on-Hudson, a little town on the water, and many mornings her father takes the bus to go to New York City to work. Jean imagines it must be an extraordinary place, New York City, lights and metal and vastness and busy people and all. On the other hand her mother says that New York City is perfectly ordinary, perfectly mundane. Ordinary is a routine. Ordinary is a cycle. It is an extraordinary thing to be ordinary in a world of extraordinary things.
When she is five and her sister is two, Jean is living a perfectly ordinary life.
When she is six and her sister is three, aliens fall out of the sky in New York City and kill their father.
They are little children when the news breaks. Jean is at school, and then there’s a news broadcast and everyone is being sent home and by the time her mother arrives to pick her up it is already over. It happens rather unexpectedly, quite abruptly, so quickly that both Jean and her sister forget to cry over the following days. It is only after the will has been read and the casket has been lowered into the ground and the priest has given his sermon and the guests have gone off to console their mother—and now they are alone, the two of them, holding hands, standing by the headstone in their silly black dresses and their silly black shoes, amidst bouquets and petals peeling from bouquets—that it really begins to hit them. They stand by the gravestone, hand in hand, while all the others have moved on. It is cloudy, air clogged thick with dried-up rain, and there is just them.
“Do you think Dad’s in a better place?” Sara asks.
“I hope so.”
“Do you think he’s in heaven?”
At that, Jean pauses. “If there’s a heaven, he’d deserve to go there.”
Then Jean kneels—kneels, like her father used to do when he came back from work and found her and her sister at the kitchen table, doing homework—and she presses her lips to the palm of her hand and then presses her palm to the coarse polish of her father’s gravestone.
It was raining earlier. It has stopped raining now, and there is a puddle by the headstone and Jean tiptoes to the edge to peer into the water and look at her own face. Her mother likes to say that Jean looks very much like her father. Perhaps that is true. She did not pay enough attention, back then, truth be told. Truth be told, she is now starting to forget her father’s appearance. She remembers him, the vague contours of him. But not the little details, the important details. The glow of her father’s voice, the cut of his face, the candour of his smile. So she chases in her reflection for that grain of fading memory.
Her little sister waddles over, stopping with her to gaze. Straw-yellow hair and sharp grey eyes. If she looks like her father, her sister looks very much like their mother.
She pulls her sister close. Buries her face into her sister’s hair. She breathes in, memorizes the scent. Sage and oranges. She burns the smell into her mind.
When she is seven and her sister is four, their mother starts changing. Or perhaps, to use the metaphor of the cocoon, the butterfly was always waiting inside of the caterpillar, waiting for the right moment to molt. Except the butterfly is ugly. People change. It’s a fact of life. Mother becomes withdrawn, brooding, mostly sullen and unresponsive, sometimes lashing at everyone and no one. She drinks. She says all the swear words that she tells Jean and Sara to never say. She stops cleaning, stops watching, stops caring. Sometimes the television turns on and there’s a broadcast, Iron Man stopping a plane crash in Slovakia, Captain America helping flood victims in Louisiana, and then their mother comes to life to laugh, cry, yell.
There’s no such thing as a superhero, their mother repeats, over and over. Like a mantra. Like a spell that comes true if you incant the words enough times.
It is easy, far too easy, for Jean to take her place. She is observant, and copying others comes easily for her. Her mother still remembers to go to work at that beachside diner, remembers to bring home leftovers for dinner, and that’s about everything she remembers to do. Jean sweeps the floors, takes out the trash, wipes down tables and sinks and counters. She changes lightbulbs when they burn out. She fetches the envelopes with the monthly bills and does the math on the back of those envelopes, then fills out the cheques and coaxes her mother into signing them and then mails the cheques out herself in the postbox by the convenience store at the second intersection away from their house. Her mother stops waking up in the morning so Jean starts making breakfast and packing lunch for her and her sister on her own and on her first attempt at scrambled eggs she burns her hand on the stove and doesn’t cry, just runs cold water over her hand until the pain fades to a faint red sting. Her sister finds her afterward, at the dining room table, cradling her palm with an icepack.
“It’s nothing,” Jean says, pasting on a smile. “It’s silly. I messed up, that’s all.”
They need to go to school soon. So Jean pours them both some cereal and some milk. The milk is running out. She’ll have to go get groceries soon.
When she is eight and her sister is five, SHIELD falls apart along with three hijacked helicarriers over the Potomac River, and her mother remarries to an all-too ordinary man, and Jean gets her little sister a scrunchie. They’re passing by a garage sale on the way back from school, and Sara’s hair has been growing long, past her shoulders, a wheat-gold curtain. There’s a much older girl with beads in her hair and a gold piercing in the nose, and she’s selling trinkets under the shade of a maple tree. Here, the girl offers: a scrunchie for your sister, blue and gold, handcrafted, only a dollar.
A dollar and a scrunchie later, and Jean’s tying up her sister’s hair, smoothing with her fingers, tying the knot and fixing the scrunchie in place, when Sara talks.
“I don’t like our new dad.”
Jean feels her fingers still.
“Me neither. But our mother likes him, and our mother’s happier. That’s the important part.”
She knows little about their stepfather. She stays away from him, for the most part. She knows their mother met him at work; that he is rich, that he is from the city, and that he has many rich friends, and that those friends come over on weekends to play poker and smoke on the back porch and laugh loudly, boorishly, while their mother mans the barbeque grill and serves them drinks. She knows it is better for her and her sister to stay out of sight when his friends are around. Her mother, when they were littler, and her father would say to stay away from strangers, and anyone who makes you feel even the tiniest bit unsafe. She does not feel safe around those strangers. But who is she to tell mother that, when her mother is smiling again? Happy again? Their mother’s getting better, with their new stepfather around. Her mother is remembering more what to do, and this past year of Jean picking up the slack, maybe it’s behind them now for good. She did what she had to do, as her mother’s elder daughter, and now she can go back to being a little girl.
Maybe this is just a dream, in the end. Maybe that’s what life is, in the end. Bad memories are just nightmares, and the good memories are but happy dreams. Fleeting, evanescent. Strung one after another in a blurred line, lights on a Christmas tree, wrinkles in a scrunchie.
When she is nine and her sister six, Sara asks her what she dreams of being when she grows up. And Jean thinks, and thinks, and finds she can’t find a good answer.
“Do you think that superheroes dream of supersheep?” she asks back instead.
Her sister doesn’t skip a beat. “That’d be a strange thing to dream of.”
She does not want to say to her sister that her dreams are strange. That her dreams are filled with fire. Sometimes she dreams of the stars. Sometimes she dreams of creation, of plasma, of cosmic conflagration, burning and twisting like the feathers of an incandescent creature. A bird. A phoenix, she thinks, those creatures she reads about in picture books, that live and die and are reborn in fire. She does not know what those dreams might mean. She does not want to know, truth be told. She is an ordinary girl, and she has her sister, and she has her mother back, and she does not want any of that to change.
In the evening, she watches the news about Ultron. Iron Man’s newest creation, gone rogue. The chase in Johannesburg, the destruction of Sokovia. See, their mother whispers with venom in her breath, see these so-called heroes playing at god with their powers. See the devastation they have wrought. See their hypocrisy. Their stepfather nods along. It’s good none of us could be tempted by power the way they have been, he says. Good that we are all ordinary.
When she is ten and her sister is seven, there’s a bombing at the United Nations and the Avengers split up, and their stepfather has been getting worse and their mother has been happier than ever and Jean and Sara start staying away from home. They start racing each other up a hill.
They are little children. They are sisters, they are human girls, and they are racing each other up a hill at sunset. In years to come, the beings that they are will come to be called many names—monsters, gods, mutants, heroes—but for now they are just sisters, human girls, one older and one younger, running up that hill. They giggle as they reach the summit.
“You let me win,” Sara says.
“You’re faster than me,” Jean says, feigning confusion.
“You could have pulled ahead,” Sara says. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because you deserved it,” Jean says.
And Sara shakes her head, with all the arrogance of untempered children, and promises:
“One day, I’ll beat you for real.”
On her sister’s eighth birthday, Jean is eleven, and Wakanda undergoes a succession crisis, and Jean makes Sara a cake. Mint chocolate, glazed with caramel. They have it in secret in their room, after midnight, on the floor with winter moonlight painting their faces nostalgia-blue, because their stepfather has taken to stealing their food while they are not looking and yells at them when he is discovered and their mother has taken to believing his word over theirs.
“I wish I could take care of you, once in a while,” Sara says.
“Don’t be silly,” Jean says. “That’s what big sisters are for.”
“Then I’ll be your big sister, one day,” Sara says, and laughs at that impossible wish, and Jean laughs back. “What about you?”
“I wish I’ll always be graced with the company of my beautiful, perfect, greatest little sister I could have ever wished for,” Jean says. She lets her smile slough off her face, replaces it with a candour she hopes comes across as genuine. “You’re the best part of me, Sara.”
Sara blinks.
“You really mean that?”
“Of course I do. Dad taught me I should always be true. So I’ll never lie to you, Sara. That’s a promise.”
On the count of three, they blow out the candle.
“Did you make a wish, too, Jean?”
“I wish I could watch over you, always.”
Getting blipped is the easy bit.
The hard part comes after.
She’s at school when it happens. One moment she’s scribbling in her notebook for English class, the next her hand is turning to dust, then her arm, and half the class is also turning to dust around her and then suddenly she’s blinking and in that same classroom, except it’s dark and decrepit like it hasn’t been used in years, and half her classmates are also around her, shaking their heads in confusion, and perhaps she’s been teleported to an alternate dimension? It’s not the craziest thing she can imagine. Someone tries turning the lights on and off and on again, click click click, to continued darkness, to no avail. There was that alien spaceship in New York City, and then it left, and Iron Man went missing, didn’t he? Perhaps that has something to do with it. The door open, and then one pair of feet walk into the corridor, and then two pairs, and then she’s following along with everyone else, and there are more faces, her music teacher rubbing his eyes like he just woke up from a long nap, the principal calling for order except no one’s interested in listening, and then there’s shouts from outside, fright, awe, jubilation, tires screeching, some kind of great uproar, and they’re all rushing toward the entrance and then it’s evening from the angle of the sun in the sky, but Jean remembers that it was morning just moments ago—perhaps she fell asleep? did the whole school fall asleep?—and then there are cars stopping, there’s crying, there’s tears, and she doesn’t do well with emotions and what is happening and everyone is rushing down the street and there are people stopping to fall on their knees and clasp their hands and lift their heads to heaven as if in thanks, and people frozen in their spots in shock, and people laughing like they’ve never laughed before, and the street looks strange, all the houses look cold and gutted and bleached of all their warm colours, like some post-apocalypse movie, toppled telephone poles and crooked telephone poles and pavement cracked and blistered with age, walls tattered with graffiti, and she sees posters on walls and poles, missing posters, the trees are orange and not green because somehow it’s autumn instead of spring, she’s rushing down the street without thinking of where she’s going and faintly she registers that she’s going toward home, home, in the direction of home, her sister—where is her sister—
“Jean?”
This isn’t right. It’s not her sister. It can’t be. It can’t be her sister emerging from the front door, wading through the overgrown weeds, with straw-yellow hair and those sharp grey eyes, except on a face that’s so much older, and a frame that’s slimmer and taller and she’s taller than Jean, a full head taller than Jean, and she’s crying and she’s running forward and Jean doesn’t know her, she should be running but she doesn’t because she’s lying to herself, breaking her father’s promise.
“Jean,” and then there’s a face pressed into her hair and her face is pressed into a shoulder and there’s hair tickling her nostrils and she smells the strands. Sage and oranges. Sage and oranges. She reaches up with her hands and there’s the blue-and-gold scrunchie, still tangled in that hair.
It’s her sister. It’s her sister. Perhaps all the rest is false, but her sister has to be real.
“Jean,” Sara, her once-younger, now-older sister, murmurs into her ear. “Welcome home.”
Jean was twelve, is still twelve. Sara was nine, and now she is fourteen.
It’s been five years, Sara explains, since Thanos wiped out half of all sentient life in the universe. Sara survived. So did their mother and stepfather. Jean was erased.
In the intervening time, their stepfather ran off. So now it’s just Sara and their mother, living in the old house.
Their mother is waiting in the kitchen. Time has not treated her kindly, and she is more skeleton now than human, Jean thinks—bony wrists and ankles, sunken cheeks and straining tendons along the curve of her throat, eyes glassy where Sara’s are keen. A too-big shirt billows around her knees, swallows the thinness of her arms. She smells like smoke and age and rot. She scans Jean twice over, then scoffs.
“This is how you’re going to do it, huh? Finding a lookalike for Jean.”
“She is Jean, mom,” Sara says. “I know it’s hard to believe, but—”
“Still trying to fix me, after everything.”
“The Avengers did it: everyone from five years ago, they’ve returned, just look out the window and you’ll see—”
“Foolish girl, no one comes back from the dead—”
“It’s me, mom.”
Her mother blinks, then gives a low chuckle.
“Sure you are. Can I expect your father to be giving me a visit then? Am I to be biting the dust within the next year? Am I to soon join you among the dead?”
“Mom,” and Sara is giving a tight sound of warning but Jean feels herself ignoring it, stepping forward, “it’s me, Jean, I just saw you yesterday morning—”
“Get her out of my sight.”
Their mother rises in a flash, faster than Jean would have thought her capable of, a glint of something deeply mad and broken in her eyes, clawing forward, and there’s a hand gripping onto her shoulder, pulling her backward, pulling her out of the kitchen, and then her sister’s face, grey and drawn thin and serious in a way that Jean has never seen before.
“I’ll deal with her,” Sara says.
“I can deal with this,” Jean grits back, “I’m your older sister—”
“Get her out, Sara, do you hear me, get her out out out out out out out—”
She should be stepping in front, shielding her sister, because Sara’s always been the better of them—
“I’m the older sister now, Jean. I’ll do this.”
And then Jean finds herself pushed out of the way, and the kitchen door shutting in her face with a resounding clack.
Sara finds her after, in their old bedroom.
Me and mother figured out an arrangement, Sara says. Stay out of sight. Don’t let mother see you. So she sets up a new routine. Wake up. Walk across the floor to the bathroom, brush her teeth, then walk back and plop back onto the bed and laze about. There’s no school, not when the world still doesn’t know what to do with the previously dead, suddenly alive. So she has all the time in the world. Jean stays holed up in her room, and Sara brings up her meals, and Sara talks to her about the last five years. Sara shows Jean the closet with all the old clothes she’d saved for Jean. Sara talks, and talks, like she could relive five years in the space of a few days.
So it goes, for a week, then two, then a month.
Every time Jean brings up her mother, Sara gives her the same answer. Give me time. I’ll reason with her. I’ll make our mother see sense.
“The world’s different,” Sara says finally, bluntly. “You’re going to have to let up on a lot of things, Jean.”
She knows. She heard everything. Through the bedroom door, that first day, after Sara sent her upstairs. Sara lying to their mother through her teeth. She’s just a kid I picked up on the street, and she looked like Jean, and she—I know I’m being sentimental. But please, in Jean’s memory, please let her stay a bit. She has nowhere else to go. I’ll make sure to take care of her. I’ll make sure you don’t have to see her. She remembers. She remembers she walked away from the door and sat down on the bed. The sheets were the same as usual, still folded the same way she’d woken just last morning, five years ago. The room hadn’t changed at all, come to think of it. Like Sara had kept everything exactly the same, waiting for the day Jean came home. Like she’d been clinging after everything onto a sliver of hope.
“You’ve changed, Sara.”
“I have,” Sara says simply, quietly.
“And—and mom too.”
A heavy breath. “Grief’s a horrible thing. It got bad after you … after you died. She started hallucinating you, Jean. She started hallucinating our dad, our real dad. Then our stepfather left and she was barely able to do much else beyond sit around and daydream all day long. I had to take care of everything.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be sorry. There was no way you could have foreseen this.”
It’s autumn. They’ve snuck out of the house for the evening and they’re sitting under the shade of an old oak tree, shedding gold, and Jean’s sister reaches out with cupped hands to pluck one leaf out of the air. She holds it up by the stem, turns it to catch the dying light.
There’s a strand of caterpillar silk, glittery white, caught on the tip of the leaf.
“Mother used to teach us to never change,” her sister starts softly. “To never be different, to always be ordinary. But change—change is the natural state of the world. It’s in our nature to evolve. To be different. To break out of our cocoons and grow into the newest, best versions of ourselves.”
They speak of an angel in that little town of theirs.
After the Blip, after the Avengers’ loss, after the loss of all too many heroes and the rest of them stretched in across a collapsing universe, no one could have batted an eye at a tiny town on a tiny world falling into ruin. But there’d been an angel, inexplicably, who’d watched over the people of Annandale-on-Hudson and prevented the town from falling into total ruin. A boy who’d fallen into a ditch, saved by a firefighter who said he’d been possessed by a greater power. A girl who’d almost been murdered by her father, only for him to walk away to the police station with a knife still in hand and confess to his attempted crime. Many such stories were told of these strange happenings, and more. It seemed to keep a particularly close eye on the children. A ghost, the more suspicious townsfolk had come to call it. An angel, everyone else said.
“It’s me,” Sara says. “I’m the angel of Annandale-on-Hudson.”
She has powers, Sara says. After the Blip, like a switch had flipped somewhere inside her brain and suddenly she could read the thoughts of other people and control their minds too.
And Jean might have the same powers.
“There’s a spark inside your head,” Sara tells her. “I can feel it. It’s like … a little ember, buried under everything else. I haven’t seen it in anyone else, other than in my own mind.”
“How do you turn it on?” Jean asks.
She doesn’t know, Sara says. Perhaps she had those powers all along. Perhaps it was the grief, Sara thinks, that triggered it. The surge of cosmic energy from the Infinity Stones, that might have counted for something, too.
“I’m sorry if that isn’t very helpful if you wanted to figure out how to unlock your own powers,” Sara apologizes.
No, Jean thinks, there’s nothing to apologize for. Their mother is wrong. There is a hero out there, Jean thinks, a real hero, and she lives in this very town. She’s Jean’s own flesh and blood. Her sister, her better half.
“Does mom know?” Jean asks instead.
Sara’s face darkens, and that’s answer enough.
Christmas. There’s been some disturbance at Westview that’s hit the news, and there is little snow on the ground, and it is warm for the end of the year, and there is still some sunlight, none of the usual winter gloom. They are wearing sweaters and boots, gloves but not hats, breath misting in the crisp chill, and Sara is tying her hair back, by herself now, the faded scrunchie slotting neatly between silver-gold locks.
“Race each other, Jean? Up the hill?”
They leave the house nearing sunset and they’re running and they’re running past debris and huddles of people and the tentative garlands of lights and colour and the exuberant bangs of fireworks, the skeletons of their pasts, they’re shedding skin in the wind and then they’re forgetting about the last five years, about infinity, about everything but each other.
In the end, she makes it to the top of that hill after her sister.
“You know you don’t have to pretend anymore,” Sara says as they take a seat on a bench.
“Pretend what?”
“We can race for real, now.”
Jean smirks, despite it all, and shakes her head. “And where would the fun be in that?”
“I can beat you, I can prove it.”
“And you’re still my little sister—”
“No,” Sara groans, but with a hint of that old mirth, “I’m not—”
“And it’s my duty as your big sister to always let you win. Sorry, Sara, but I’m not letting you one up me on this.”
At that, Sara chews on her cheek. She stretches out her legs, props herself on her arms. She’s quiet for a long while. Then she laughs. And Jean laughs back, and they laugh as night falls and faraway the fireworks keep going off.
She was born the older sister, you know. The elder, the teacher, the protector. Even after she became the younger sister, there will always remain a part of her that believes she should have remained the older sister, to take all those steps first, to shield her once-younger, always younger sister with her body and spirit.
What does it mean to be a sister? To be born is to live, and to live is to run, run forever, run that uphill slope, run alone toward something—perhaps the moment of your death, or perhaps something else. It’s a morbid thought, yes. But she’s a kid, you know, she doesn’t know about tact and only knows about honesty, about being true to yourself, and if that could be the truth then who’s to stop her from thinking about it?
Maybe that’s what sisters are for: to have someone race by your side from the start of your race to the very end, bound by blood, racing each other for eternity.
Then their mother calls soldiers on them.
“You have powers.”
“I do.”
“You’re the angel of Annandale-on-Hudson.”
“That’s right.”
Crick crack, the sound of dripping water, of trickling plaster. The faint heaving breaths of the pile of soldiers by the doorway. If anyone caught any footage, they would have seemed to beat each other unconscious.
A shaky inhale. “Those gentlemen—they, they were trying to help that girl, just like you have been doing. They work for the Global Repatriation Council, helping people get home—they would have sent her off, gotten her somewhere better—”
“Jean is home. Jean is your daughter, and she is my sister, no matter how much you try to deny it—”
“Was it you then?”
Footsteps, footsteps, running a race up that hill.
“You drove him away,” their mother rasps. “I needed your father, and you took his mind and you sent him away.”
“He wasn't my father. He was hurting you, mom. He was hurting me. I needed him to get out, so I did what I had to do—”
“Now you get out.”
A low pause.
“So that’s it, mom? You’re sending me and Jean away?”
Their mother swallows. Her eyes are red. Her nails dig into the kitchen table like hooks, holding onto the last tethers of her sanity.
“I’m not a mother, and neither of you are my daughters. Get out before I call the cops again.”
Years later, Jean Grey will wonder if she was made extraordinary, or if she was already secretly marked from birth, destined to be different from the moment she came into this world. Her mother came to drill into her an adage in those childhood years. That heroes are born to be heroes, and that in a good world heroes would never have to be born. There is no such thing as a true hero, after all: silly you, foolish you for believing in superhero stories, present-day myths, modern fairytales. No one with superpowers could ever be truly good. In a good world, Jean Grey should have never been born. Her mother became cruel because of her, stopped being a mother.
But her mother was once still a mother, still acted like one at some far-removed point in time when Jean was still ordinary. So why, why? Jean does not understand why. She does not understand heroes or destiny, understand mothers or adulthood or the concept of love.
She does not think she will ever understand. Her sister says it has to do with adulthood. Adults are so dishonest, so complicated, so much uglier than newborns. It’s like Halloween with the masks her father used to help her cut out of cardstock and thread through with string, except the masks never come off, and it’s more like a chrysalis, to think of it: children are born as caterpillars and through their childhoods they metamorphosize into something new, except it’s a transformation into something more twisted, more cruel, robbed of all its youthful beauty and innocence rather than exalted by it.
When she was a little girl, she remembers wishing for herself and her sister to stay children forever.
Perhaps this hell is but a cage in Jean’s own mind. Perhaps she’s gone mad like this dream version of her mother, gone down the version of her mother that she knew from the last normal yesterday and all the days before yesterday: in that, at least this make-believe reality is still consistent, still makes sense. Perhaps this is just a bad dream and she just needs to wake up. Perhaps she ate the poisoned apple like Snow White and now she’s waiting for the hero of the tale to revive her from this tormented slumber, but—
But there are no heroes, doesn’t she remember?
Her mother’s lessons come to mind. The world is all too ordinary. There are no heroes. There is no true heroism in this world, and if it did, it wouldn’t last. No good deed goes unpunished. Think of her father, rotting in his grave.
Power corrupts. Power makes for cruel and uncaring gods. There is no justice except that which we make with our own hands. Reality is but a dream, after all, the string of our memories that unfurls on and on and forever. Everything is all too wrong and yet all too right. This is the new reality of her world, and it is a cruel reality.
She cannot deceive herself any longer.
She is thirteen, and her sister sixteen, and she is racing her sister up that hill. It is an ordinary day, a beautiful autumn dusk in the park, with mosquitoes and cicadas buzzing in the evening heat and the ice cream truck in the shade by the duck pond where the children fashion swords out of reeds and pretend to be the heroes of some timeless fairytale. There are many extraordinary things in this world of modern heroes, after all. But they are ordinary, these sisters are, perfectly ordinary at this point in time, though that does not stop them from dreaming. They dream that they are special. They dream that they are no longer running on dew-kissed grass but floating, floating, their feet finding purchase on the very air. They dream that the world is their oyster, a cradle of eternal happiness for two. Sneakers flash and loose sleeves flutter and hair trickles like smoke in the wind—
Forgive me, Jean.
Mothers and a beautiful autumn day and mint chocolate ice cream, powers and the extraordinary and running up that hill. She was running, running, running for real, running to win, running to pull ahead, like big sisters are supposed to—and then, then—
Sages and oranges, sharp grey eyes and straw-gold hair tied back with a yellow-blue scrunchie—
A shutter clamping down on her mind—
She lost.
She is thirteen, and her sister is sixteen, will be forever trapped at sixteen, will dream one last dream before slipping away into the merciful void, and they were two little girls running up that hill. Now, she is still running, running toward eternity, and it is just Jean the sister who was once the older sister and then the younger and then no sister at all, and she is running alone.