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There was a weight to being alive that Jason had never understood before she died. Flesh was heavier than she remembered, the drag of gravity through the joints, the ache buried beneath old scars, the low animal labour of lungs opening and closing in the dark, the heart insisting upon itself with every blunt contraction. The sheer indignity of it surprised her: the vulgar persistence of the body, its endless appetite for air, water and sleep, the way it demanded to be fed, warmed and touched, the way a bruise could darken beneath the skin like fruit left to spoil, and a cut could open and bleed with the gracelessness of a slaughtered pig.
Before she died, Jason imagined death as a form of cleanliness. No hunger, no thirst, no aching knees after patrol, no pulse hammering against her throat when footsteps came too quickly from behind. No body at all. Only some weightless and incorporeal soul released at last from the humiliations of meat. She had been young enough, once, to think that would be freedom despite the old stories warning otherwise.
The Greeks had their rivers and ferrymen, their black water and asphodel meadows, their pomegranate seeds dark as blood, their iron gates shut with the dead on the other side. They knew death as a crossing, and knew, too, the cruelty of trying to cross back. Orpheus descended for his beloved and, at the threshold of daylight, looked back; for the sake of seeing her, he lost her again. Persephone swallowed the fruit of the dead and returned as someone else — Kore buried beneath the name Persephone. A girl could be taken beneath the earth and come back a wife, a season could die and return altered. The old stories understood that death did not always mean the end of the body. Sometimes it meant the end of what the body had been.
Even Mary Shelley, writing in an age that had begun to prise open the corpse with instruments of science, understood the obscenity of laying hands upon what already crossed its threshold. Frankenstein's creature opens its eyes because a man cannot bear the limits of his own mortality. Victor would steal creation from the womb and make a cradle of the grave; he would wrench life from cold flesh with nothing but intellect and ambition, as though the oldest mystery in the world were merely another locked door men had been denied the right to open.
There is something Miltonic in that arrogance, that Satanic hunger to mistake every prohibition for an insult. Victor makes his little hell among dead things, and when the corpse opens its eyes, he learns too late that the power to create life is not the power to command it. That to bring a being into the world is to incur a debt that cannot be discharged by turning away.
Jason thought that was the true obscenity of resurrection: not that the dead should rise, but that a living hand should reach into the grave, close around what had gone cold and decide that the earth had no right to keep its dead.
And yet, somehow, Jason could not make a monster of Clark for it.
She had imagined resurrection as blasphemy, the hand of the living prying apart the sealed lips of the grave, but Clark had never touched her like a thief. There had been no triumph in it, no Promethean delight in stealing fire from the heavens, no Victor Frankenstein standing breathless over the corpse because he could not bear to be lesser than God; there had only been Clark, standing before the impossible with grief in her hands, and Jason could not understand how grief could become a prayer so powerful that even death bent its head to listen. The old gods had always demanded something for their miracles: blood for rain, worship for favour, a life returned as a warning, but Clark had asked for nothing. She simply refused the finality of Jason's absence, as though death were not a law but a verdict, and even the dead can be granted an appeal.
Perhaps that was the part Jason could never forgive herself for loving: not that Clark brought her back, but that somewhere in the terrible mathematics of loss, she had chosen Jason's life to be one of the things she could not accept as finished. No purpose beyond the unbearable, almost childish insistence that Jason should still be here. There was something holier in that than any altar she had ever imagined, something ancient enough to make the blood remember before the mind could give it a name. A god might resurrect the dead to prove that death could be conquered; a goddess might call a beloved from the underworld because eternity failed to make her absence bearable. But Clark looked upon the silence where Jason had been and answered it with love, and Jason, who spent her whole life turning herself into something useful enough to be kept, had no defence against the terrible tenderness of being wanted for nothing at all.
For a moment, Jason could almost see her as the old stories might have seen a god: not as a woman at all, but as something the human eye had been forced to translate into the shape of one. Sunlight given skin, a piece of heaven that had somehow fallen to Earth. It was an absurd thought, and perhaps that was why it would not leave her alone. Clark sat beside her with one knee drawn loosely beneath herself, the blue-white flicker of the television passing over her face.
There was nothing remotely divine about the way she was eating chips directly from the packet, fingers disappearing into the crinkling foil with the absentmindedness of someone who had forgotten the rest of the universe existed. Outside, rain whispered against the glass, thousands of tiny fingers worrying at the windows while Gotham glimmered below them in broken gold and red, its towers dissolving into the low clouds until the whole city seemed half-drowned, half-dreaming. Somewhere beneath the floorboards, the pipes groaned like an old man turning in his sleep. The radiator clicked, tires whispered over wet asphalt, a siren rose in the distance, two parts mournful and melodic, and Jason's attention followed it instinctively through the walls, streets and darkness until it vanished somewhere beyond the river. Then, there was only the room again, warm and dim and smelling faintly of rain, ozone, citrus and the clean cotton of Clark's shirt. She could hear the tiny rasp of Clark's breathing between the television's voices. Could feel the heat of her where their bodies almost touched. Could hear the soft, ridiculous crunch of another chip between her teeth.
It was strange, the way divinity became smaller the closer Jason looked, until all the impossible grandeur fell away and what remained was simply Clark's shoulder beside hers, Clark's hand resting loose in her lap, Clark's mouth faintly curving at something happening on the television that Jason had not been paying attention to. Maybe that was what made her divine. Not the strength. Not the flying, or the heat in her eyes, or the terrible breadth of what those hands could do. It was this instead: that something powerful enough to be mistaken for a god could make itself so gentle in the presence of one person. Jason found herself looking at her for too long, helplessly, stupidly, as though there might be some scripture written in the small details of her face if she stared hard enough.
Clark noticed, eventually. She swallowed, reached into the packet again, and glanced sideways at Jason with the faintest crease between her brows. “You know,” she said, offering her the bag without taking her eyes off her, “if you keep staring at me like that, I'm going to start thinking I have something on my face.”
Jason reached into the packet, letting her fingers brush Clark's as she stole a chip. "That's because you do," she said, and before Clark could ask what on Earth she meant, she lifted her hand and flicked the bridge of her glasses with one finger.
The frames jumped crooked against her nose. Clark's face folded at once, her nose wrinkling beneath the displaced lenses, and Jason felt something warm blossom throughout her body, slow and golden as honey, sweet enough to make a ruin of her.
There were softer things in the world than this, surely; there were spring mornings and sunlight on water, the first green shoots breaking through thawing earth, the small, blind mouths of flowers opening to the warmth of April. And yet, Jason sat there thinking that she would gladly have the whole of spring reduced to this one ridiculous wrinkle between Clark's brows, this fleeting indignation, this little disturbance of a face she had begun to know with the fervent intimacy of prayer.
She bit into the chip and it shattered between her teeth absurdly loud in the hush that followed.
Clark's eyes narrowed and the easy warmth of her expression drew inward, gathering behind her gaze until Jason had the peculiar sensation of standing beneath the full attention of a storm. Then Clark tossed the packet onto the coffee table and moved with such suddenness that Jason barely had time to swallow.
One instant Clark was beside her, all warm-shouldered and soft smiles, and the next she crossed the distance between them, bracing her palms against the cushions on either side of Jason's waist and leaning over her until the armrest pressed into Jason's spine. The couch gave a soft, complaining sigh beneath their combined weight.
"How about now?" She leaned closer, tilting her head to one side and peering down at Jason through her lenses.
Jason's mouth twitched.
Clark leaned closer. "What about now?"
She turned her face a fraction to the left, then the right, presenting Jason with each angle as though she were a particularly troublesome portrait whose likeness had to be inspected from every possible direction. Her brows climbed, her lips pursed; then she pulled them into an absurd, pathetic little pout, peering at Jason over the rims of her glasses with such grave, hopeful expectation that Jason couldn't hold it any longer. Laughter escaped her, sudden and helpless, and she ducked her head as though that might conceal the sound.
Clark's expression transformed, and the ridiculous pout vanished. Her eyes brightened as her mouth opened into a grin so broad and unguarded that Jason forgot, for a moment, what had made her laugh in the first place.
There it was again: that intolerable brightness, not the distant, terrible splendour of a star burning beyond reach, but that first gold spilling over the rim of the world, finding its way beneath shutters and through cracks in old stone. Jason had seen Clark smile a thousand times. She watched her smile for strangers, for children, for the cameras that followed her through the sky; she saw the careful, reassuring beam she offered a frightened world that needed to believe somebody would always come when called. This was not that smile; this one belonged to the woman leaning over her on a battered couch in a rain-soaked city, pleased with herself over a joke so stupid that Jason could hardly believe she laughed.
"Well?" Clark demanded, giving her head another little tilt. "Is it still there?"
Jason leaned in.
Clark blinked rapidly, her expression faltering for the briefest instant as Jason suddenly closed the distance between them. Yet she didn't retreat; if anything, she seemed to settle more firmly into the cushions, her palms planted on either side of Jason's waist, her face hovering a breath away. Jason's mouth curled. There was something deeply satisfying about catching Clark off guard, if only for a moment, about watching that bright, confident face lose its place in the world. She tipped her chin up, regarding Clark with the sly, unhurried attention of a shark that had found a bleeding fish in the water.
"It is," she murmured.
Clark's eyes flickered between hers. "It is?"
"Mm." Jason let her gaze wander deliberately over Clark's face, as though conducting a final, thorough inspection. "Honestly, Clark. Can't do anything without me, can you?"
Clark nodded. Enthusiastically.
Jason stared at her.
Clark nodded again, as if to make absolutely certain her agreement had been understood.
A laugh threatened at the back of Jason's throat. God help me, she thought, and there was no help in the world for a creature who could look at her like that, so pleased to have been caught, so entirely unashamed of wanting to be kept there. She lifted her hand to Clark's face. A few grains of salt clung to the corner of her mouth, tiny white flecks against the soft pink of her lips, remnants of the chip she had eaten without ever bothering to reach for a napkin. Jason brushed them with her thumb, but they caught against the skin instead of coming away. For a moment she only looked at them, absurdly intent upon such a small thing; then, without taking her eyes from Clark's, she brought her thumb to her own mouth and wet the pad of it. When she touched Clark again, she did so with a care that seemed almost comical beside the mischief still lingering at the corners of her mouth, sweeping the salt from her lip in one slow, gentle stroke.
"There," Jason whispered. "Much better."
Her thumb remained against Clark's mouth. The last grains of salt long gone, but Jason found herself in no hurry to withdraw her hand. She traced the corner of Clark's lower lip, scarcely touching it, and watched the soft flesh yield beneath the pad of her thumb before settling back into place. Clark's breath warmed her knuckles. Her eyes had gone very still behind her glasses, fixed on Jason's face with an openness that made mischief difficult to sustain. Jason's smile faltered at its edges. Surely, she ought to have been content with this. The warmth of Clark's skin beneath her hand, the quiet trust with which she let herself be touched, the small and ordinary miracle of being permitted so near. Yet her gaze fell again to Clark's mouth, and the thought that followed was older than any prayer she knew.
Jason thought of fruit split open beneath the teeth, the brief resistance of its skin before it gave, juice running warm and sticky over the mouth, sweetness turning suddenly obscene in the mess of it. Perhaps that was what myths and legends had understood about desire: that the fullest beauty was the beauty of abundance, when sweetness overflowed its vessel and gave itself freely, spilling into the hands and mouths of those who came to receive it. There was joy in giving as there was joy in hunger, in the answering warmth of one body leaning willingly into another, until hunger became its own kind of prayer, greedy and without end, and the one who was loved opened her hands and said: take.
Her gaze lingered on Clark's lower lip, on the soft seam of it, and Jason imagined catching it between her teeth and pulling, gently, feeling that little yielding stretch before letting it go. She imagined the warmth of Clark against her mouth, the taste of her, the faint wetness that would gather where their lips met, and her hunger became a thing with a name and a body, a mouth made of want and teeth. Let others make idols of gold and cedar, shaping a likeness and calling it holy. Jason wanted no likeness; she wanted the fruit itself, bruised beneath the pressure of her mouth, split at the rind, its sweetness spilling over her lips. She wanted the mark of her own hunger upon it, not to spoil what was beautiful but to prove that beauty yielded to her touch. Her spare hand pressed unconsciously into the warmth of Clark's waist. She imagined leaving the smallest mark upon that perfect mouth, imagined the soft swelling of her lower lip beneath the pressure of Jason's teeth, and the thought carried the strange gravity of scripture, of forbidden gardens and hands reaching where they had been commanded not to reach. Perhaps that was the oldest law of wanting: that the fruit must be taken into the mouth before its sweetness could be known, that knowledge required the breaking of the skin, the spilling of juice, the surrender of what had been whole. As though, before there were altars or commandments or names for sin, there had only been a garden, a woman, a fruit heavy in her hand and the first mouth discovering that sin was sweetest when it ran warm and shining down the chin.
The thought scarcely finished unfolding before Jason's hands moved again. She caught Clark by the wrist, then seemed to think better of it, sliding her fingers down until they fitted between Clark's own, palm to palm, the familiar bones of her hand resting against Jason's as though they had been made to meet there. For all the strength in those fingers, for all the terrible things they could do, Clark's hands were warm and unresisting in hers. Jason looked down at them. There were times she still found it difficult to believe that anything so soft could've hurt so many people. She lifted her eyes. Clark was watching her, her mouth parted just slightly, the question in her face soft enough that Jason could not bear to leave it unanswered.
She drew her closer by the hands, guiding them down to her waist and pressing Clark's palms firmly against her sides, beneath the loose cotton of her shirt. Clark's fingers curled instinctively into the fabric. Jason tightened her own grip around them, holding her here, and felt the answering pressure of Clark's hands against her flesh.
Harder, she thought, with a suddenness that startled her. Not necessarily because she wanted to be hurt, but because there was something almost unbearable about the thought of passing through Clark's hands untouched, of being held by a woman who could lift mountains and leave not so much as a bruise upon herself. Jason wanted proof of the encounter. The faint ache of fingers pressed into her waist. Something that would remain when Clark let go, a testimony written into the vulnerable lines of her body.
Clark's expression changed as she understood what Jason was asking, and her hands tightened, carefully but unmistakably, gathering the cloth and flesh into her palms. Jason drew a sharp breath. Clark was here, holding her, and Jason's body, traitorous and grateful, answered the certainty of it before her mind could make a philosophy of the feeling.
"You're staring again," Clark murmured.
Jason's gaze fell to her mouth. "You're very distracting."
"I've been told."
"By whom?"
Clark's smile widened. "A very discerning woman."
"Sounds like she has terrible taste."
"She has excellent taste. She's dating me."
Jason huffed a laugh, and Clark laughed with her, their foreheads nearly touching, the sound of it mingling so easily that Jason couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. It was an ordinary, foolish exchange, the sort of thing that would've meant nothing to anyone else, and perhaps that was why it stuck with her. Clark's smile was terribly unfair up close. It gathered in the creases around her eyes, softened the line of her cheeks, and left her looking so unbelievably pleased with herself. Jason felt the familiar, hopeless urge to keep her there, to cup the warmth of her face between both hands and learn the shape of that happiness by touch.
There was a sacrament in the simplest acts of being loved, Jason thought, in the breaking of bread and the passing of a cup from hand to hand, in the ancient promise that a body might be given and received, that the divine might be made flesh and offered to the hungry. She had always imagined such things happening beneath vaulted ceilings, amid candlelight and incense, spoken in a language older than the mouths that carried it. She had never considered that they might happen here, with the television murmuring behind them and a discarded packet of chips on the coffee table, with Clark's knee pressed against hers and laughter still trembling at the corners of her mouth. No choir had ever sounded so sweet as Clark laughing beside her. No altar had seemed so holy as the small, warm space between their bodies, where neither of them were inclined to retreat.
Jason had spent so much of her life learning how to survive an emptiness that she had mistaken its absence for peace; she had never understood that there could be a kind of abundance in being permitted to stay.
Her thumb brushed Clark's knuckles. "Come here," she said, though Clark was already close enough that their noses almost touched.
Clark's eyebrows rose. "I'm right here."
"Closer."
There was no teasing in it now, and Clark seemed to hear the difference. Her smile quieted. She leaned forward until the bridge of her glasses nudged Jason's forehead, and Jason shut her eyes for a moment, breathing her in: the faint citrus on her skin, the clean, papery scent of old comic books, something sharp and mineral beneath it all, like ozone lingering in the air after lightning had struck and the warmth that clung to her as naturally as light clung to the sun.
She had thought once, that the dead must be free of wanting. That whatever remained beyond the grave would be cleansed of the body's endless, humiliating demands. But here was Clark, breathing against her mouth, and Jason could no more have renounced the small distance between them than she could have ever renounced the blood in her veins. She tilted her face up. Clark met her halfway.
The first kiss was almost absurdly gentle. Their noses brushed; Clark's glasses bumped Jason's cheek, and Clark made a tiny, embarrassed sound against her mouth that might've been a laugh. Jason smiled into the kiss, and Clark smiled back, and for a moment they couldn't quite manage it, too busy grinning at one another like fools. Then Jason caught the side of Clark's face in her hand, thumb settling beneath her cheekbone, and kissed her again.
This time, Clark's hands tightened at her waist, drawing her closer until the remaining space between them gave way. Jason felt the familiar pressure of Clark's fingers through her shirt, the soft pull of fabric gathered beneath her palms as though she might anchor them there by sheer insistence. Her mouth moved against Clark's with the tender, searching greed of someone who had spent too long learning the shape of absence. She kissed the corner of Clark's mouth, then the soft centre of it, and Clark followed each small retreat with such unthinking devotion that Jason's heart seemed to turn over in her chest.
There was a terrible sweetness in it, almost painful in its abundance. Clark's mouth was warm against hers, her lower lip soft between Jason's, and the faint scrape of teeth sent a sharp, startling thrill through her. Jason had known the body chiefly as a thing to be disciplined, hardened, driven past its limits; she knew the precise agony of split skin, the hot salt of blood at the back of her throat, the sickening give of bone beneath a well-placed blow. Her body remembered violence even in stillness. It lived in the tension of her shoulders, the restless flex of her fingers, the instinct to brace for impact even when there was nothing coming to strike her. Yet Clark's hands were firm at her waist, her mouth insistent against Jason's, and the old reflexes found nowhere to go at first. There was no unwanted pain to anticipate, no blow to return, only the pressure of Clark's body fitting close to hers, the small hitch of her breath, the answering movement of her lips.
Then her instincts returned. They became the fierce pressure of her palm against Clark's cheek, the careful turn of her head, the hungry insistence of another kiss. She wanted to get closer than skin allowed, to press herself into the warmth of Clark until the hard, splintered parts of her could no longer tell where they ended and Clark began. Clark met her there, with a hand curled into her shirt and her mouth slotting over Jason's, giving as fiercely as she received. For once, Jason's hunger didn't leave her emptier. It met another hunger, and in the warmth between them, neither had to go unfed.
Jason couldn't leave a mark upon Clark that the world would recognise. She couldn't bruise her skin, couldn't carve her wanting into that invulnerable flesh and call it proof. But Clark could leave her fingerprints in the soft places beneath her ribs. Clark could make her breath catch with a little pressure, could leave her aching long after the hands themselves had moved away. And if, later, Jason found faint marks at her waist, tender shadows blooming beneath the skin, she would know precisely whose hands put them there.
The thought made her smile against Clark's mouth.
"What?" Clark whispered, her lips still brushing Jason's.
"Nothing."
"That's not a ‘nothing’ smile."
"You're imagining things."
Clark drew back just enough to look at her, plainly unconvinced. A strand of her hair had fallen across her glasses; Jason brushed it away and tucked it behind her ear, letting her fingers linger against the warm shell of it. Clark turned her face into Jason's palm and kissed the base of her thumb as though Jason's hands were not things to fear or forgive. She had come back from the dead to find the world the same as she had left it, full of things that could be broken and people who could leave. Yet here was Clark, kissing the very fingers Jason had spent a lifetime teaching to make themselves useful.
Jason bent forward and kissed her again, before the world could think to interrupt.