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Chapter Text

Kit can't tell whether meeting Jade has made her more or less complete. Has there always been something missing inside of her that Jade somehow fills the edges of, or has Jade managed to shear something off of Kit? Does that part of her simply remain with Jade wherever she goes? It doesn't matter, as long as wherever she is, Kit is there with her.

11th grade

Kit’s been staring at this picture for an hour and the visceral anger in her chest hasn’t gone away.

The rest of the Facebook album had been bad enough, watching Jade at an all ages event at a gay bar, freckled shoulders bare under a ribbed tank top, red hair for once not strictly braided back, and an open mouthed smile that Kit has only seen on her face a half dozen times in the seven years of knowing her. Jade's sister is draped around her shoulders in half the photos, a physicality Jade allows with no one– except for, once upon a time, Kit. But it's this one, the final one in the album, that has Kit apoplectic.

Some girl is pressed up against her side, her hand on Jade's shoulder and is exaggeratedly kissing her cheek.

Kit had never kissed Jade. Not on her bruised knuckles after she hit that boy for Kit, not on her summer tanned shoulder at the lake, not on the strip of her stomach where her pajama top would ride up during sleepovers, not on her ankle where Kit would doodle aimlessly on her skin while they watched movies on the couch, not on her lips that night in the treehouse, the night before Jade left her.

Jade hadn't wanted her to. 

She hadn't wanted Kit, but this girl– this new girl who isn't even in any of Jade’s other photo albums she's that new– gets to press her mouth to Jade’s cheek like it’s the easiest thing in the world, and instead of pulling away, instead of jerking back and placing a hand on her sternum to keep her distance, all Jade does is smile.

It makes Kit feel so stupid , so unwanted and deluded that everything she had ever thought she meant to Jade, everything she had ever hoped that she was in Jade’s eyes, was wrong. Not that it was a lie , no, Jade hadn’t needed to do that– Kit had fooled herself well enough on her own.

There’s a picture of her and Jade taped to the side of her computer– a stupid one from some summer day when they were kids, Kit grinning with her face covered in ice cream from the bar she bought from the ice cream truck, Jade with the careful half smile she had for years as a child and an orange popsicle that is melting down her hand. Kit snatches the photo, her fury crumpling it in her hand and there is a sharp pang of regret about creasing their faces, marring the memory, but she shoves that impulse away and tosses it to the floor. There are pictures on the corkboard above her desk– she and Jade in a photobooth complete with stupid faces, Jade holding a soccer trophy and Kit caught in the act of leaping on her back, Jade riding Eclipse and looking horrified while Kit led him by the bridle, Kit and Jade curled up in the same sleeping bag in front of the TV at Ballantine’s, picture after picture, like Jade has always been the only thing in her life worth recording.

Kit yanks them off the board, pushpins scattering, concert ticket stubs tearing, photos bending and thrown to the floor. On her bookshelf there’s a dumb little blob of ceramic that looks vaguely like a horse– Jade’s exchange with her when they had their pottery module in school. When Kit swipes it off the shelf it thumps to the carpet, too heavy to even shatter. There’s a half filled mason jar of origami stars from when Kit had tried for a wish and Jade had dutifully sat beside her and folded them until both of their fingers ached. They scatter everywhere. Shoved in the back of her closet are two t-shirts that Kit had borrowed and decided to never return. They crumple to the floor in the mess of stars and photos. In the notebook by her bed are plans for prom that will never happen. They tear out easily. Under her pillow is The Mists of Avalon , because she’d had Jade read it to her so many times that she just left it at Kit’s house now. It’s dog eared at Kit’s favorite passages, a concession Jade’s normal care had made for Kit. Jade is everywhere in her room and Kit feels like she’s going to have to claw the paint off the walls with her fingernails to get her out. 

She stands at the center of her own tornado touch down, breathing hard and surrounded by evidence of how dumb she’d been to think that a friend that had been essentially bought for her could ever be anything real. She storms down to the kitchen and grabs a black garbage bag, determined to rid herself of as much of this mess as she can. The bag fills to bursting with passed notes and saved moments and everything that she’d ever shared with Jade. Kit strips the sheets off her bed because Jade has her own side when she stays over and her nightmares are sweat into the fabric, the places where their thighs or arms touched folded into the cotton.

The last place she empties is her secret place, the stash behind the vent down low on the wall. She hasn't touched it in ages and it makes her fingers ache to try to slip her nails between the wall and the metal. When she bends one nail back she shoves it in her mouth and bites down hard on her skin, controlling the source of the pain, blocking off the rest of it. Inside is a tiny bottle of Fireball, a pack of cigarettes with only two smoked– Jade’s miserable face when Kit had talked her into it burned into her brain– and a folded envelope worn soft.

Jade had sent it from summer camp after 6th grade– a two week scholastic one that she'd been awarded free boarding to, and one that Kit wouldn't have even remotely qualified for, regardless of the money thrown its way. Jade had told her about being away with all the seriousness of announcing that someone had died, and while Kit had poked fun at her in the moment, she had been heartsick about it herself. Two weeks of summer filled with all of the mandated activities to keep Kit “out of trouble” and none of the release valve of Jade to ease it was an awful prospect.

But Jade had written to her, like they were old-timey pen pals, and the first time Kit had received a letter in the mail from her she'd shrieked loud enough that Sorsha had heard her all the way upstairs and had sent Kit outside. Kit hadn’t minded mind– she climbed up to the treehouse and tore into it there.

Jade was methodical and detailed in her writing, recounting exactly what she did everyday, and while it sounded incredibly boring to Kit, she memorized the flow of Jade's day with far more dedication than the times tables she was supposed to be working on. Jade wrote clearly and in capitalized print that Kit’s eyes would have an easier time following. Jade had known that Kit would find it difficult to write her back, that Kit struggled with the order and orientation of letters to the point that she mostly tried to avoid them altogether, but she'd asked Kit to remember all that she'd done in the weeks Jade was away so that Kit could tell her as soon as she got home. It felt like a way to sew their separation together.

The last letter Jade sent had felt almost…wistful. She’d talked about missing Kit, missing her room, and Jade didn't talk like that. Missing meant needing and Jade couldn't afford to need. 

And she'd signed the letter Love, Jade.

Jade had never told Kit she loved her.

Kit told her constantly.

On the phone or before they fell asleep next to each other, teasingly or perfunctorily or earnestly, Kit said it because she meant it.

Jade was careful with her love, even more careful with voicing it.

Kit had kept that letter for years and years.

She wanted to shred it now.

Kit would never have left Jade, would have clung like a barnacle. Apparently she'd been a leech instead, one Jade had finally rid herself of with her escape. How much had Kit held Jade back with her neediness, her selfishness, her infatuation? Jade looks fine . Kit feels like the most pathetic surrendered shelter dog.

She stuffs the letter to the bottom of the trash bag, ties it off, and drags it all down the stairs. The bins have already been rolled out to the street for pickup in the morning and Kit hauls it down the stone path and heaves the bag inside. When the bin lid smacks down and the bag is out of sight Kit feels a sense of relief, like she’s sloughed off a too tight skin. Each step away from the trash bag makes her feel lighter, more impervious, like she was walking through briars tearing at her all day and now she’s finally cleared them out.

When she gets back into her room it feels cored out.

Jade was so involved in her life, it’s like there isn’t any life she had left to herself, and it looks it.

She drinks the bottle of Fireball.

It feels warm in her chest and belly. She turns on music as loud as she can and dances until her arms and legs are just as warm and sweat is running down her back. She goes into Airk’s room and roots under his bed for the half bottle of Grey Goose he keeps there. She drinks until she throws up in the bathroom, the bottle rolling across the tile. She sticks her head under the sink, soaks her hair and most of her shirt, pulls it off and stumbles into her room. She twists her comforter around herself on the bare bed, darkness wheeling her about even as she’s still, and eventually sleeps.

Grinding noise wakes her in the morning, heavy kachunks and hydraulic sounds, and it’s both familiar and impossible to place. She still feels like her organs are swaying inside her body, her brain furred over and just beginning to ache. There’s a squealing sound and a final thunk and then the unmistakable sound of an engine beginning to pull away. Kit crushes her face into the softness of her comforter, tries to imagine it shoving behind her eyes to hold her aching brain.

Kit’s stomach twists, and she thinks she might be sick again.

That was the garbage truck.

Everything that Kit has left of Jade is on that truck.

Kit throws herself out of bed, slamming to the floor and stumbling up as she struggles to untangle herself from the comforter, her stomach roiling and her balance still shaky. She pulls on a crumpled shirt from the floor and rushes down the stairs, holding onto the bannister with both hands because it feels like descending a ninety degree slope at top speeds. Her head feels like a static shriek of no and Jade and fuck and stupid . She bursts out the front door, concrete cold and wet with dew on the soles of her feet, but the garbage truck is already turning down the block.

Kit wants to scream. She holds it in, wraps the sound around her insides to hold it together.

She runs to the garage, throws herself into her Charger, and fumbles for the keys she left in the cupholder. It squeals to a start and Kit waits interminable seconds for the garage door to open, slamming her hands against the wheel and digging her nails into it by turns. She reverses out of the drive at too high a speed, barely glancing behind her as she does and slams the gear back into drive and floors the pedal. She takes the turn without decelerating, twisting the wheel and gritting her teeth through the drift. The garbage truck is halfway down the street, moving on to the next house on its route. Kit speeds after it, laying on her horn. The truck brakes, streaming black smoke as it does. Kit pulls to the side and then jerks over in front of it before stopping, making sure the truck is blocked in.

The driver hops down from the truck, looking an angry sort of afraid that shifts more to the anger side of the balance when he sees her and not someone his own size.

“What is your problem? ” he demands as she trips out of her car, shoving her hair out of her face and trying to focus on words instead of the yells that want to spill out of her.

“I threw something away,” she says, “by mistake. I need it back.”

“Okay, kid, if it’s in the truck it’s done. You can go to the landfill and request to do a search once this load is dumped but–”

“No, no!” Kit says, “Can’t you just let me look in the back of the truck? It was just a few houses down, I can get it.”

The driver makes a face.

“Are you fucking nuts? No. I’m not gonna let you get in the back of a garbage truck to root around and look for something you won’t find. It’s not safe and I’m on a schedule and–”

“I’ll pay you,” Kit cuts in, “I’ll pay you whatever.”

“What? No–”

Kit runs back to her car, yanks open her center console where she leaves her wallet and her heart twists at how Jade always chastised her for leaving it there, telling her how unsafe it was every time Kit pulled it out with a guilty grin. She pulls every bill out and runs back to the driver.

“400,” she says, shoving the money towards him, “All yours.”

The driver looks at the money, looks back at her.

“You don’t have shoes,” he says.

Kit curls her toes on the asphalt.

“Wait,” she says, “Just hang on.”

She goes back to the Charger and pops the trunk. She’d never cleaned it out from a beach trip she and Jade had taken a year ago, and there’s towels and sand and a sunscreen bottle and a pair of flip-flops. She drops them to the ground and stuffs her feet into them, rushing back to the driver and shoving the money at him again.

“Come on,” she says, “Give me ten minutes.”

He takes her money without a word and climbs back in the truck.

Kit heads to the back of the truck, already tugging her shirt over her nose and breathing out of her mouth from the smell encrusted into the metal itself. She grabs onto the side pole and steps up onto the ledge, peering down into the mess of half compressed trash. Black garbage bags, cardboard boxes, split open containers, a loose mess of food and paper and a thousand other things that are thrown away every day.

She can’t tell which is hers.

She climbs in.

Keeping her balance is hard, the trash slides under her feet, sinks, collapses, and she has to use her arms to steady herself on more stable piles as she picks through. She sees a handful of origami stars. The trash bag must have split open. Kit bites her lip, grabs a fist full of stars and throws them out the back of the truck before she starts pawing through the area she found them.

Her hands touch something slick, but when she pulls it out it's several photos stuck together with an unknown grease. Her face and Jade’s, smiling. She tosses them out of the truck, digs in again. She feels something wet between her toes. Something sharp jabs at her palm. Her stomach churns and her head pounds and acid tickles at the back of her throat. She swallows every feeling down.

She finds a few more photos, the stupid ceramic horse with its legs all broken off, and two folded up pages of notes they had passed back and forth in class– Jade had been terrified and stiff and therefore incredibly obvious about it. She finds the sheets but not the pillow cases, stained almost certainly irreparably. Kit finds The Mists of Avalon and clutches it to her chest. She finds one of the t-shirts. It smells nothing like Jade and never will again.

She just needs to find the camp letter. Just that one thing and she'll be okay. Everything can be cleaned up, smoothed out, put back in place. The cracks can be hidden. Jade can keep being the glue that holds her together.

Time sifts by as she trawls through the trash, her hands digging deeper, less carefully. She reaches for a bag near the top of a pile and loses her balance, the flipflops slipping out from underneath her and she crashes forward. She can see this moment from the outside, how this will become a kind of nexus for the rest of her life, this sad pathetic snapshot of wallowing in a mess of her own making that every offshoot of herself will originate from.

The driver honks his horn.

“Time's up! Get out of there!”

Kit scrambles at the trash, tearing through it wildly, her chest locked tight, her hands numb, filth all over her clothes and it doesn't matter it doesn't matter , she just has to find this one thing–

Arms wrap around her from behind and bodily haul her out of the truck. Kit kicks and scratches until she's dropped, knees and palms hitting the asphalt, stray origami stars crushed flatter.

“What the fuck , kid. Go home . And take a shower,” the driver says and walks away.

The driver doesn't seem to have any trouble navigating around Kit’s temporary car roadblock, and the smoke and growl of the engine dissipates as Kit sits in the middle of what she’s managed to save. It's not enough.

Kit piles it together, and every piece feels like an impossible weight to move but it looks pitifully small all together. She puts it all in the trunk of her car and drives home.

The flipflops– straps already pulled loose from the soles– go immediately into the garbage can still on the curb. The clothes she strips off once she's inside, but they go into the trash as well. She can't tell if the shower is too hot, or too cold– her skin just feels numb. There is red swirling down the drain, probably from her foot.

Her mind is only on the letter.

Kit knows it by heart. She can see it. Jade's careful lettering, the little smudge where she must have brushed still wet ink, the spot where she crossed something out with perfect straight lines.

The part where Jade wrote Love .

Kit can't remember if she actually took soap to herself or just stood under the water, but it doesn't matter, she has things to do.

She sits at her desk, naked and dripping and tears out a lined sheet of paper from her notebook. The edges are frayed. Jade would never do that. Kit painstakingly tears at the perforations of another page, gets one mostly intact. Jade had written in black ink. Kit slams through her desk drawers till she finds a black pen, cursing the purples and blues and oranges she uses to doodle useless junk. Kit can see the letter in her mind, but when she focuses on the shape of the words themselves they start to shift, start to reorient and flip. Kit grits her teeth, feels heat build in her head.

She starts to write.

It's painstaking. She goes through sheet after sheet. Her hand cramps. The letters are shaky.

Finally, there is one worth keeping.

Love, she writes at the bottom, Jade.

It's not Jade’s handwriting. It's not been touched by her. It's not been softened by Kit’s fingers tracing it over and over again. 

And it isn't true.

She rips it to pieces.

She writes it again.

Chapter Text

Jade felt possessive from the very start. Kit was wild and emotional and unwanted. Jade was reserved and repressed and unwanted. They both became the thing the other wanted most.

Late Summer, Early Fall, Kit 8, Jade 10

The place looks like a castle, Jade thinks as she unclips her seatbelt, grateful that the car has stopped moving and her stomach can settle. She presses her shoulder into the car door to open it. It's a nice car, it's just old, and doesn't always move like it should. Kind of like her new foster parent. Nice, old, and a little stiff in his body and words. Ballantine . It's a weird name but Jade keeps that to herself– she's not about to make waves over something dumb. That he's a single older man who lives alone and adopted a nearly teen girl is nerve-wracking enough. Jade supposes this is what the bottom of the barrel looks like.

The castle thing surprises her though.

It's not Ballantine's house– his is a sensible two bedroom ranch– but some old employer's who has “a girl close to her age” that they've set up a playdate with. 

A playdate. At ten, Jade is too old for people to be making social arrangements for her, and if left to her own devices there would be no social engagements at all. Most kids are a little boring– their worries silly and their stories stupid and Jade has nothing she cares to share with them. There are very few things she can take with her wherever she goes– only her own self, her own private thoughts. Those, at least, cannot be touched.

Every new situation has the potential to go wrong, to hurt her, to cost her something. She keeps alert, scans everything. The house has a tower . There's stonework on the side of the building and ivy and towering old trees that say rich people. Old trees, not the little stick saplings in suburbs, mean you can afford age, when hand-me-downs become heirlooms, out of style becomes vintage, and old becomes antique. Rich means brand new, rich rich means old.

Jade is wearing something at least five years old, worn by at least two other people, thin in places she hasn't been the one to wear down, a little pen mark on the sleeve in a color she's never written with. She'll look out of place here– almost literally the pauper in King Arthur’s court, but it doesn't matter. This is almost certain to be a one and done. It doesn't matter what people think of her if she's never going to meet them again.

“Well, here we are,” Ballantine rumbles, and he does that a lot– says things that are obvious because he doesn't know what else to say.

Jade nods.

“She's a nice kid, just kind of…high intensity,” Ballantine says as he starts walking up the stone paved path to the arched doorway, “Chatty too.”

Jade nods again.

The smell of all the flowers and grasses and bushes and whatever else all these plants are is nice. No one has time to care for something like this on their own; everything about this place suggests staff. She wonders if she counts as a kind of staff– a playmate for whatever little princess lives in this castle.

Ballantine leans on the iron railing as he steps up to the entryway and Jade appraises him– if he's in ill health, maybe he got her to help out around the house. That's an exchange she can understand. If he's very ill though, it limits the number of years she might be with him, and the shuffle of the unknown is always worse. Jade's thoughts are interrupted by Ballantine ringing the doorbell. He stands up straight and squares his shoulders. Jade does the same, to the side and a little behind him.

The door opens and the woman who opens it certainly is staff. It’s in what she wears and how she carries herself, how she holds the door like it’s something she could possibly break.

“Oh, hello Mr. Jacobs. Mrs. Tanthalos is expecting you. Come in and I’ll let her know you’re here.”

She disappears without introducing herself, without saying anything more, like her whole existence can be reduced to opening a door and an introduction. Jade clenches her jaw, but carefully unfists her fingers.

Ballantine grinds his boots into the welcome mat, though Jade had seen him put them on and the walk to the car and now to the front door had been uneventful, boot muddying-wise. She wipes her own second-hand tennis shoes carefully. There are stains of long wear on them that cannot be rubbed out with a welcome mat.

There's a peculiar hush to the house they enter, like this place pulls in noise and stills it, a black hole for sound. It makes Jade’s neck prickle– loud danger is always easier to avoid. They linger in the entryway, waiting.

The woman– who can only be Mrs. Tanthalos, she looks like she'd have a name like that– emerges silently from a side room, and if whoever Jade is about to have a playdate with is a little princess, then this is surely a queen. It looks and feels like a moment she should curtsey or something. Jade won’t be doing that, but she does keep an eye on Ballantine, checks to see what obsequiousness he might feel necessary.

Mrs. Tanthalos is not a tall woman, but the set of her shoulders and lift of her chin make her seem like one. What must have once been hair as fiery as Jade's own is now softened with gray, though it is the only thing that looks soft about her. Her eyes are alert and assessing, though Jade knows instinctively it's different than her own constant scanning– the difference between a prey animal surveying the landscape and a predator doing the same. She's wearing a dress that looks right within the house, but would make her stand out anywhere else, an impossibility in a Walmart or in line at a bank. Her eyes flick over Ballantine and she gives a slight nod. Ballantine clears his throat and looks down at Jade. Mrs. Tanthalos' eyes snap to her.

Jade isn't used to people really looking at her– she is the over looked one, after all. Mrs. Tanthalos starts at her head, where her hair is pulled back imperfectly because she hasn't had the time or focus to braid it in ages, across her face which Jade does her best to keep impassive, down her body in its second hand shabby clothes, and finally down to her worn shoes. Mrs. Tanthalos gives a quiet little sigh. Rage and shame burn inside Jade.

“I appreciate you coming, Ballantine. And this young lady must be Jade,” Mrs. Tanthalos says, and she sounds like she's out of a book.

Mrs. Tanthalos steps towards them and Jade flinches when Ballantine's hand rests on her shoulder and lightly pushes her forward. There is a war happening in Jade's heart– part of her demanding that she looks down at her shoes and part of her insisting that she meet this woman's eyes with every ounce of steel in her body.

The second impulse wins out.

Mrs. Tanthalos looks down at her, and there is an almost infinitesimal quirk to her eyebrow, a slight curl of her mouth.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, Jade,” she says.

Jade nods.

“Thank you,” she says, because she doesn't know what else to say and that seems safe enough.

Mrs. Tanthalos' mouth curls up just slightly more. Jade puts her hands behind her back, where Mrs. Tanthalos can't see her making them into fists– Jade doesn't want to be entertainment. Mrs. Tanthalos turns to the stairwell with the heavy carved wooden bannister.

“Kit!,” Sorsha calls up the stairs, “Our guest is here. Come down and say hello.”

Kit , what a ridiculous name. It’s the sort of name only someone out of touch would call their child, someone that doesn’t need to be worried about others mercilessly bullying them. Certain things socially insulate and as Jade’s eyes flick around the house, taking in the rich dark woods, the rugs she doesn’t want to step on, the metal fixtures, she can tell that these people are very insulated.

“No!” a voice yells back down, sharp with petulance.

Mrs. Tanthalos' eyes go harder, even as she smiles.

“Kit, come down right now!”

The most dramatic, world weary sigh Jade can imagine floats down the stairwell as its speaker tromps down sullenly.

It's a little girl, with long brown hair that glints red and gold in the light as she moves, elfin ears, a sharp face, and huge blue eyes. She's wearing a pink corduroy romper and she looks miserable.

Jade tries not to smile.

She– Kit– slumps her upper body across the bannister, half sliding and half walking most of the way down before she grabs at the wooden bars like they're a jail cell and whines . She breaks the hush of the house, the decorum, the sort of stifling spell her mother seems to cast over everything. Her socks have lace at the cuff, and she scratches at them with the toe of her shiny mary-jane shoes.

It satisfies something in Jade, to see this static snow globe world cracked open. Jade doesn't belong here, but neither does this little princess.

Mrs. Tanthalos says nothing, seemingly content to let the storm of Kit blow herself out. Kit looks up through her bangs and her eyes zero in on Jade. Her look is just as assessing as her mother's, but the grin that splits her face is feral, but genuine.

“You have to play with me, huh?” She asks.

Jade raises an eyebrow.

“Depends,” Jade says, because something about Kit makes her less careful.

Kit pokes her whole head through the bannister bars, and Jade wonders if she ever gets stuck like that.

“On what?” Kit asks, and there's a glint of excitement in her eyes.

“On if you can keep up,” Jade says.

“Jade,” Ballantine rumbles, and it's not quite a warning, because there's too much surprise in it.

“Well you two will be quite the pair,” Mrs. Tanthalos says dryly, “Why don't you girls go into the backyard and play. Ballantine you can pick her up in two hours.”

Jade recognizes the dismissal– both of herself and her caregiver. Ballantine gives her a single pat on the shoulder before he turns to leave and Kit sighs melodramatically as she leads the way to the back of the house, her shoulders sloped forward and her feet in a stomp, her fingers worrying the pink ribbon twisted through her hair.

Two hours until Ballantine comes back. Jade can do anything for two hours.

“How old are you?” Kit asks, looking her up and down.

“Ten.”

“ That's why you're taller. I'll be taller than that when I'm ten.”

Jade snorts.

“No you won't.”

“I will!”

“You might,” Jade says, “but you won't.”

Kit rolls her eyes, hops up to reach the monkey bars above her, pumps her legs to swing.

“Why did you get brought over here anyway?”

Jade shrugs.

“Because I don't have any friends.”

Kit frowns, hooks her legs to flip upside down on the bars, her long hair streaming underneath her. For a moment Jade wants to reach out and run her fingers through it– it looks soft.

“You don't have friends either, do you?” Jade accuses.

“Whatever,” Kit says, not looking at her, “other people are stupid. I have Airk.”

Her twin. Ballantine had mentioned him. Jade has nothing to say about this. There is no one she would ever say that about, the concept so foreign that her mind just slips entirely over it. Jade sighs again. Kids used to make fun of how often she sighed about things– said she sounded like a teacher. Jade clenches her teeth, but she knows her face doesn't change beyond the flex of her jaw– anger has to be private in front of new people.

“I can hold onto the bars longer than you can,” Jade says, hopping up and grabbing one, curling her fingers over the bar and settling her shoulders into a comfortable enough lock.

Kit glares from upside down.

“Can't.”

“Can.”

Kit twists like some kind of half monkey, half weasel around the bars, finally ending up hanging by her hands. Her feet are a full foot further from the ground than Jade’s.

“I've already given you a head start,” Jade says.

“By like, a second ,” Kit says, sticking her tongue out, her hands already twisting into a new grip.

Jade lifts herself up enough to approximate a shrug. She's showing off, she knows, but what else does she have to show off about?

Kit squiggles like she's trying to get comfortable, and Jade can see how her fingers are already white with the intensity of her grip. Jade puts on her flattest affectation– there's nothing more demoralizing than your opponent making it look easy. She is immediately rewarded with Kit’s grunting snarl.

Jade meets her eyes, watches how the bright blue of them flashes darker with concentration, how her eyebrows curl down with all the intensity of fury her body can hold. After ten seconds Kit’s face has gone red.

“Arms hurt yet?” Jade asks, and she lets herself smile, just a bit, just enough to be really annoying.

“ No! ” Kit says, but even the effort of saying that one word has her panting, her legs starting to swing as she no doubt tries to distract from the burning in her shoulders.

“Looks like they hurt,” Jade says. Her own grip is still steel strong, but her arms are feeling a mild warmth now.

Kit opens her mouth to say something– probably to disagree– but then she snaps her teeth shut and growls through them. Her face is beet red now. Jade is actually starting to get a bit worried for her.

“You can let go,” Jade says, “you're not gonna win.”

Kit glares at her. She's holding on by only the top third of her fingers.

“Come on, you'll hurt yourself,” Jade says, and she is worried now, because if she gets some girl killed from an exploded blood vessel she'll almost certainly be sent back. “You're littler than me, not as strong, it's okay that you can't,” Jade pushes, and she doesn't know why she's trying so hard to let Kit off gently, but maybe it has something to do with how watery those blue eyes are now, how much stubborn determination for self-destruction Jade can see in them.

Kit shakes her head.

“Just let go!” Jade says, and her voice is nearly a yell and she didn't mean it to come out that way. Kit flinches but she holds on.

“ Fine ,” Jade grumbles, and lets go of the bar, dropping to the ground with a huff. Kit drops almost immediately after, and she stumbles a bit, enough that Jade reaches out to steady her.

Kit pants, her arms limp noodles by her sides, but she looks up and grins -- feral and pleased.

“I win ,” she says.

Jade considers reminding her about the head start, how Jade had technically held on longer than Kit had, but when Kit swipes the hair out of her eyes and Jade notices the single dimple on her cheek she decides not to.

Let the princess win this one. What could it hurt?

The treehouse is supposed to be shared by the twins, but in practice it is solely Kit’s domain. Jade has never seen them fight about it, Airk appears to have ceded it with his usual good temper, but Airk also doesn't need it. His free time is filled with friends and activities and he doesn't seek out hiding places like Kit does. Jade knows about hiding places, knows about barricading herself in, knows about the safety of solitude, and so she understands Kit. 

Jade still isn't allowed up.

She sits at the base of the tree and reads her book. Jade refuses to let this sting.

“What are you reading?” Kit calls from above.

“A book,” Jade answers, leaning her head back against the bark just enough that she can surreptitiously flick her eyes upward.

Kit rolls onto her back, her head hanging upside down through the opening with the ladder.

“Haha, you’re so funny, just the funniest, wow,” she says with several eye rolls.

Kit can't see her face at this angle, so Jade doesn't bother hiding the curl of her smile.

“It's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ” Jade says.

She can hear Kit flip back over, her interest noisy.

“Knight?” She asks, “Like knights and dragons and stuff?”

Jade glances up and sees Kit’s big blue eyes staring down at her, a singular intensity of focus her scattered nature doesn't usually allow.

Jade isn't surprised that this is a shared interest, though she guesses they find different things to like about the epic quests. Jade likes cleverness and honor. Kit likes adventure and killing monsters.

Jade runs her fingers along the pages. It's an older copy, stamped with the name of the library on the inside and Jade's name on the check out card in the front pocket. Her library card is in her pocket right now. Jade had gone back and forth on asking Ballantine for it. Getting a library card meant hoping she'd be here long enough to use it, that it wouldn't become some tragic talisman that she'd have to throw away so she didn't have to look at it. All of Ballantine's books at home were trade manuals and building guides and a few crack spined Tom Clancy's, and Jade's need for her own stories had won out.

She had brought a stack of Arthurian legends to the front desk, prepared to make the hard choice about which to put back if there was a checkout limit, but the librarian had smiled at her and recommended two more Jade hadn't seen. She'd had a soft prettiness to her that made Jade blush and nod instead of properly thanking her.

“It might be too grownup for you,” Jade says.

“What because people die in it?” Kit wiggles her eyebrows, “Or they have sex? ”

Jade blushes. There is some kissing in this story, but Sir Gawain is honorable -- he doesn't do anything.

“No, I just mean like…some of the words are hard,” Jade replies.

“So you can explain them when they come up.”

“I don't always know what they mean either. I might be guessing.”

“Then guess good,” Kit sighs like Jade is being ridiculous, “How would I know if you're lying anyway?”

“I don't lie,” Jade says, because she will keep silent or hold things back, but she does not lie .

Kit snorts.

“Everybody lies,” she says, and there's an edge to her voice that hints at experience.

“Not me.”

Kit makes a sound of disgust and disagreement but doesn't push any further, and this surprises Jade– Kit is always pushing.

“You could come up to read it to me,” Kit says, almost too quiet for Jade to hear at the bottom of the tree, “If you wanted to.”

Jade closes the book slowly, memorizing the page number, and has the self-respect not to immediately scramble up the ladder.

“Is that so?” She asks, because if Kit can push, so can Jade.

Kit groans in that princess petulant way she has, when she has to ask for something.

“ Yes , you could come up in the treehouse,” she says.

Jade taps her fingers along the spine of her book.

“And I'd be allowed up there whenever?”

Kit goes silent and Jade waits her out.

“If you read to me every time, yes.”

Jade stands, stretches nonchalantly.

“I could just leave the book with you,” she says, “Then you could read it yourself.”

Kit is silent again, but the quality of it is different, and Jade looks up. Kit is resting her forehead in the lip of the opening, her eyes hidden and her fingers curled white around the edge.

“Kit?”

Kit shifts her head up so just a sliver of her blue eyes are visible, like something creeping out of its shell.

“I can't read very fast,” Kit says.

Jade shrugs. She'd be more worried about Kit’s potential to lose the book if she wasn't certain her family had enough money to buy the library altogether.

“You can borrow it as long as you like, I can always check it out again if you–”

“No!” Kit says, tucking her head back behind the opening, “I'm not good at it. I suck at it!”

Kit never admits to being bad at something– she is always the best in her ridiculous, overly competitive way. This vulnerability has a wounded aggression to it and reminds Jade of a dog with a thorn in its paw– desperate for you not to touch it, and just as desperate for you to fix it.

“Alright,” Jade says, low and soft, because she's always loved animals, “I can read to you.”

Kit snatches another look at her, and there's a hesitancy there. Jade knows what it's like for someone to have something over you, to not trust that they won't hurt you with it. Jade shrugs, slow movement.

“But don't complain if it's boring,” she says.

Kit’s grin is tentative but true.

“Knights can't be boring,” she says.

Jade grins back and puts her foot on the first ladder rung.

Kit is like this, all the time.

Stubborn and reactive and vicious to herself and others. Jade can see how she's driven people away. Jade has nowhere to be driven to.

Kit is stalking about the backyard, whipping flower heads off stems with a long branch she wields like a sword, and Jade has watched her long enough now to know something must have upset her. Jade has had to get good at reading emotions in others, to head them off, or to hide. Kit’s anger is her easiest emotion to read, her sadness a close second, and they layer and trade, frequently.

No one else seems to care that Kit has these emotions. It's like everyone else has grown so used to them that they let her fade into the background, like Kit is screaming in her own soundproof box. Jade is fascinated by it– she has muzzled her own self so long she doesn't know if she could even get to the heights of passion Kit frequently ascends to.

Jade collects one of the decapitated flower buds, rolls it between her fingers.

“So?” She says.

Kit looks at her out of the corner of her eyes and smacks her stick against the storm drain. It echoes and Jade knows it must have hurt Kit’s own arm to hit it that hard.

“Stacy Bowman is a bitch, ” Kit snarls.

Jade nods.

“Yeah, that's not new.”

Kit flops her head back, annoyed that Jade isn't shocked by her language. Jade has heard worse.

“And she's stupid, ” Kit says, slashing her stick through a stand of lilies, bending stems and disrupting petals with her onslaught, “she says stupid things.”

“Yeah,” Jade says, keeping her voice neutral. Kit has to be coaxed, like a cat you need to look away from before it will approach you.

“She doesn't know anything about my dad, but because her mom's a bitch too she thinks she can just say whatever.”

Jade tries not to visibly perk up about this topic– it's been something she's been curious about, but the way the entire Tanthalos family tends to tense and bristle around even the mention of it means Jade has approached it carefully, obliquely.

Jade picks up two more fallen flowers, thinks, picks up a third.

“Her mom probably doesn't know anything about it either,” Jade says, “Doesn't stop them talking.”

“ Exactly! ” Kit says, throwing her hands up, “They don't know! Nobody at that stupid school knows because he didn't tell anybody.”

Kit stabs her stick into the ground, ripping up grass with the point.

“Didn't even tell me ,” she mutters.

“Maybe your mom knows?” Jade tries, and immediately she realizes it's the wrong thing by the way Kit stiffens up, her hand tightening around the stick, her eyes flashing.

“Why would she know?” Kit snarls, advancing on Jade with her stick, “she doesn't even like him, why would he tell her? ”

A stick is not the most threatening thing Jade has seen coming at her, and Kit is a full head shorter than her– feisty but Jade is confident she could sit on her if she had to. She's not afraid. Her impassivity makes Kit’s scowl deepen.

“You wanna hear all the gossip about it too? Want to tell everybody that he ran off with some lady, or maybe some other guy, or maybe he was dealing drugs and had to run away from the cops, or maybe he started a cult, or maybe he just didn't like us that much and got bored?”

Kit’s shaking now, with rage and sadness and shame and Jade feels sorry for her. She's never had a dad she cared about, never had to be upset about losing one. Love seems like a real risk like that, and if it doesn't go right you end up like Kit.

“You going to use that?” Jade says, nodding towards the stick. She's not afraid. She's not.

“I–” Kit says, and she looks at the stick in her own hand, like she's remembering it's there, “I– no, no.”

Kit tosses the stick into the brush, and moves slowly towards Jade, like Jade’s the feral cat now. Jade’s palms hurt, and she looks down and sees that her fingers are clenched tight, digging into her skin. There are pieces of petals all around her, shredded.

She's not afraid, is she?

“I don't…I don't hurt my friends,” Kit says.

Jade's breath feels shaky.

“You don't have friends,” Jade says.

“Neither do you,” Kit says, “let's fix that?”

Airk has been invited to a birthday party. Kit has not.

Jade hasn’t been either, but that doesn’t bother her. What would she even give as a gift that a girl in her class didn’t already have? What would she wear that wouldn’t be depressingly out of place? Who would she talk to? And even if all those things were solved, even if Jade belonged there, no one there belonged to her .

Kit sits moodily in the corner of the tree house, fingers picking at a knot in the wood and Jade would like to chide her about splinters, but Kit would probably just start tearing at the wood with her teeth. Jade thinks that Kit isn’t so much bothered about not being invited, more that she’s bothered that Airk was, and has left her behind.

Jade is in the middle of The Once and Future King and she keeps turning pages every two minutes, but she isn’t actually reading. She has her index finger slid between the pages where she actually is, but she keeps up the facade.

“ Ughhhhh ,” Kit groans, thumping her head back against the wall.

“Only boring people are bored, you know,” Jade says, and she keeps her smile curled behind her teeth.

“Oh my god, are you sixty-five? ” Kit demands, and she throws a Ranger Rick magazine in Jade’s direction. It flutters to the floor two feet away from her, its unfortunate aerodynamics saving Jade a mild annoyance.

“I’m wise,” Jade says, “you’re lucky to receive my words.”

Kit gets that glint in her eye that means mischief, and begins crawling across the floor towards Jade, like some kind of badly coordinated leopard. 

“Kit,” Jade warns, pulling her feet back from the approaching girl.

Kit grins, all sharp teeth.

Jade sighs, sets her book to the side and slides it further away from her, hopefully far enough out of the war zone. Kit pounces the moment Jade’s eyes are off her, but Kit is just never going to be as big as Jade is, so her weight doesn’t stop Jade from rolling them both over onto the floor, Kit making an oof as her back hits the boards.

“Ouch,” Kit says, and she ramps up the whine in her voice more than Jade knows she actually feels, “mean!”

Jade doesn’t have to do much other than hold her wrists, raising an eyebrow at Kit’s wriggling, how she attempts to lift her hips up to get some leverage under her feet, but just can’t budge Jade.

“ You started it,” Jade says.

“It’s in my nature,” Kit says, “that’s what mom says at least.”

“To be a little asshole?” Jade asks, and she lightens her grip on Kit’s arms.

“Yep!” Kit says, and she wrenches her arms free and locks them around the back of Jade’s neck, hanging off her like some sort of violent sloth.

Jade sits back on her heels and it pulls Kit up with her and into her lap, nose to nose. Kit is grinning, and Jade is pleased to see her happy again, pleased that Kit gets so caught up in her body that she can forget when her heart is heavy.

It’s just that…

Why wasn’t Jade enough to make her happy in the first place?

“What's so special about him anyway?” Jade says, and she doesn’t really want to be asking this, because Kit is happy now, and also this is embarrassing to even bring up.

“Airk?” Kit asks, tilting her head to the side, losing her smile.

“Yeah,” Jade mumbles, sliding Kit off herself, Kit’s hands holding tighter around her neck for a moment before releasing.

“He’s my brother ,” Kit says.

Jade frowns and looks away, shrugs. That doesn’t mean anything to her.

Kit scoots on her hands back into Jade’s line of sight, stares at her face.

“He's mine ,” Kit says, “No one else is his twin. I’ll always have him.”

“How do you know?” Jade asks, “That you’ll always have him, that he won’t ever leave?”

Kit frowns, shoves at Jade’s leg.

“Because he has to, that’s just how it is.”

“ Has to isn’t special,” Jade grumbles, and she hates how petulant she sounds, why is she even still talking about this?

“Why not?” Kit demands, and her voice is anger edged.

“Because it means more to be picked!” Jade says, because that’s obvious, because she has spent a lifetime not being picked, being passed over and passed around, and second choice. The only people who took care of her had to.

Kit stares at her and Jade feels her face go hot, feels tears run even hotter down her cheeks. Kit never mentions Jade’s tears. Jade knows she cries more than is safe to do, that tears are a vulnerability that she shouldn’t allow. Jade had been certain Kit would mock them, tactless as she is, but she never has, never acknowledges them. It lets Jade pretend she’s not doing it.

Kit chews at her thumb, stares at the wood floor, tugs at her shoelaces with her other hand. 

“People break promises,” Kit says, “all the time.”

“I don’t,” Jade says, “I wouldn’t.”

Kit’s eyes come up to meet hers, and they are intense and blue and demanding and maybe just a little scared.

“You’d have to swear ,” Kit says, “that you’d be mine and nobody else’s. Forever.”

Jade nods. There’s no question in her head about this– life has not handed her anything kind. This she had found by chance, this she had grown by grit, this she had demanded would be hers. She’d known it the day she’d met Kit. She’d looked at Kit with her hair tied back in a bow she was already unraveling the thread of, in shoes she’d kicked off the instant they’d been alone, at the scowl on her face and the distrust in her eyes. Jade had known that if she was scraps, but she was all that was left to offer this little princess, then maybe they had something in common. Maybe they’re the only ones that would have each other.

“I swear,” Jade says, serious as anything she’s ever said, “I’ll be yours.”

Kit searches her face, blue eyes flickering over her. 

And then she smiles.

“Alright,” she says, “ Mine. ”

Jade doesn’t say the counterpart out loud, but she thinks it– and you’re mine.

Chapter Text

Kit had always hated the idea that she needed saving. It got harder to deny each time Jade swooped in to do it though, whether it was saving Kit from the world or from her own self. Kit never stopped feeling pathetic about it, but somewhere along the way it started to make her feel cared for too. She could have gotten used to it, maybe, until Jade stopped showing up.

College Freshman Year

Kit feels like the coolest person alive when she’s four drinks in and her hand is down a girl’s pants and she’s fucking her to the beat of the music and there’s sweat tickling down her back underneath her too tight shirt. For most people, that might be a difficult moment to recreate, but Kit Tanthalos can make it happen twice a week at least.

There’s always a party happening on Friday and Saturday, and usually Sunday as well. The pickings are slimmer during the class week, but there are enough bars/music venues/clubs/pool halls for Kit to get into mischief whenever she feels the itch to.

And she always feels the itch.

So she’s taking fewer credits this semester than she should be, and she dropped out of her 8am class two weeks in, and she habitually shows up to her 1pm Monday class brutally hungover with sunglasses and a bottle of red gatorade, but so what? It’s not like it matters. It’s not like Sorsha can’t fix it. It’s not like Kit can’t decide to apply herself if it actually interested her, it just doesn’t, so she won’t.

College is the time when you’re supposed to party and fuck up and get fucked, and Kit is killing it at that.

The girl she has pressed into the corner moans loudly in Kit’s ear, and Kit grins as she nips at her neck, leaves a little mark the girl can remember her by. The solo cup in Kit’s other hand is pressed precariously between Kit’s palm and the girl’s shoulder, and Kit doesn’t want to accidentally pour it down the girl’s front, or waste the alcohol, so she pushes her fingers deeper, curls them harder, lets the girl drop her head back and close her eyes in ecstasy and then shoots the rest of whatever was in the jungle juice tonight.

The way the alcohol fires down her throat and expands with warmth in her chest, the way the girl clenches around her fingers, the way the music shivers up through her boots and calves and into her own cunt, the way she presses forward to cage the girl more fully between her body and the wall, the way her arm and wrist ache with the awkward angle, it fills Kit to the brim, so full that the thoughts, the hurts, the feelings, all the things that itch are very nearly crowded out of her body by the sensation she’s flooding it with.

Kit shakes her hair out of her eyes, grins at the wet feeling that the heat and the fucking and the music have given her whole body. Her eyes catch another girl’s, standing beside the beer pong table with a boy’s arm around her shoulders. Kit grins wider, licks the neck of the girl she’s fucking, and beer pong girl blushes, but doesn’t look away.

“You gonna come yet?” Kit pants into the girl’s ear, and she pulls out far enough to rub her thumb in heavy circles around her clit.

The girl clenches her hands in the material of Kit’s shirt, and Kit has a moment of annoyance thinking about how the material will stretch out before she shoves that thought away and shoves her fingers back deep inside this girl. 

The girl starts to shake and Kit has fucked enough girls to have this down to a science.

“Hey,” Kit says, “Look at me.”

The girl’s eyes open, find Kit’s and Kit finally feels like she’s something special , because this girl is staring into her eyes and Kit is rocking her world and she wants Kit, wants the pleasure Kit can give her, wants Kit to touch her, and Kit tries to feel only the triumph of that and not the ache. She gives her fingers another curl, impatient to send her over the edge, and the girl is obedient to the crook of her hand, to Kit’s expert touch. Her mouth opens and before she can release whatever noise she makes when she comes, Kit catches her mouth with her own, swallows up the sounds, licks at the taste of pleasure in her mouth.

Kit’s not much for kissing, but it has its uses, and it’s probably best not everyone at the party knows exactly what she’s doing, even if most could probably guess.

The girl kisses at her ravenously, her hands slipping from Kit’s shirt up her neck, but before she can tangle her hands in Kit’s hair, before Kit can be trapped, Kit shakes her off, pulls away from her still searching lips, away from the wet heat between her legs. Kit feels her breath quicken with the way her body shies away on instinct, feels her cool rattled, feels twist squirm uncomfortable in her too tight clothes instead of like a fucking sex god.

The high is so short, and like any drug it feels like she needs more and more of it to get that feeling she’s chasing. The one where she feels untouchable. And like any drug the comedown can be nasty.

“You good?” Kit says, and her voice is gruffer than it should be, than is kind to be.

“Um,” the girl says, and she looks a little hazy still, but Kit’s standoffish attitude seems to be knocking her out of it fairly quickly, “Um, yeah, yeah I guess?”

“Cool,” Kit says, and she zips and buttons up the girl’s jeans, uses it as an excuse to surreptitiously wipe the damp of her hand on the fabric too.

“Do you need some like– like some water or something?” Kit offers, and she knows it’s not enough, but she doesn’t have anything else to offer– she already gave what she’s good at.

The girl bites her lip, looks away and crosses an arm across her stomach.

“No, I’m good. You can go if you want, it’s okay.”

“Cool,” Kit says again, and she never knows what to say at the end of these things– this was nice? You were great? See you around? She settles on what is probably the worst thing, which is just a thumbs up and an immediate 180 back into the center of the party.

The center of the party has more alcohol and she refills her solo cup, drinks half, and tops it up again. Beer pong is still in full swing, and it looks like the guy who was on the sidelines with his arm around the blushing girl’s shoulder is about to play. From his gelled hair to his puka shell necklace to his polo to his shorts to his boat shoes, he is exactly the sort of person Kit would like to dunk on. She shoves her way to the other side of the table, and when the weaselly guy with the mustache swears at her for pushing him out of the way she just grins with all her teeth in the most deranged way she can.

He backs off.

“You wanna play, babe?” boat shoe boy asks the girl still standing close to him. She looks at Kit on the other side of the table, smiles a little and pushes her hair behind her ear before she shakes her head. Kit grins, but brings down the derangement level.

Some other completely interchangeable dude comes on as his partner, and weasel mustache asks if she wants a teammate. Kit rolls her eyes.

“I play alone,” she tells him.

Boat shoe boy narrows his eyes at her, flicks his fingers to his own eyes and then back at her, Kit struggles not to roll her eyes so she can maintain eye contact for the first throw. She sinks hers, he does not.

His buddy punches his shoulder for losing first toss, and he bounces the ping pong ball way too high to send it back to her. Kit doesn’t bother to catch it, just waits for some bystander to give it back to her. She gives it a cursory rub off on the hem of her shirt before she rolls the two balls together in her hand. The first she shoots from above her shoulder, a fast beeline down into a center cup. The force that it hits the beer with makes it splash slightly up and over the lip. Before they can process the ace, she gently arcs the next ball into the front cup.

Kit throws up the most unenthusiastic backwards double peace signs she can manage.

The two boys make an elaborate show of trying to psych her out on when they’ll throw, but they both end up simultaneously bouncing them towards her side of the table. Kit doesn’t bother trying to block them– she plays better drunk. One goes in and one doesn’t, and she grabs two cups, chugs them while keeping eye contact. It is not beer in the cups.

If Everclear always makes her head go hot and her stomach burn, she’s not going to show it to these idiots.

They start trash talking somewhere through the third throw, every name she’s heard for a dyke and a few she hadn’t, speculating on how many girls in the room she’d fucked and– to Kit’s pleasure– under guessing, asking if she’d ever even tried giving a guy a chance. Kit just grins and tells them how much their moms like her, how she’d be happy to give them tips to please their girlfriends, should they have them, suggests they give each other a chance before she gives a guy one. It’s just parry, riposte, over and over again. The real hits are the balls she keeps sinking, the dwindling number of cups on their side of the table. The real conquest is the way the girl is creating more space between her and boat shoe boy, how she colors and mouths “sorry” at Kit when they say something blatantly offensive, in the way she smiles every time Kit makes a shot.

They’re not terrible and Kit ends up drinking perhaps a little past the point when she’s best at beer pong, but it just makes her grin bigger, her digs sharper, the eye contact she’s making with the girl longer and more intense. It’s better this way, she’s better this way, when all her thoughts have to be focused on how all the joints of her body link up, when all her concentration is on remembering that she has legs in addition to arms and they should probably be stable. It’s not as good as the filled up feeling she gets when she’s inside a girl, but it’s a pleasant distraction.

Kit’s last throw she knows she’s going to make because that’s just how it works– she tosses a ping pong ball with each hand, and they land in the cups because she’s Kit Tanthalos , and if there’s anything she’s good at, it’s partying, drinking, and making girls come like that’s what she’s getting her degree in.

If she's not good at much else, well, all the more reason to lean into what she has going for her.

The crowd that's gathered around the beer pong table is merciless to the losers– tearing into them for losing to a girl half their size who drank all the cups herself, for getting the short end of the trash talk, for getting mad at the heckling instead of letting it slide off them– and Kit can see that boat shoe boy is getting really angry now. The girl puts her hand on his arm and he jerks away from her. Kit narrows her eyes– sometimes chivalry and steal-your-girl energy can coexist.

She keeps one hand on top of the table to steady herself and concentrates really hard on how her knees connect to her shins connect to her ankles connect to her feet and how each part has to move for walking to happen. She must do a pretty passable job, because she ends up on the other side of the table, and she’s upright.

She tries to lean casually back on her elbows on the table, but it’s slippery with spilled alcohol and she ends up thumping her arm on the edge. The girl turns at the sound and Kit smiles and gives a little wave.

“What the fuck do you want?” boat shoe boy demands, and Kit is tired of thinking of him with such a long name and decides he’s just Brad from now on.

“Being a sore winner and coming over here to rub it in,” Kit says.

“You know what–” Brad starts to say, but the girl puts an arm on his chest, pats it there like a baby.

“Tim, come on,” She says, and Kit decides that he’s still Brad.

Kit manages to lever herself up onto the table to sit, the tips of her boots barely skimming the ground but she’s a little closer in height to Brad now.

“Yeah, you seem like a real… winner at just about everything, huh?”

Brad brushes the girl off again, steps into Kit’s space. Kit tilts her head to the side with a grin, disguising how she has to look up to meet his glare.

“You wanna fuck girls like a guy does?” he says, and then his hands are tugging at the collar of her shirt, “Maybe I should kick your ass like you're a guy then.”

He drags her up to standing, and the floor here is slippery too, and Kit’s feet go out from under her– why is the floor this wet? Were they pouring their drinks on the floor instead of drinking them?-- and for a moment Kit is just held up by Brad’s grip on her.

“Tim, seriously?!” the girl yells, smacking at his arm, “You are being such an asshole!”

“Yeah,” Kit echoes, “ such an asshole.”

“ What , Christy? You wanna go home with the girl who probably has, like, every STD?” he snarls, and Kit ragdolls a little in his grip.

Kit looks at Christy, shakes her head, mouths clean.

Christy rolls her eyes– obviously charmed, for sure– and goes back to tugging at Tim’s– no, Brad’s -- arm, trying to uncurl his fingers from Kit’s shirt.

“Let’s go then,” Kit says, and she wraps her own hands around Brad’s wrists to get her feet under her again, “Come on, try it! You think it was embarrassing to have me kick your ass at beer pong, wait until I actually kick your ass!”

Brad draws back one hand, curls it into a fist, and Kit is thinking about what the bruise will look like the next day, when someone spins Brad’s shoulder around and decks him square in the jaw. Several things happen– Brad drops her, and Kit goes down hard on her knee and she feels the impact thrum up through her teeth. Brad goes down like the absolute glass jaw he is, but his flailing body shoves Kit further into the floor, and Everclear soaks through every layer of her clothing. Christy screams something that might be Jesus Christ and pulls Kit by the back of her shirt out from under Brad. The girl that decked him meets Kit’s eyes.

It was the girl she was fucking in the corner, and now Kit vaguely remembers that she had talked about being a kickboxer when Kit had run her hands up her arms. Kit can remember that piece, but she can’t remember her name, can’t even remember if she’d asked her name. Before Kit can mash any of these events or thoughts into words or movement, the kickboxer girl crouches down, and pushes Kit’s hair out of her face.

“Just in case you thought I owed you something for that,” she says, “Don’t call me.”

Kit doesn’t have her number, but she imagines it’s the thought that counts.

It’s such a wildly slick move that Kit can’t help but be impressed and jealous, but all is not lost. Christy puts an arm around her and tugs Kit to her feet, but that knee is not going to be stable under her, and she lurches forward until Christy gets a tighter hold on her.

“Thanks,” Kit says, “Sorry about your…your Tim.”

Tim-Brad is being tugged up by his beer pong partner, and his eyes are fluttering open, so he’s probably not dead, which is good, because even Sorsha would probably have some issues fixing that.

“Yeah,” Christy says, and there’s a bit of a sneer on her face as she looks at him, “not my Tim anymore.”

“You can do better,” Kit says, and she winces as she tries to put more weight back on her knee. Christy blushes and holds her a little tighter.

“Can I get you back to your dorm?” she asks, “I don’t think you can, like…walk.”

Kit tosses her hair back, gives her most rakish grin.

“Rescuing me?” she asks, and Christy smiles.

“ Someone has to,” she says.

My knight , Kit almost says, but the words are too precious, even on her loose tongue, for her to drop them like that.

Christy helps her out of the frat house, carefully down the front steps of the porch that are rickety even with two working knees, and down the street towards Kit’s dorm. Christy spends the walk talking about Tim, and how when they first got together she really thought he was different, and how he was different when it was just them, but how he could be such an ass when he was drinking and she’d been thinking of breaking up with him for a couple weeks now and tonight had just solidified it. Kit nods along and makes affirming noises, says things like “it’s not your fault” and “you couldn’t have known” and “you get to find somebody better for you now,” because she knows this type of girl, this type of conversation, and Kit’s adaptable.

The outdoors is somewhat sobering, the rips in Kit’s jeans letting sharp night air in, the drying Everclear on her shirt freezing the skin underneath. When she shivers Christy runs an absent hand up and down her arm to warm her up, and it’s such a nearly affectionate touch that Kit tries to suppress all further shakes.

Getting up the stairs to the third floor is slow and a little excruciating. Kit turns it into laughter and leaning against the railing and complimenting Christy’s strength– all yoga, she says. Kit pushes Christy’s hair out of her face when her hands are full managing Kit, tucks it behind her ear in that way she saw Christy do before the beer pong game, and Christy looks at her and bites her lip.

It’s all very Marty McFly, but results are results.

Christy brings her all the way to her dorm room, all the way to helping Kit sit on her bed. When Christy sees the first aid box underneath the bed slats and reaches for it, Kit panics and grabs her hand, asks Christy to sit by her instead. She does, and then makes a joke about Kit’s clothing being soaked in alcohol, and Kit asks if she’d like to help her take them off. Christy looks down at her hands, confides that she’s never been with a girl before, as if Kit couldn’t tell. Kit takes one of her fidgeting hands, runs her lips along it, asks if she’d like to.

Kit doesn’t end up taking her clothes off, as cold and uncomfortable as they are, because that’s not really what Christy wants anyway, and not what Kit really wants either. Christy is shy about letting Kit go down on her, and Kit rolls her eyes internally at what a tool Brad must have been, but Kit is reassuring, careful, and makes her feel too good to stay self-conscious. Her knee fucking throbs throughout, especially when she crawls up Christy’s body, her balance shaky from using the wrong hand to fuck her because at least Kit isn’t a complete asshole, and Kit needs to see Christy’s face when she comes, needs to know that she did that, that she’s good for something, that Kit isn’t just a black hole of need as long as she can subvert it into giving pleasure.

Kit can make up for everything, if she can just make someone else feel good.

Christy makes such a pretty picture when coming that for a moment it doesn’t matter that everything hurts, that Kit feels so lonely for touch, that the space between her own legs aches for relief. It’s so nice she makes Christy come again.

Kit leaves Christy in her bed to reevaluate her life trajectory and excuses herself to the communal bathroom across the hall. She grabs her ipod as she heads out the door, hopping a little to stay off her bad knee. The stall Kit likes is at the far end, and she passes by the sinks and washes her hands before she heads there. She keeps her head ducked down as she lets hot water scour them red, not wanting to catch how she looks in the mirror. In her head she can pretend she looks cool and cocky and put together. It’s hard to maintain that illusion of self-image as she limps her way into the last stall and clicks the lock behind her. She puts in her headphones, presses her forehead to the cool tile, clicks play and lets the loudest, most mind numbing music chase everything out of her brain, and unzips her pants.

Kit has gotten very good at coming without thought, without fantasy, with only sensation, but it’s…a process . She can’t with someone touching her. She can’t with someone watching her. She can’t if she lets her mind wander because it goes to what she wants and that hurts too much. She can’t if she’s too comfortable, too soft, has felt too cared for, even if only by herself.

She slides her hand between her legs and feels how wet she is and she knows she groans, even if she can’t hear herself, knows that her mouth falls open and fogs the tile, even if she can’t see it. She feels good underneath her fingers, the way her slickness makes her touch so smooth against herself, how open she feels, how easy it would be to slip inside herself and–

Kit presses her knee against the wall, lets that pain chase the pain in her thoughts away, rubs hard at her clit.

Drums make her head pound and there is a guitar shriek that she can feel in her chest and if there were lips against hers now she’d be panting against them and her mouth would be open for a tongue to slide inside and hands that she knows so well could pull her neck deeper into the kiss and–

Kit bites her lip, grinds her head harder against the wall, tries to shove the thoughts, the memories out of her head.

There’s not enough room in her jeans to touch herself properly, her hand trapped between the fabric and her own heat, and she yanks at her belt, shoves them down her hips, feels but doesn’t hear the clatter of the buckle hitting the tile. She widens her stance and lets her hand press harder, her fingers circle faster, and it makes her hips buck against the wall, makes her already shaky knee weak and she uses her other hand to steady herself, cold palm stretched wide against tiles and too dark grout.

Her cheek is pressed against the wall now, her eyes shut so tight it’s starting to make her head hurt, the spin from alcohol and music and the twisting heat building up in her belly making her almost sick, but she wants it, she wants to come, she wants to feel good, and she presses her body hard against the wall, and if for a moment she imagines that it’s softer, that she’s grinding against someone, her real knight, then maybe it’s that very thought that tips her over the edge, that makes her clench and wet down her thighs, that makes her jerk hard and fast, that draws the achiest, most guttural groan out of her throat.

Kit huffs for breath, twists against the wall so she can sink back against it, jeans still around her knees and her bad knee aching at the bend, but she can’t stand anymore. The unceremonious drop pulls the earbuds from her ears, and her head lolls against the wall, hot skin seeking out cool tile.

Flip-flop sounds on the tile, girls heading to the shower.

“Did you see her bringing another girl into her room tonight? How does she keep finding girls who aren’t sick of her?”

“She thinks she's such a player– fucking all these girls and not letting them fuck her back. It's like some weird power play.”

“Hey, we don't know what her deal is, maybe she's like…stone or something.”

“Oh my god, stone? What era are you from?”

“Melanie, take a gender studies course, okay?”

A shower radio is turned on, and Taylor Swift starts blaring in the bathroom as showers start to spray.

Kit knows she could slam the stall door open and limp her way proudly past these girls. She knows she could head back to her dorm and fall asleep next to a girl who is hot and nice and liked what Kit could do for her. She knows she could probably even go back to the party and get absolutely blackout.

She doesn’t though.

She pulls her knees up under her chin and wraps her arms around them and curls her body tight and close to itself while steam builds up and Taylor sings.

That I’m not a princess, this ain't a fairytale, I'm not the one you'll sweep off her feet.

Chapter Text

Chapter 4

Courage was for storybooks. Jade loved reading about it, but there was no room for courage in her own life. Courage and survival were too often at odds. Kit never cared about that, would fling herself towards bravery every chance she got. If Jade was going to keep up, she would have to learn how to leap after her.

Kit 11, Jade 13

Jade hasn't been hungry for a long time now. Not truly hungry, not clawing inside herself hungry, not constant ache hungry, not lightheaded shaky hungry. Ballantine eats three meals a day, and now Jade does too. There have been a few times where Jade has felt a mild sort of hunger in between meals but she has easily coached herself through it. She's watched how Ballantine treats food. He doesn't seem to have any particular rules around it, he keeps staples well stocked, even asks her what she wants when he makes a grocery list. Jade is torn between protecting the vulnerability of her desires and testing the water to see what in this offer might be trusted. She goes several weeks shaking her head no to the question, and then Ballantine starts suggesting things– frozen waffles, peanut butter, cereal that doesn't have bran or oats in the name. Peanut butter is a real temptation– it stores well, it’s filling even just by the spoonful, and is densely caloric. Jade nods yes.

Peanut butter appears in the cabinet. 

She doesn't ever want to be caught opening things first, so she has to wait for Ballantine to unscrew the lid, pull the seal off, and break the perfect smooth top with a knife to cover his toast.

She sneaks spoonfuls between when she gets home from school and when he gets home from work. When it gets to the last quarter of the jar, she scoops the rest of the peanut butter into a container she'd saved, throws the peanut butter jar into the trash, prominently on top, and squirrels away her own container underneath the bed.

She sleeps better that night.

It's little things here and there– the last nutrigrain bar in the box, a handful of granola shoved in a ziploc bag, individual jam and butter packets from the diner. Nothing that has to be refrigerated, nothing that will go bad and give her away.

She hides things in multiple places, because if Ballantine finds one stockpile, the rest will remain secure. 

It's safer to have locations outside the house too.

Her cubby at school is too exposed. Anything hidden outside runs the risk of animals getting into it, or weather spoiling it.

The treehouse is a good spot. Kit has a trunk up there filled with makeshift stick weaponry and comic books her mother would find trashy but Kit can follow the pictures in them without having to read. Jade puts a little stockpile at the bottom of the trunk and drops everything else on top of it, a mess of things Kit doesn't bother to keep track of and certainly won't dig to the bottom of.

At least Jade had thought that.

The housekeeper lets Jade into the Tanthalos house after she heads over from her after school science club. Jade goes to the backyard and climbs up to the treehouse where she knows Kit will be waiting for her– all tense and sharp movements until something unwinds when she sees Jade.

Kit’s there, long hair braided back from her face in a way that Jade knows will be half unraveled by dinnertime. She has scratched a little red furrow on her arm. Beside her is an empty ziploc bag– one that Jade recognizes.

“What are you eating?” Jade says, trying not to sound angry, trying not to sound frightened, trying not to give anything away.

“Dunno. Trail mix? Airk must have left it up here ages ago,” Kit says, and she's already reaching for the copy of The Once and Future King they're reading through.

Jade's chest goes sore, her throat tight and she throws herself at the trunk, yanks it open, throws sticks and comics and stupid dress up costumes out of it and digs down to the bottom, to where her safety is and half of it's gone half of it's eaten by someone who doesn't even need it, who has more in her pantry than Jade could ever dream of, and why did Jade think this would be a safe spot, of course Kit wouldn't think twice about it, of course Jade should have been smarter, more careful, more everything .

“Jade?”

Kit’s voice sounds small, frightened, and Jade hates it, hates the idea of Kit being frightened of her, hates everything, hates herself. She's not even hungry but there's a hole gnawing inside her that feels fathomless.

“Jade, what's wrong?”

Kit’s body is pushed up against hers, arm around her, head shoved into her shoulder and Kit’s not afraid of her , Kit’s afraid for her and Jade cries and aches and wants so much to not be afraid.

“Tell me,” Kit says, and it's not a request, it is her imperious princess voice, her ‘you belong to me’ voice.

As much as it should offend Jade, this entitled tone that Kit takes, it is comforting, to belong.

“I left it there,” Jade says, “it was mine. ”

Kit nods slowly and Jade knows she doesn't get it, can't get it. She's listening though.

“I might need it,” Jade says, swiping away tears, “Anything could happen and I might…I just might need it.”

Kit nods again, tugs at the toe of her shoe, chews at her lip.

“Okay,” she says, and bounces to her feet, “Come with me.”

“Okay,” Jade says, following Kit with watery eyes, “Where we going?”

Kit is already halfway down the ladder, and either doesn't hear her or feigns not to– she has always been dramatic. Jade finishes wiping her face off with the inside of her shirt– no one should be able to tell if she gets that messy– and follows Kit down.

Kit leads them back into the house, marches them through the kitchen and then flings open the door to the pantry.

“Okay!” She says, “What do we need?”

It makes Jade so angry, so envious, so very nearly safe, what she’s being shown.

The Tanthalos pantry has enough food to stock a small sized corner store. There are cans upon cans of vegetables, sliced fruit, soup, evaporated milk. There are multiple loaves of bread– multigrain for Sorsha and soft white for the twins. Boxes of every shape of pasta and jars of sauce and pickles and salsa. Cases of name brand soda. The worst bit is the snacks– boxes of crackers and individual chip bags, fruit roll ups and rice krispie treats, goldfish, ritz bitz, squeeze juice boxes and on and on. It's food for fun.

Kit isn't phased by it, of course she isn't, this has been here her whole life. Jade looks to her, prepared to hate her, but Kit is staring back at Jade intensely and her face is serious– she may not understand, but she knows it's important to Jade. She can't hate determined, loyal, accidentally generous Kit.

“No one will miss anything?” Jade checks, because hiding things away is pointless if someone finds out, if someone catches on and punishes them over it.

Kit shakes her head.

“Mom doesn't do the shopping,” she says, “We can ask for whatever we want. Should I ask for something specific?”

Jade's fists clench at the possibilities, at the blank check of it all, torn between the urge to be cautious and the instinct to spring on any opportunity.

“Maybe,” Jade says, because careful is smarter, “I'll think about it.”

“Oh!” Kit says, with a dip forward onto her toes, “Lemme get a bag.”

Kit dashes out and Jade can hear her rooting around in the kitchen, cupboards pulled open and slammed closed unceremoniously, a recipe for nicks and scratches and worn out hardware. She comes back with a fancy reusable bag– thick material and reinforced handles, strong enough not to rip under the weight of a well stocked emergency stash. Kit holds the bag open, waiting for Jade to fill it up.

Jade resists the temptation to start throwing just anything in, forces herself to walk around the shelves with her hands behind her back and take in everything once, makes a mental list of what's the most numerous, the least likely to be missed, the best for storing, the most valuable nutritionally. Kit doesn't say anything, just waits, and Jade is grateful.

She starts with canned goods first– things that won't need to be heated, she's eaten plenty of soup cold straight from the can before and spaghettios will be a step up. She picks a can of green beans and corn too, as a concession to healthiness. The bottles of juice are incredibly sugary, but in case she gets low they offer an immediate jump start. There are mini individual boxes of cereal, like at a hotel, and Jade pulls out the cheerios and cornflakes. After a momentary hesitation she snatches the coco pops too. 

Jade can see herself for a moment– someone desperate and grasping, an animal curling over its food stores, embarrassing and pathetic. She can't help but bristle.

“I know it's weird,” Jade says, prepared for Kit’s flippant response, prepared to nurse a splinter in her heart forever, “You don't have to pretend it's not.”

Kit looks at her and slowly shrugs.

“It's good,” Kit says, “We need supplies for our adventures.”

Jade sees it for what it is– an out. The same way Kit never mentions Jade's tears, never tries to wipe them away, she lets Jade have this. Pretend might be something Kit indulges in far more than Jade, but she knows what it covers over, knows she's being invited to use it the same way, a costume over a corpse.

“Yeah,” Jade says, “For our adventures.”

Kit surprises her the next day, dragging Jade up to her room instead of to the tree house. She throws herself against the side of her dresser and goes red faced pushing it a few inches from the wall– Jade knows better than to offer help– and reveals a metal vent low on the wall.

“What's this?” Jade asks, mostly to give Kit the excuse to grin and not say anything.

She picks at the edge of the vent with her bitten down nails and Jade winces at the sight, but keeps herself patient. Kit eventually works the vent free from the wall, revealing a square black hole.

“Look!” Kit says, waving her down.

Jade gets on her knees and peers inside.

It's nothing Jade would have picked for herself– mostly junk food and things she'd never spend money on even if she had it, too embarrassed for that kind of indulgence– but it's there and Kit has hidden it there in a secret, private place for Jade and that knowledge fills her and sates her more than any food could.

Kit looks at her, fingers twisted in the hem of her shirt, eyes wide and waiting for approval.

“Thank you,” Jade says, “it's perfect.”

Kit’s body relaxes and she grins.

“Okay, where can we hide more?”

Jade hadn't wanted to invite Kit over for a sleepover. There's no good way to introduce someone with a four poster, a custom made indoor fabric tent, and a combo daybed-window reading nook to a twin bed with sheets that are pilly from being washed too many times and a carpet that has the scratchy plastic texture of material that had been popular before Jade was born.

Jade hadn't wanted to and Jade hadn't . Kit had invited herself.

She also hasn’t brought anything– no cold weather graded sleeping bag, no down pillow, and Jade is worried that there won’t even be pajamas in the backpack Kit has slung over her shoulder. Of course Kit would anticipate those items being provided, and Jade will make do , but they won’t be the quality Kit is used to and no amount of spitting out the silver spoon changes that Kit was born with it.

Kit’s been over a handful of times now, and Jade has always been meticulous to the point of obsessive about making sure everything is as good as it can be before she arrives. Ballantine doesn't keep a messy house, and he doesn't own enough clutter to really make such a thing possible, but Jade still manages to find things to stress over. The towels have bleach stains on them, and Jade folds them over to hide the worst of it. The dishwasher makes a groaning rattle when it's run, so Jade makes sure all the dishes are clean beforehand. All their food is grocery store brand, and Jade doesn't know how to fix that.

She's a mess for hours before Kit arrives and stressed out and tense during the whole visit but what's the other option? Not having Kit over, not being near her?

Dinner goes mostly fine. The food wasn’t fancy– there were no courses, no demi glace, no caramelized anythings, but it was good and there was enough of it. Kit had trouble sitting still, as she always did at a dinner table, but Ballantine just watched her with amused curiosity as Kit hopped up to refill her glass at the sink, then immediately went to the bathroom, and then peered out the window of the living room for a solid three minutes because she thought she saw a raccoon. Kit talked all throughout dinner too, and Jade was grateful for that– she and Ballantine had companionable silence but were not the best conversationalists with each other. Jade clears the dishes and Ballantine all gets them a scoop of vanilla ice cream that Jade tries her best to savor in tiny bites and Kit drowns in chocolate sauce and muddies into a half melted slurry.

“Have a good night, girls,” Ballantine says, collecting his readers and a John Grisham novel from the living room before retiring.

Kit and Jade both lick their bowls clean before setting them in the sink and racing to Jade’s room.

Kit wins because she cheats.

Jade closes the bedroom door behind her and her fingers start to twist the lock automatically, but she stops before the click. Kit doesn't lock her bedroom door at night. People who feel safe don't have to. Jade's eyes meticulously avoid looking at her chair, the one she wedges beneath the door knob each night that will need to stay uselessly tucked under her desk, impotent as an unset trap. Ballantine has done nothing– she hasn’t even heard the jiggle of a tested doorknob. He knocks and announces himself and waits for her to open the door every time, but it would hurt worse if she trusted him and then he did something. She doesn’t have any illusions that her locked door and the chair would stop Ballantine if he really wanted to make his way in– he is older but powerfully built– but it would give her enough time to make it out the window, to start running. It’s a painful necessity that her window remains locked, knowing it will take that extra second to click it over and dash away, but it would be just as bad to leave it unlocked. Jade’s calculations for maximal security, for safety, always have an element of imperfection inserted into them. There is no way to account for all the variables and reduce their sum to zero.

Kit tosses her backpack onto the bed and then flops on her back after it, arms and legs starfished. The bed is small enough that her stretched limbs reach over the edges.

“You can have the bed,” Jade says, suddenly at a loss for what to do or where to stand in her own room.

Kit cranes her neck up and makes a face.

“We share a bed at my house,” she says, “Weirdo.”

Kit’s bed is a queen, it’s not the same. Jade shrugs.

“Maybe I don’t want you kicking me all night.”

Kit does a strange forward roll and tuck under that leaves her with her hands under her chin at the end of the bed.

“You’re the one who snores,” she says.

“No I don’t,” Jade says, crossing her arms. Kit rolls her eyes.

“Fine, no you don’t.”

“You’re the guest, so you get the bed,” Jade says, grateful that the rules of hospitality are behind her for this.

Kit reaches out for her, manages to snag one of Jade’s hands in her own and reels Jade in by it.

“But Jade , then you’ll be lost in the freezing arctic waters! The only safe place is this dinky life boat we’ve managed to commandeer when our ship sank. Even a few seconds overboard will have you dying of hypothermia.”

Jade drops her head back with a groan as Kit clutches onto her middle, melodramatic as always.

“You don’t want to die do you, Jade? I’d have to eat your body if you did and then you’ll have condemned me to a taste for human flesh and even if I’m rescued I’ll never really be part of civilization again–”

“Oh my god, Kit, okay, okay!”

If there’s one thing that’s bound to put Kit in a good mood, it’s getting her way, and Kit in a good mood puts Jade in a good mood, and it pushes the part of her that’s looking towards the unlocked, unblocked door to the furthest part of her consciousness. She can ignore it.

It turns out Kit had brought pajamas– or at least an oversized shirt that Jade suspected might have been her father’s at one point and that she wouldn’t have dared to wear where Sorsha might have seen it– but Kit hadn’t brought a toothbrush. Jade’s sure that the Tanthalos’ had spare toiletries just on the off chance that a guest might be caught without, but Ballantine doesn’t keep extras just lying around. She hands Kit her own toothbrush with a sigh, watches as she puts far more than a pea size glob of toothpaste on it, and grins through her brushing. She doesn’t do the full two minutes that dentists recommend, and that Jade always does because no one takes a child with a toothache seriously.

Kit bounces back into the bed and Jade follows more sedately after her, clicking on the bedside lamp and opening her copy of Ivanhoe , flipping past the tournament with the masked knight, the capture, and onto the trial by combat where they had left off. Kit leans on her shoulder while Jade reads aloud, occasionally interjecting with a comment or question. 

“You know, if Rebecca could have fought in her own trial then she wouldn’t have had to wait for dumb Ivanhoe anyway,” Kit grouses, “If someone was accusing me of being a witch, I’d want to kick their ass myself. But also being a witch is pretty cool anyway.”

“Not if you get killed for it,” Jade says, sliding a bookmark carefully into the seam of the page they left off on.

“That’s what I don’t get!” Kit says, turning her pointed chin onto Jade’s shoulder and speaking so closely to her ear that Jade can feel her breath, “If Rebecca was actually a witch, couldn’t she have just hexed them all or something if they accused her? That she couldn’t is proof she wasn’t a witch.”

Jade frowns, shrugs off Kit’s head.

“They just wanted to hurt her,” Jade says, “It didn’t matter what reason they gave.”

Kit curls into Jade’s side instead.

“And that’s why she should have known how to use a sword herself,” Kit says, as if that wins the argument, as if the ability to fight back is all that’s needed, as if there isn’t always someone bigger, stronger, and meaner out there.

Jade uncurls her fists, sets the book down on the nightstand and clicks the lamp off. The darkness can hide her frown.

Kit yawns, rubbing her tousled head into Jade’s side, and Jade’s eyes are tired too, but there’s a sliver of light under her bedroom door that keeps drawing her eye and she can’t stop thinking of the click of a lock, of the feeling of the wooden back of her chair as she wedges it underneath the doorknob. She chews at her lip. Kit turns and curls into a ball, pulling much more than half the covers with her. Jade is cold from the inside though, and the blankets won’t help it. She sits propped up against her headboard, unable to lay down, unable to close her eyes, unable to pull her focus from anything but that strip of light between the carpet and the bottom of the door, fatigue making her see the shadow of footsteps that aren’t there.

Her eyes slip closed for a moment, and Jade startles back awake with a gasp and a thunk of her head against the headboard. She can just stay awake. She doesn’t need the lock and the chair if she’s awake, if she can focus on the twist of the doorknob catching the moonlight, on the creak of the door opening, on the shuffling sound of shoes on the carpet. She can be ready.

Kit makes a huffing sound and turns over in the bed.

“Why are you sitting up like a creeper?”

“I’m not a creeper , I’m just not tired,” Jade grumbles.

“You hate staying up past eleven,” Kit says, “It’s like…embarrassing.”

Jade is too wound up to explain circadian rhythms again, so she just softly taps the back of her skull against the headboard, hoping the mild irritation will keep her awake.

Kit shuffles closer, head pressed up against Jade’s hip. Jade glances down, watches as Kit nips at the material of her sleep shirt, gnawing on the collar. Closeness and darkness has always uncurled parts of Kit, like if she can’t be seen telling her secret heart then maybe it didn’t even happen.

“I used to have a hard time sleeping,” Kit says, “because what if dad came home and I missed it? If I was awake when he came back, I could tell him to take me with him.”

Kit smooshes her face against Jade, her words coming out garbled.

“I know he wouldn’t have wanted to stay, but maybe I wasn’t the bad part he had to leave. Maybe I could have gone with.”

Jade shuffles down in the bed, wraps an arm around Kit.

“It would have been hard, to leave Airk and mom, but…they don’t really need me, and I don’t really fit in. Like dad didn’t fit in. So maybe if we both left everyone would be happier.”

Jade tugs Kit closer.

“I wouldn’t have been,” Jade says, “happier, I mean.”

Kit glances up at her, and there’s a neediness in her eyes that Jade is terrified is reflected in her own.

“Really?”

Jade curls around Kit, two creatures in a den that’s too small to fit anything else inside, too small for anything to reach in and get them, too tightly wound together to be pulled apart.

“The arctic winds are really cold,” Jade says, “We have to huddle for warmth or we’ll get frostbitten.”

“We’ll never make it through the night,” Kit whispers, a dramatic quiver to her voice likes she’s freezing, “We’ll never see the sunrise!”

Jade’s eyes flick to the light underneath the door, like the slim line of the sun at the horizon. If the door opens, she can’t run, because what about Kit? If Jade ran, she would take Kit with her.

“That’s quitter talk,” Jade says, nuzzling closer to Kit, “We’ll make it through, just you wait.”

“What’s this?” Kit says, her fingers tracing over the scar on the back of Jade’s neck. It’s a numb feeling against the scar tissue, between a tickle and scratch. It gives Jade the shivery feeling that books describe as someone walking over your grave.

The sensation is startling and awful and Jade hates it.

She twists around in the bed, grabs at Kit’s curious hand.

“It’s none of your business! ” Jade hisses, her hand pinched around Kit’s wrist hard enough that she knows it must hurt.

Jade’s used to a snarl and snap being enough to scare someone away, used to letting the lick of her ever present anger spill over onto someone just enough that they back off when she needs them to.

Kit does not.

She shoves closer into Jade’s space, right in front of her face, mouth twisted in her own growl, eyes flashing.

“Of course it is!” she says, wriggling herself even closer as Jade tries to both scoot away and hold her wrist captive at the same time, “ You’re my business.”

Kit manages to straddle her, though Jade has caught both her arms now and is using her superior strength to keep Kit at bay. Kit is as tenacious a fighter as she is a friend though, and every time Jade thinks she’s thrown her off, Kit twists back on top of her.

“Get off ,” Jade says, trying to wrestle out from underneath blankets and Kit at the same time. Kit keeps her seat.

Kit huffs for breath, but Jade knows she never grows tired enough to stop.

“No!” Kit says, her voice just below a yell, because it’s past midnight and they have to be quiet.

Jade lets go of Kit’s wrists, and the sudden lack of force holding her back makes Kit flop forward onto Jade’s chest. Jade wraps her arms around Kit’s back and rolls them bodily over, hoping to pin Kit until she quits. Kit is a squirming, wretched creature though, and keeps their momentum going, flipping them over again and Jade can feel the edge of the bed slip away from underneath her and then they are both falling to the floor with a thump.

They both freeze, Kit panting on top of Jade and Jade holding her breath as they wait to hear whether their noise will have woken Sorsha, whether they’re about to be separated into a guest room and Kit is about to get a lecture. Jade’s arms are still wrapped tight around Kit, and she squeezes harder just for the satisfaction of feeling Kit’s heavy breath straining against her. A minute passes and Kit opens her mouth, but Jade shushes her before she can say anything. Kit rolls her eyes but goes silent again. Another minutes passes and Jade heaves a deep sigh, relaxes minutely. Kit rests her head against Jade’s sternum, sharp chin digging at the bone there.

“So what is it?” she says.

For the first time, Jade is tempted to lie to Kit. She’s never needed to come up with a lie about this before, because either people don’t ask, or she brushes them off, but the moment she thinks about doing that Kit’s eyes narrow, like she can tell what Jade’s about to do, and her hands curl back into claws at Jade’s sides, ready to restart the battle.

“It’s a burn,” Jade says with an awkward little shrug from underneath Kit’s weight.

“Weird place to get a burn,” Kit replies.

“Mmhm,” Jade says.

“And big,” Kit says.

“Yeah,” Jade says and goes silent, thinking.

Kit doesn’t lose the intent look in her eye, or the tension in her body that could send her right back into fight mode, but she waits.

“I was younger,” Jade says, finding the words as she says them, “younger than you.”

Kit scoffs, and Jade smiles, because it makes it easier, makes the story more distant if she can keep Kit in her thoughts while she tells it.

“My, um, my mom, like, my real mom,” Jade stumbles over how to explain it, “She was– I think that there were some things that maybe were wrong with her. Or maybe my dad, the guy who– what I mean is he wasn’t a good guy, and so I don’t think that she was always–”

Kit’s arms worm free of Jade’s grip on her, come up to stroke at Jade’s collarbones.

Jade clears her throat, keeps trying.

“She wasn’t always herself and she wasn’t always…safe, I guess.”

Kit’s eyebrows come together, but she gives a slow nod, keeps up the gentle pet of her fingers across Jade.

“She was doing my hair and– and she was being kind of rough. I remember complaining, I think maybe crying, and she– she wanted to use a curling iron and I didn’t want her to, I wanted braids and she said that took too long and I don’t, um, I don’t know if maybe I said something that set her off or what I did but, she had one hand in my hair and then she just,” Jade heaves in a breath, “She just pressed it there, at the back of my neck and I don’t, um, I don’t really know what happened next.”

Jade isn’t sure what she thought Kit would do with this information, only that she has always been afraid to tell it, always been afraid to give this piece that feels so unwanted about herself, both sad and uncomfortable and too much for anyone else to hold. Tears tickle at the hairline by her ears, and she sniffs. Kit watches her face, stares intently at her and then wraps her arms around Jade’s head, curls herself up closer like a cat on her chest, and Jade can actually hear her growl.

“I’d kill anybody who tried to hurt you now,” Kit says, fierce and faultlessly honest.

Jade laughs a bit, not because she doesn’t believe her– the will would be there, if not the way– but because it feels good to let someone else prickle around her sore spots on her behalf. She still cries some, and Kit tightens her arms around her every time she hears Jade sniffle.

“Did it hurt very badly?” Kit asks eventually, her voice quiet against Jade’s skin.

“I don’t remember,” Jade says, “It must have.”

“I bet it did,” Kit says, “You were brave.”

Jade sighs at that.

“I didn’t have a choice about it. That’s not brave.”

Jade can feel Kit narrow her eyes against her, the sharp chin coming back up to dig into her skin as Kit looks up at her.

“You’ve read me all kinds of stories about knights and things,” Kit says, “And they’re always brave about stuff they didn’t have to do. Quests and rescuing people and whatever. Things that they get to choose. None of them had moms that hurt them like that, or dads that were like, bad to them and stuff. So you’re braver.” 

Jade turns the thought over in her mind. It doesn’t feel real yet, but it could, it might, with time. It might become true if Kit keeps saying it and believing it, keeps her sure hands and eyes on Jade and makes her the bravest knight from any of her stories. It is a green feeling, a growing one, in the midst of all the red anger that Jade always feels, that scours her insides with its heat. She’ll let Kit curl around that color, and she'll let it grow.

Kit wants her around all the time now and Jade struggles to contain how much she likes this. It’s a big responsibility too– she’s made a promise, and she has gambled things that are out of her control. If Ballantine doesn’t keep her, how will she stay with Kit?

Jade makes herself extra useful around the house. She vacuums, does laundry, scrubs out the tub, and picks up sticks in the yard so that Ballantine doesn't mow over them. She makes her own lunch and she never tries to change the TV channel or says that she's too cold or asks for anything. She can't tell what Ballantine thinks of any of this– she can't tell what Ballantine is thinking at all. He's quiet, which is mostly nice. It would be companionable if Jade felt she could trust it wasn't hiding a storm. He likes routine, and Jade would like this too if she wasn't bracing for the moment it would change. He likes things simple and plain and Jade does everything she can to be as simple, as unremarkable as she can be.

Jade has always liked report cards, because they're a clear sign of how she's doing, what needs fixing, that she's doing what she's supposed to and is therefore safe. It's been awhile since she's been at school long enough to receive one and she aches for the simplicity of a letter grade.

Ballantine doesn't give her a report card on being his adopted daughter.

It twists her inside, not to know. It rattles the cage of her anger, of wanting to demand why she's never been enough, what she has to do to earn it. Every time she feels the curl of her anger trying to pick that cage lock she thinks of Kit, thinks of her serious, excited, frightened eyes, and pulls that emotion back into herself, sedates the thing in her that wants to spring free and roar.

“Kit, do you want to explain why I received a message from your teacher about you being disruptive in class? That you've been sent to the principal's office twice already this month?” Sorsha demands.

There are times when it's harder for Jade to quiet her anger than others.

Kit and Jade are sitting at the kitchen island, marble countertop scattered with half eaten snacks– from Kit– and empty wrappers– from Jade– and pages of the homework they're both working on.

Kit is already near meltdown. Her spelling sheet is nearly ripped through with the number of times she's written and erased the words, her grip on the pencil tighter and tighter until Jade thinks it might snap in her small hand. Jade can tell something is wrong, that it isn't normal for Kit to have this much trouble. At first Jade had thought Kit’s inability to sit still and focus had been a product of a lax upbringing, but Sorsha is anything but lax.

Even when Kit can bring herself to concentrate on a task, reading the directions takes ages. Jade has taken to working on the same worksheet as Kit whenever they're together so Jade can read the directions out loud– that seems to go quicker, and it preserves Kit’s pride. The same problem happens whenever Kit has to write anything down, the letters come out scraggly, jumbled and backwards. Jade can't tell where the problem originates– Kit’s eyes or mind or hand, but somewhere something is gathering up all the words, putting them through a wood chipper, and then handing them back to Kit to assemble. Of course Kit struggles– she's trying to sift through so much mulch just to make one letter, with the only reward being piecing together the next one. It irritates Jade that she can't find some solution for Kit. It irritates her more that no one else seems to be trying to.

So when Sorsha– Mrs. Tanthalos– comes in ready to spit on what's already bleeding, Jade's hackles rise.

“Miss Patricks hates me!” Kit whines, and while Jade agrees this is true– though Miss Patricks loves Jade, every teacher does– that's not why Kit is disruptive. Kit is disruptive because every five minutes she stands to sharpen her pencil or asks to go to the water fountain or retrieve something from her cubby or drops her pencil and kicks it away and has to go get it. She's disruptive because she talks constantly, and even though her desk has been moved six feet apart from everyone else that only makes Kit talk louder. She's disruptive because she asks question after question, complains about assignments, argues about rules. She's disruptive because she'll pick a fight with every other student and she has never learned to back down. It's both exhausting and fascinating for Jade to watch. What would it be like, to take up that much space? What would it be like, to be that loud and still be dismissed?

“Miss Patricks is a teacher-- she doesn't hate any of her students,” Mrs. Tanthalos says.

This is incorrect, Jade knows– anyone can hate children, anyone can be cruel to them. The ones who aren't supposed to are always the ones it hurts the most coming from. Miss Patricks certainly doesn't care for Kit, Jade can tell, and there are moments where the way she presses Kit on certain things hints at a frustrated malice.

Kit scowls.

“You're always going to believe them instead of me, so why do you even ask me?” she says.

Mrs. Tanthalos' eyes narrow and Jade’s back stiffens.

“Because I am hoping Kit that you'll show a little remorse or, god forbid, responsibility for your actions.”

Kit’s hands fist up, her shoulders near her ears and she stares down at the wrecked spelling homework in front of her. Jade sees the storm coming before it hits, but she's too late to dissipate it.

“Kit? Look at me when I'm talking to you!”

“No!” Kit yells, and she grabs the homework pages in front of her and rips them to pieces, “You just think I'm stupid and bad and you don't care what I say and I hate you, I hate you!”

“Kit!” Sorsha snaps, and her face goes dark, the similarities between her and Kit’s rage apparent. Her hand snaps out and wraps around Kit’s wrist, yanking her off the stool and making her stumble. Kit tries to tug her arm back, growling and snarling like something that needs a muzzle.

The anger that settles into Jade’s chest is not the kind she's used to, not the rabid fire that makes her feel like static shrapnel is filling her head, not the kind that makes her muscles hot and tense. This is vicious, but cold, the kind of anger that leaves her head clear, her insides scoured desolate with the force of her rage.

She is also afraid.

The anger and the fear twist up in her and she steps down from her own stool. Kit is still a wriggling whirlwind, but Jade steps between her and Sorsha anyway, forcing Kit behind her back.

She doesn't say anything, doesn't even meet Sorsha's eyes, just stands still and stares straight ahead. She's seen dogs do this, the terrified but determined stand off of an animal that's been kicked but still has something to protect. She shivers, a little.

With one last vicious tug, Kit frees her wrist from her mother's grip and presses herself up against Jade's back. Jade can feel the warmth of her through the chill of her own skin. Jade doesn't see what expression Mrs. Tanthalos makes, her own eyes fixed firmly on the middle distance, present but not, a weathered wall.

This is not wise, what Jade is doing. This is not a smart calculation in the ever shifting equation where the solution is being able to stay in a home, with Ballantine, near Kit. It is a terrible, gut churning risk, but she can't do anything less. It grates against something heart deep in her, and she can't stop herself from acting any more than she can stop herself from breathing. She can't watch anything happen to Kit because Jade knows it won’t matter if she stays with Kit but can't take care of her, can't protect her.

Jade's skin shivers in waves of cold, and she isn't sure how long the interminable stand off lasts for, only that it scours against her willpower, a part of her brain begging her to sit down, shut up, and stop being seen.

Mrs. Tanthalos walks away.

She can feel Kit’s forehead pressing between her shoulder blades. Jade makes a fist until her hand stops shaking, and then pulls Kit back onto the stool, sits back beside her.

“Jade–” Kit starts, and her voice is small, a shakiness to it that's unnatural, that hurts Jade to hear.

Jade shifts her own spelling homework page between them, erases her name at the top and writes Kit’s instead.

“Just say the letters out loud and I'll write them,” she says, because there are a million ways to protect Kit, and Jade is going to learn every single one of them.

Chapter Text

Kit’s body has an excellent memory. No matter what she shoves to the back of her mind, what she crushes down into the depths of her heart, what she runs away from with every painful distraction, her body will still remind her. Kit’s body recalls things with a flinch, a tension, an ache, a longing in the very muscles of her. Her skin remembers when she has been touched, and when she has not.

Summer after 10th grade, Kit 16, Jade 18

Kit thinks that Jade might finally love her.

She’s been hoping explicitly for this moment for two years, and with the unconscious need of her heart and body for far longer than that.

Kit watches as Jade adjusts the telescope, squints into the viewer in the way that scrunches her nose and opens her mouth in concentration. Kit would like to run her thumb along that bottom lip and then lick it– which is a bizarre thing to want before they’ve even kissed , but Kit has long since stopped interrogating her desires when it comes to Jade. They’re impossibly too much but she feels them anyway. Jade’s red hair is muted in the darkness, but Kit can still make out every curl, where the little hairs cling to her skin, the coils that Kit could wrap around her fingers, that she could bury her face in and it would smell of Jade. It’s a smell she knows from long nights held close to Jade, intimate affections they should have grown out of with age, but had clung to instead. Kit always promises herself that she’ll lay awake longer to enjoy the rise and fall of Jade’s chest behind her, the way Jade’s fingers twitch across her skin as she dreams, the warmth, the closeness, the smell of her. She doesn’t though– Kit falls asleep in Jade’s arms quickly and sleeps deeply because there is nothing that stills her racing mind or her twisting body like Jade does.

“It’s lined up now,” Jade says, nodding to herself and pulling away from the telescope.

It's a meteor shower they're waiting for, the Perseid, and they've been planning to watch it together for weeks. To Kit it feels like a culmination of this summer, of the way Jade has been insistent on spending so much time together, the way that Jade has filled their days with things that Kit loves, with little reminders of the years they've spent together, with the way Jade has stood nearer to her, looked at her longer. This is the last weekend before 11th grade starts and Kit thinks– she knows -- that Jade is going to finally ask her, finally let her in, finally allow Kit to love her and admit that she loves Kit back.

Love is a strange thing. It's not just one thing, not a primary color of emotion, but something richly blended together. The way Kit feels about Jade is so much– admiration, trust, enjoyment, possessiveness, adoration, craving. She's felt these things for Jade for so long, much of it as soon as Kit chose her, but the partitions between those rooms in her heart, in the ways she held things separate and safe had crumbled away with the force of each individual emotion growing until now every space in the home of her heart is flooded with love.

Jade has undermined those walls with the steadiness of her presence, with the solidity of herself, day after day, in the face of Kit’s anger, her capriciousness, her intensity, her stubbornness– all the things that make Kit so hard to bear, Jade has weathered and returned and stayed.

There have been times this summer that Kit thought Jade was on the verge of telling her.

Kit has managed to convince her mom to let them drive up to the lakehouse on their own, though it was certainly more Sorsha's faith in Jade's responsibility than anything Kit had said that convinced her. Jade is laid out on the raft off the dock, face shielded with a book she eats through quicker than Kit can even comprehend, her already innumerable freckles multiplying in the sun. Kit sprawls out beside her, her restless body compelling her to do backflips into the lake and deep dives into the green tinted darkness at irregular intervals. 

When she bobs to the surface to the glittering light on the water, momentarily sunblind with just the silhouette of Jade with her long legs crossed over each other and the length of her arm held up against the vast blue, Kit swipes her wet hair back and stares. It makes her warm even in the cold lake water.

She doesn't let herself stare much at Jade these days. Kit knows there's an impulsiveness to her that would have her pressing her mouth against Jade's if she lingered looking too long. It's easier to let her eyes slide away from Jade, to stare off at the horizon and laugh and tell some idiotic story that might make Jade smile, might make Jade roll her eyes a little fondly. Kit aches to make Jade smile, to be… pleasant for Jade to be with. If they only spend time with each other, if Kit keeps Jade jealously to herself then she hopes to at least be something Jade can genuinely like.

Kit dunks her head back underwater, squeezes her eyes closed and lets out enough air that she floats, stuck between sink and rise, between lungs filled with air and emptiness, heart twisted between hope and doubt. Kit has never been good at the in-between, aches to either crash or fly but the midpoint hover where either could happen is excruciating.

Kit’s chest starts to burn and there are sparkles of dull red in the darkness behind her closed eyes. She waits until there is a scream of need in her and then kicks her feet, shooting to the surface with a gasp.

She drags herself dripping back up onto the raft, shakes her hair out like a dog and Jade sighs dramatically, but smiles behind the pages of her book. Kit drops her damp head against Jade’s warm stomach, letting her mind entertain the possibility of turning her head to press a kiss into the skin there. Jade keeps one hand holding her book up and the other she strokes through Kit’s wet locks, and when Jade finally sets her book down and Kit shifts to turn a curious eye towards her, Jade is staring at her like she’s memorizing Kit. She looks long enough that Kit wonders if Jade feels the same vibrating impulse to kiss her, if maybe she isn't suffering alone. Jade's hand tightens just slightly in Kit’s hair, and Kit shivers.

Jade hadn't said it then.

They’re watching Free Willy for the millionth time, with Kit sitting on the edge of the bed, busying her hands with Jade's braids as she sits on the floor between Kit’s legs. No matter how many times they watch it, Jade always pays such close attention. Kit could make a few guesses why– it was about an orphan in the foster system, and a whale that missed its family after all.

Kit has slipped an elastic around the braid she's just finished, separating strands to begin the next one as she half listens to unscrupulous businessmen plan how to exploit Willy.

“Am I your Willy?” Kit asks.

Jade drops her head back, and Kit loses hold of the section of hair she'd been about to move to.

“My what? ” Jade asks.

Kit locks her legs around Jade's torso and Jade brings her hands up to tug halfheartedly at Kit’s ankles.

“You know– you show up as a mysterious tween and make my captivity more bearable,” Kit says with a grin, “Maybe even bust me out someday, huh?”

Jade's face goes tense for a moment, and Kit worries she's offended, but Jade doesn't shake her off. Instead, her grip on Kit’s ankles goes soft, her thumbs stroking along the ankle bone so gently it was nearly ticklish.

“You are a wild thing,” Jade says, and there is affection in her voice, like Kit’s wildness is a good thing. Jade's hands slide further up, stroking along Kit’s calves. Kit reaches out to pull a stray red curl between her fingers. They stay like that, strange gentle touches and a quiet only broken by an occasional intake of breath from Kit when Jade touches something sensitive. On screen a whale escapes and a boy is left alone.

Jade hadn't said it then.

They’re driving with the windows down in her dad’s car– Kit can still never quite think of it as her car– with her left hand out the window, fingers spread to catch the pressure against her palm, her right hand on top of the steering wheel, head bobbing to one of the seemingly endless cassette tapes that had been left in the glove box when she inherited it. Jade is in the passenger seat, looking green as usual but doing her best to white knuckle her way through it. Kit’s eyes flick over to her as she hits the brakes a little too hard at a red light, Jade’s body jerking forward only to stop as the seatbelt yanks her back. Jade closes her eyes and swallows hard.

Kit had bit her tongue and shifted into park. She unbuckles her own seat belt– Jade refuses to get into the car until Kit has clicked it securely in place– and hops out of the car.

“Kit, what are you doing?” Jade calls after her as Kit attempts a slick slide across the front of the car, mostly succeeding in burning her thighs as the hot metal kisses the skin below her jean shorts.

Kit just grins and opens Jade’s door.

“Come on, it’s no fun if I have to worry about you throwing up on the dash,” Kit says, “You drive.”

Jade stares up at her and Kit tries her best to look like this is all totally chill and no big deal when in reality it was the sudden impulse of her heart and they both know it’s a big deal. Nobody drives her dad’s car but Kit. Jade has never even asked to, not even when Kit only had her learner’s permit and Jade already had her license and two years of driving Ballantine’s station wagon around. Airk didn’t need to borrow it– he had his own car, shiny and new without cigarette burns in the upholstery or dings in the bumper or the smell of beer every time the weather heated up. Her mother had wanted to trade in the car to get something more suitable for Kit, but she’d pitched such a fit that even Sorsha had decided to cede that battle.

Jade doesn’t bother to ask anything dumb, like if Kit is sure, just looks Kit in the eye for a long moment before unbuckling her seatbelt and sliding out of the seat.

The light has long since gone green by the time Jade has sat down in the driver’s seat, but there is no one behind them and Jade takes her time to get settled, to check all her mirrors, to adjust the seat as much as possible– even to check the fuel gauge, which Kit rolls her eyes at. Kit’s hands twist in her lap, the only thing that will keep them out of her mouth and anxiously chewing on them, and the bobbing up and down of her leg is shaking the whole car.

“Seatbelt,” Jade says, voice carefully toneless, that particular voice she uses when Kit is wound up and Jade wants to remain neutral, to observe Kit before she makes a move. It makes Kit feel too looked at sometimes, too much like her emotions are for tornado watching, but there is a kindness to even Jade’s most dispassionate words– a lack of judgment that Kit has found nowhere else.

Kit fastens her seat belt, and Jade accelerates smoothly.

It was strange to be in her dad’s car this way. Madmartigan had never driven her around in it, hadn’t even owned it before he left. Kit had seen it for the first time when she’d pulled the dust tarp off it in the parking lot of his apartment complex after his funeral. She didn’t have any fond memories of them singing along to the radio, or late night rides, or him letting her shift the gears for him. Even Kit knew her attachment to the impractical charger was an attempt to cling to a string of connection that was entirely woven on her end. Sitting in the passenger seat now with Jade’s careful use of the turn indicator, her smooth stops, and how she still looks in both directions at empty four way stops makes Kit feel…safe. Jade directs their path, and Kit trusts Jade to get her there safely. Kit wonders if her father in the driver’s seat would ever have given her that feeling. Madmartigan had been exciting and fun and Kit had adored and chased after him but safe was not a feeling she associated with him.

When they finally pull up to the park and Jade gets them precisely as close to the curb as they need to be and then turns off the engine, Kit looks over at her, and Jade meets her gaze, a question in her eyes.

Kit shrugs.

“You’re a better driver.”

Jade nods, pulls the key free and presses it back into Kit’s hand.

“Any time,” she says.

Jade hadn’t said it then.

Kit gasps for breath as she holds out her arms, desperately trying to keep Jade from stealing the ball between her feet– entirely unsuccessfully. Jade checks her back and Kit stumbles forward just enough for Jade to get her foot between Kit’s, kicks the ball free and deftly pivots to get in front of it and starts her own sprint across the grass.

“Mother fucker ,” Kit snarls, recovering her balance and charging after with her head down.

Jade is a superior ball handler, a better shooter, smarter with her plays– an all around soccer team MVP. Kit has quick reflexes, speed, and a vicious foul. Of course, Kit’s not on the team. Kit just isn't built for teams– she pisses everyone off and doesn't listen and gets too angry and coaches hate her and no one wants to play with her and it's just better if she stays out of it. Everyone likes to play with Jade– she's generous on the field, rigorously disciplined, attentive, and they can be three goals down in the last minutes and Jade never stops running.

Still, when they win, Jade comes running to Kit on the sidelines, lets Kit scream and jump on her shoulders. Jade makes her excuses to the rest of the team as they go out for burgers and shakes afterwards, hops into the back of Sorsha's car with Kit and goes home with them. She showers off in Kit’s bathroom and changes into clothes she leaves in Kit’s dresser, calls Ballantine and recounts the excitement of the game in what Kit swears is the blandest way possible, and then has ordered in pizza with Kit at the kitchen island.

The girls with their perfect ponytails and pink laced cleats, the ones with grades better than Kit’s, good enough that the school allows them on a team, that have boyfriends and cute decorated notebooks and don't need to turn around and look away in the locker room might have Jade while she's on the field, but Jade is hers everywhere else.

Jade is hers , which is why Kit doesn't feel remotely bad tackling her from behind.

Jade is sturdy, but not even Jade can take the full force of Kit wrapping her arms around her middle and taking her down. She does manage to twist in Kit’s grasp as they fall, and they both hit the grass on their sides with an exhale of breath. 

Kit giggles.

Jade groans.

“Red card, Tanthalos.”

“We bought the ref,” Kit says, “She didn't see anything.”

“You know this isn't actually helpful for practice, right?” Jade says, attempting to sit up even as Kit clings around her.

“Sure it is,” Kit says, “It encourages you to run faster. I provide valuable motivation.”

Kit can't see it but she knows Jade rolls her eyes, and Kit smiles.

“Oh, thank you , princess,” Jade says.

There are things Kit only allows from Jade, and princess is one of those things. What would bludgeon in anyone else’s mouth is a clean slice from Jade's tongue, a deep cut that gets to something soft and vulnerable inside Kit, something embarrassed but waiting to be stroked. Kit doesn't know what to do with that feeling so she sinks her teeth into Jade's shoulder.

Jade grunts, but she doesn't jerk away. Instead she slides her fingers between Kit’s that are still clasped around Jade's stomach and starts to squeeze hard. Jade's grip on her is painful, but Kit doesn't relax her jaw, can't submit to the pressure. Kit bites a little harder. Jade’s fingers between hers start to tug back, pulling a burn from the knuckles in Kit's hand that quickly goes from manageable to unbearable.

Kit whimpers into Jade’s shoulder. With the sound comes the slightest hitch of her hips, a roll of her body against Jade's.

“Mercy,” Jade says immediately, and lets Kit go. 

Kit pulls back her teeth feeling a buzz that hasn't settled, something that feels like it needs smoothing down. Her hand aches, and Kit knows she could have taken more, could have fought longer, but a Mercy is the end of the game, even if Kit doesn't feel like she won.

Jade sits up, dragging Kit locked to her back with her, and Kit rubs her forehead between Jade's shoulder blades, trying to figure out what it is she wants .

Jade tenses and her hand ghosts along Kit’s knuckles again, like there's something she didn't quite get to either.

Jade hadn't said it then.

Kit orders the same ice cream flavor every time. Mint chocolate chip. It's the best one, and there's enough in her life that she doesn't get to choose that she takes a– childish, she knows– pleasure in stubbornly picking the same thing for herself year after year.

Jade has tried every flavor of ice cream at the shop. Kit watched Jade make her methodical way through them over an entire year of Sundays when they were kids. It was only when Jade was halfway through her tests that she started showing signs of whether she actually liked a flavor, and longer still until Kit could tell when Jade didn't. It never actually seemed to matter– Jade ate it either way. Kit might not get to choose her own life, but she does know that she’s spoiled– she can have whatever she wants, as long as it’s the right thing.

It’s the selfish princess part of her that she leaned on to convince Jade to give her a lick of every flavor she gets. If Kit could tell that Jade didn’t like the flavor, Kit would imperiously declare it was better than hers and whine about trading until Jade would pass her cone to Kit. And Jade did like mint chocolate chip. Kit didn’t always like the ones she swapped for, suffering through Pralines n’ Cream and Jamoca Almond Fudge and something called Baseball Nut that had cashews in it for some godawful reason. Half the time Kit would let the ice cream melt down her hand so she didn’t have to eat as much of it.

These days all Kit has to worry about are the monthly specialty flavors. Her heart sinks when she sees Mint Watermelon Breeze is the option. That won’t taste good– she can already imagine the fruity sweetness cut with the bite of mint on her tongue and she wrinkles her nose.

“A scoop of chocolate please,” Jade says, and Kit snaps her head to stare at Jade like she’s deranged.

“Wait, what?”

“Chocolate ice cream, Kit. You’ve heard of it.”

“No, but,” Kit huffs, “there’s a new flavor.”

“Yes, but I don’t like mint.”

Kit’s jaw drops, and she wonders if predictable, solid Jade has been replaced.

“Yes you do!” Kit says, “You eat it all the time!”

“That doesn’t mean I like it,” Jade says, accepting the cone from the disinterested teen working behind the counter.

“You lied?” Kit can’t understand it, because Jade doesn’t lie, it was one of the first things Kit learned about her.

“No,” Jade says, shaking her head, “I never said I liked it.”

“But you–” Kit was about to say you always ate it , but realizes that’s meaningless– that’s already exactly what Jade did with all the ice cream she disliked. Jade takes a lick of her ice cream and Kit blinks.

“No, that’s– that doesn’t make sense,” Kit says, “When you didn’t like a flavor, I just, I used to–”

“You used to switch with me, I know,” Jade says, and there’s the smallest curve of a smile to her mouth, edged with a bit of chocolate cream.

“You knew?” Kit asks.

“I didn’t like it either way, but at least you felt like you were helping.”

“I–” Kit opens her mouth and closes it again. She feels stupid, not new, but also hurt , and that’s new, at least from Jade.

“A scoop of mint chocolate chip, too, please,” Jade says.

Jade collects her ice cream and heads to the door and Kit has no choice but to trail after her, still reeling, and from such a silly thing. Jade sits on the curb and Kit sits down too, a little further than she might usually. Jade hands her the ice cream and Kit doesn’t feel like eating it, but she doesn’t want to show she’s hurt, so she licks a long stripe along the side.

“I didn’t want you to stop doing it,” Jade says, looking off into the parking lot.

“You didn’t?” Kit asks, and she sounds needy to her own ears, and she draws her shoulders up as if she could ward off the feeling.

“You don’t have a good poker face, Kit. I could tell you didn’t like most of those flavors either,” Jade says.

Kit grumbles and rasps her shoe across the asphalt.

“At first it made me angry, because I didn’t want your pity, and so I let you keep doing it, because if you wanted to eat bad ice cream then fine, we could both suffer,” Jade says.

“Mean,” Kit says.

Jade nods.

“I know, I’m sorry.”

Kit takes another halfhearted lick at her ice cream.

“But you just kept doing it,” Jade says, and she licks a line of ice cream that’s about to drip onto her thumb, “You kept giving me your favorite, and you thought you were so slick, and if I’d told you then you’d have been so hurt and I guess I was being selfish because it was…” Jade trails off, and she gets a twisted, distant expression on her face that Kit associates with Jade’s mind wandering to memories she only occasionally shares. Kit scoots a little closer and Jade’s expression smooths slightly. Kit shifts closer still and lays her head on Jade’s shoulder.

“It made me feel nice,” Jade finally says, “Like you cared.”

“Of course I cared,” Kit says, snorting.

“Not of course, ” Jade says, and she’s so serious as she says it, and Kit doesn’t like it, doesn’t like this examination of something so fundamental, “It’s rare, real care. I just didn’t want to lose it.”

“You won’t,” Kit insists, pulling her head up to glare, and Jade can say what she wants, but it is obvious to Kit, as much a part of her as her bones and blood.

Jade smiles, and it’s not quite that effortless smile Kit chases to be the cause of, but it’s close.

“Why tell me now?” Kit says, “Obviously I wasn’t going to get a clue.”

“We’re old enough that we don’t have to keep things from each other, right? Even if it’s–” Jade nips at her bottom lip, brown eyes asking something that Kit is desperate to answer, “something big.”

“Yeah,” Kit says, and her heart feels like melting ice cream, puddle sweet dripping on Jade’s fingers, “Yeah, of course.”

Jade hadn’t said it then.

The meteor shower won’t be until late, until after the lightning bugs have stopped mirroring the sky and Jade has pointed out constellations that Kit always conveniently forgets, staring more at Jade’s fingers than the stars she points to. It won’t be until the August night cools off, making Kit shiver and Jade pull the ratty quilt they keep up here over them both and their shoulders press against each other, Kit’s body feeling like a blush. Not until Jade has tried to hold back a half dozen yawns and Kit has teased her about every single one and Jade arches her eyebrow at her in the way that makes Kit thrill inside. Maybe the stars won’t start streaking across the sky until Jade holds Kit’s cheek in her warm hand and tells her.

Jade flips through the illustrated astronomy book, oblivious to the way Kit is staring at her.

“Here,” Jade says, pointing to something on the star chart labeled with a long string of letters that Kit doesn’t even bother trying with, “This is what I wanted to look at.”

Kit scoots forward and puts her eye to the telescope, careful not to jostle Jade’s painstaking positioning.

“What am I looking at exactly?” she asks.

“Mu Scorpii,” Jade says, and Kit snorts out a laugh and mutters nerd just loud enough for Jade to hear her. Jade ignores her antics, “It’s a binary star system. Two stars, locked together, gravitationally dependent, orbiting each other.”

Now that she knows what she’s looking for, Kit can see the pair. They just look like stars real close together to her, but she tries to imagine them at whatever incomprehensible distance they are from here, burning in each other’s glow, a pair held together by one of the strongest forces in the universe, stuck together for such an impossible length of time it might as well be infinite.

“Cool,” Kit says, pulling away from the telescope, her eyes drawn back to Jade with far more interest than any star can inspire in her.

“There’s another good one, hang on–” Jade flips her attention between the star chart and the telescope, bottom lip caught between her teeth and Kit fights the impulse to shove herself between Jade’s attention and the telescope, desperate for that focus on her.

Jade makes her adjustments and then squints into the telescope. She smiles. Kit wishes that she was both cause and recipient of that smile, aches with an electric sort of jealousy that twists her stomach.

“Look at this one,” Jade says, “Albireo.”

Kit takes her place behind the telescope, and Jade stays near, close enough that Kit imagines she can feel Jade’s breath on her neck.

“They don't know if they're a true pair or not,” Jade explains, her voice in that pleased register it gets when she’s interested in something, “They look like a binary star, but they might not be anywhere near each other and it’s just an optical illusion.”

One star is a lovely yellow gold, the other a cold blue white. Kit tries to tell if she’s staring at a true pair, or just the illusion of closeness. 

“What do you think they are?” she asks Jade, looking back at her.

Jade shrugs.

“Impossible to know.”

Kit rolls her eyes, presses her face back to the telescope and stares up at the pair again. She doesn’t like the idea of being tricked, of her eyes fooling her. She remembers being enraged as a toddler anytime her father made a coin disappear, pulling it back out from behind Airk’s ear to her twin’s delighted shrieks. She wanted to be in on the trick. If she couldn’t be the magician, then at least his assistant, keeper and defender of his secrets.

“Why did you want to watch the meteor shower anyway?” Kit asks, keeping her eye on the stars, suddenly anxious not to look at Jade.

“Aside from the obvious– that it’s an amazing natural phenomena we don’t often get to see?”

“Yeah, aside from all that.”

Jade goes very still, and Kit loves and hates these moments where she waits suspended on Jade’s words.

“They happen every year,” Jade says, her words slow, like she’s picking them very carefully, “When we see them, we can remember tonight.”

Kit swallows and pulls away from the telescope. Jade’s eyes are on her and Kit feels a drag in her chest so intense that she can't not. The star atlas is smooth under the palm of her hand as she leans closer, a firefly pulses on the window ledge, she can smell night air and Jade and she wants, more than anything, to touch and be touched, to kiss the person who would give her a meteor shower memory. 

Kit loves Jade, and she always will.

Jade presses a hand against Kit’s sternum, leans back and away from her.

“I'm leaving,” Jade says.

Kit is shaken, feels the tremors before a disaster.

“What? No, Jade you don't have to do that, I'm sorry, I–”

What awful mistake has Kit made, how has she fucked up this one important, good thing, why is the person that she chases after hardest speeding up? Kit reaches for her in a panic, desperate, and Jade catches her wrist.

“Kit, no, it's not that,” Jade says, and is Kit imagining Jade’s thumb rubbing across her pulse, “I'm leaving leaving. I'm going to England.”

“To–” Kit licks her lips, “to visit?”

Jade is searching her face, like Kit's a wild animal about to spring and it's not fair , of course Kit is this way– it's sudden and awful and it's like biting into something rotten when you were promised sweet.

“To live,” Jade says, “With my sister.”

Kit stares at her, trying to decode something she thought only she knew.

“For how long?”

“I'm staying there, Kit.”

Kit pulls back her hand. Jade lets her go, Kit doesn’t even have to fight for it.

“When?” Kit asks.

“I need to be there when school starts next week, so the flight is Monday.”

“ Tomorrow? ”

Jade swallows and nods.

“You lied to me,” Kit says, and a cavern opens beneath her, a sinkhole that had apparently always been there, one she'd built all her stupid hopes on. 

“No,” Jade says, and she looks down, shakes her head, “I didn't lie, I just didn't–”

“You're a fucking liar, Jade,” Kit spits, “and a coward. And a shit friend.”

Jade's face flashes with hurt and then an anger that makes her face impassive, her eyes cold.

“It's my sister , Kit. If you were my friend you wouldn’t–”

“And I'm your–” Kit can't get out the word, doesn't even know what would form under her tongue if she tried.

“My what , Kit?” Jade presses, and it's cruel and Jade is never cruel to her.

“You promised me,” Kit says, and she's pleading and she hates herself for it, but it's Jade, her Jade, “that you were mine.”

“We were kids ,” Jade says, “that wasn't–”

“Don't you fucking dare,” Kit snarls, because if Jade says it wasn't real, that she didn't mean it, Kit will topple into the hole of her heart herself.

“You just don't get it, you can't get it,” Jade says, and there's a force behind her words that presses against Kit like a shove, “You grew up with a family. You've always had them, you can't be taken away from them or lose them or–”

“I'd pick you, you know I'd always pick you–”

“But now I have a person, Kit, somebody who's part me, the only other person in the world like that and she wants me and you just–”

“Please,” Kit says, “please don't go.”

“We couldn’t be like this forever, Kit,” Jade says, and her voice is soft, like Kit is a tantruming child and she is , but how else is she supposed to be , “I can’t just always be following you around–”

“You don’t have to! Let me follow you then!”

“Kit,” Jade says, “No.”

“Fine,” Kit says, and she feels like she can’t swallow, like her emotions have come up in a ball to constrict her throat, to choke her on the words that she can’t find to convince Jade to stay, “Fine. Don’t follow me then.”

Kit stands, sways with a headrush, and Jade reaches out as if to steady her.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” Kit says, recoiling, and she already misses how Jade feels, her skin already aches with the absence, “Don’t ever fucking touch me again.”

At this, Jade finally, finally looks like she’s hurt, like Kit has said something that dragged her closer down to where Kit is thrashing, because Kit’s misery has always needed company. She yanks open the trap door and starts to lower herself down.

“Kit, we aren’t done talking,” Jade says.

“I don’t have anything left to say to you!”

“There's nothing brave about running away!” Jade snaps after her, and Kit laughs and it aches in her chest, bad laughter, the kind that’s at herself.

“Say that when you're 3000 miles away, Jade,” Kit yells up the ladder.

Kit’s whole body feels shaky as she descends the ladder, as she comes down from where her dream doesn’t want her and back to the shitty reality she’s always been in, a reality that makes her feel so stupid for thinking she was going to be loved, as if Kit hadn’t proven herself incapable of being loved over and over and over again. The rungs nailed into the tree twist under her furious grip, shifting into odd angles and Kit is just trying to get away as fast as she can, so when she stomps down on the next rung and it completely gives way she doesn’t have a firm grip to save herself, and there is a fall so quick Kit doesn’t realize it’s happened until her arm cracks inside.

For a moment, it is everything. The entire inside of Kit’s self is just the white shock of pain, an obliterating brightness that burns away everything else. Becoming herself again is like blinking after staring into the sun– shadowy outlines and bleached color, blurred edges and muted sound. Kit gasps a breath, and she’s on the ground, tumbled sideways in the grass and her arm is definitely broken and her thoughts circle only that fact until she hears Jade yelling her name.

Only then does she remember the other hurt, the hurt of Jade, and it’s so much worse than the pure light of the pain she’d been consumed by. In those few perfect moments, Kit only felt one thing– not loneliness or fear or self-hatred or desperation. Not broken love. Not Jade.

Jade is scrambling down the ladder, leaping the last rungs and skidding to her knees by Kit, reaching out for her. Kit curls away from her. She won’t look at Jade’s face.

“I don't need you,” Kit gasps, stumbling to her feet, “I don't need you.”

Kit presses the break of her arm against her chest until it is a bright star of pain, until she is her own single, solitary supernova.

Chapter Text

Jade wants to own Kit. Once she’d woken to that knowledge, every part of Kit’s mind, her heart, her body– it all made Jade furiously and adoringly possessive. During the times when Jade had not been there Kit had wandered ownerless, unprotected, and wounded. Jade swore that would never be the case again. She would keep Kit safe, and the act of keeping Kit safe would make Jade safe.

Kit 12, Jade 14

"But Mom! Jade is over!"

"I suppose you should have thought of that before you left your practice to the last minute. Now you have to keep your guest waiting."

"That's not fair though!"

"Very little is, Kit."

Kit gives an exasperated growl that is close to a shriek, and Jade would smile about it if she didn't think that it would earn her some Kit ire of her own.

"I'll start the timer when I hear the first notes," Sorsha says, breezing by Jade in the entryway, "Hello Jade, help yourself to anything in the kitchen while you wait."

"Thank you, Mrs. Tanthalos," Jade murmurs.

Jade and Sorsha Tanthalos have an... uneasy truce around matters of Kit, a possessiveness that each recognizes in the other and chooses to let lie. For now.

Kit yanks the bookbag off Jade's shoulder, stumbles a bit under the unexpected weight, and then carries it off, leaving Jade with little option but to follow behind.

"You can hang out in the tree house if you want," Kit says, heaving the bookbag onto the marble counter of the kitchen with an audible grunt, "And you can read ahead, if you want."

Kit must be feeling rather guilty to offer that up.

"How long do you have to practice for?" Jade asks.

Kit drops her head back, kicks at the kitchen island.

"A whole freaking hour, " she says.

Jade unzips her bookbag, pulls out The Mists of Avalon, watches the way that Kit's eyes follow her hands on the book, the downturn of her mouth as Jade runs the edge of her thumb along the pages.

"An hour is a long time to read ahead," Jade says, and she knows she's not going to, but Kit's contrition is rare and a little bit delicious.

Kit twists her fingers together, bending and straining them.

"I should have practiced this morning. I knew you were coming and I just," she sighs, "I just didn't."

Jade watches her, because this scratches at something she's noticed about Kit before.

"I wanted to. Or like, I didn't want to, but I knew I needed to or whatever. I kept telling myself to start. But I just couldn't."

It's language Kit has used around other things-- homework and projects and even things Jade knew Kit enjoyed. There was just something about her that wouldn't settle sometimes. Sorsha was convinced it was laziness or willfulness. Jade wasn't so sure.

"It's okay," Jade says, and she shrugs, though her mind is still mulling over this information, categorizing it and considering, "I don't mind."

"You should ," Kit says, going to the fridge and pulling out a capri-sun in the flavor Jade likes best and jabbing the straw through the pouch before she hands it to her, "You're gonna be real bored for an hour."

"Not if I come listen," Jade says, taking the drink.

Jade is curious to see what Kit's reaction to this will be-- she hates the things that Jade thinks of as her "princess tasks" and she's particular about the image that Jade is allowed to see of her, but Jade knows loneliness, even if it's a different shade than her own, and maybe that need will win out.

Kit narrows her eyes while Jade takes a drink-- sugar and artificial flavor and ridiculous expense washing across her tongue.

When Jade finishes her long sip that drains nearly half the pouch in one go, Kit takes it out of her hand and takes a drink, chewing on the end of the straw in a way that drives Jade up the wall.

"Alright," Kit says finally, "You can turn pages for me."

Jade grins.

"Oh, I have orders now?"

Kit smirks back at her.

"Yep. You're in for it now."

Kit leads Jade to the Music Room -- a stuffy room off the entryway devoid of windows or anything else that Kit might find distracting, and Jade knows Kit can find almost anything distracting. There's a grand piano that's probably worth more than Ballantine's car, and built in shelves that hold a violin case, a flute case, and rows of books on music theory. Jade has never played an instrument, rarely even had opportunity to touch one, and as with most things to do with the Tanthalos family wealth it evokes complex feelings in Jade-- shameful jealousy and restrained awe. Seeing Kit navigate it is equally complicated. Fine things looks well on her, though Kit's disdain of them can equally impress and infuriate Jade.

Kit pulls a thin portfolio off the shelf and pulls sheet music from it. There are notes and lines and numbers and symbols and none of it is anything Jade could read and it's like a door shut in her face. Kit sets the music in front of her, sits on the hard and gleaming bench, and wriggles like it would be possible to get comfortable on something so unforgiving.

Kit stretches her hands out, reaching between keys, and sighs.

"My piano instructor says I'll never be a great musician because my fingers aren't long enough. See?" she says, and shows how her hands don't reach between two matching white keys, "I can't stretch an octave."

"Is that important?" Jade asks.

Kit rolls her eyes.

"Is it important if you're normal? No. If you're an overpaid music snob, I guess," Kit's eyes fall on Jade's hands. "Here, let me see something?"

Jade lets Kit grab her hand, though she is surprisingly delicate with her touch this time, in a way that makes Jade's skin prickle. Delicate is not often a word she associates with Kit Tanthalos, but she is full of surprises.

Kit places Jade's thumb on one white key, directs her reach to widen like a bird's wing til her pinkie touches its match on the next octave.

"See?" Kit breathes, overlaying her own hand and its shorter reach atop Jade's, "You can reach much further than I can."

“I don’t hear any music, Kit!” Sorsha calls from somewhere else in the house, and Kit growls and pulls her hand away. Jade’s hand aches with the stretch of the octave, and with the absence of Kit’s touch. Sorsha Tanthalos is the worst.

“I’m supposed to warm up with like, scales and shit,” Kit says, and the sneer on her face tells Jade that scales are probably for losers, “but those are boring, so I’m not.”

Jade nods. She gets the feeling that if she played music, she’d never skip doing scales, in the same way she never skips doing the practice quiz at the end of each chapter in her textbooks. One time she’d offered to administer a practice quiz to Kit and she had laughed so hard that she’d nearly made herself sick.

Kit flips through pages of music until she settles on one named Spring Waltz . The idea of Kit playing a waltz makes Jade smile, but she curls her lips under her teeth to hide it, just in case Kit gets self-conscious and decides not to play it after all.

“Okay,” Kit says, her fingers jumping lightly on the keys in the same way that she bounces on her heels when she’s keyed up, “When I nod you flip the page, alright?”

Jade nods.

Kit’s left hand plays the first low note, and Jade is in love with this song.

There’s a slow, repetitive melody built with the left hand, and then Kit’s right hand jumps up to high notes and overlays something delicate and fast over it, like lace over rich wood. Jade doesn’t know how she manages to get her hands to do two such completely different things, and she’s torn between watching the serious look on her face, the way her eyes scan the page, her eyebrows low, the way her fingers flit across the keys, the way she sways in time to the music.

There are aching moments where there is only a single repeated tone, where the whole melody slows down and hinges on just this note, and it makes Jade’s heart ache, makes her stomach pull for the next moment, and then she’s in it, Kit’s hands fast across they keys again, a rush and then another slow down, and the same note can sound so different each time Kit touches it, the weight of her fingers, the caress of it when she lets it go.

The music stops abruptly.

“Jade?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you, um…can you flip the page?”

Jade nearly pulls the page free of its staple as she flips it.

“Sorry,” she says, and clears her throat.

Kit gives her an incredulous look, but then she’s back to playing and Jade lets her eyes stay on her face, the better to watch for the nod this time, watches how Kit’s expression changes subtly throughout the song, how there is a longing in her own look when the music is achiest, how there are moments when she knows the melody so well her eyes close.

The song ends.

Kit’s fingers stay on the keys until the last reverberation of them ends, and she slides them away.

“Will you play that one again?” Jade asks.

Kit cocks her head, looks at her like she’s trying to figure something out. Jade thinks she figures something out too.

“You know you’re good at that, right?” Jade says.

Kit snorts and rolls her eyes, flips the page back to the start of the song.

“Wait,” Jade says, putting her hand over Kit’s before she can start again. It presses her fingers lightly into the keys, and it’s a little discordant, but quiet, “I’m serious.”

“Don’t be weird,” Kit says, “It’s not like I’m good enough to do anything with this. And besides, this would be a stupid thing to be good at anyway.”

Jade might have agreed with Kit, before she heard her play, that it was unnecessary, that it was a skill purely for fluff, but she doesn’t agree with her now. Now she wants her to play the Spring Waltz again. She doesn’t know how to convince Kit that one of her “princess tasks” suits her, or how to say it in a way that wouldn’t have Kit taking a crowbar to the piano.

Jade will have to give something of herself instead.

“I liked it,” Jade says, tracing her finger along a black key just lightly enough that it doesn’t sound, “I thought it was beautiful. I’d like to hear it again.”

It’s an inkling Jade has, this request, that Kit will find it easier if it’s a gift for Jade. She doesn’t know if there is something in Kit that wants to impress Jade, or show off a little or…or something else, but Jade leans on it now.

Kit twists in her seat, and Jade can hear the tap of her pressing her feet on and off of the pedals.

“Remember to turn the page this time,” Kit finally says, not looking at Jade as she resets her fingers into her starting position.

Jade smiles.

“Of course.”

Jade notices when she goes to brush a bit of grass off Kit's neck. She uses the back of her knuckles to sweep it away, and Kit's whole body reacts. She coils into herself and shivers and this startled, charming little yelp comes out of her mouth that turns into a giggle and it freezes Jade still and heats her at the same time.

"Ticklish?" she manages to ask, after a beat too long.

"No," Kit says, shying away as she speaks because Jade can tell she absolutely is, "You just surprised me, that's all."

Jade takes one deliberate step forward and Kit hops back. Jade can't help the curl of the grin on her face.

"Oh, fuck off, " Kit says, and her eyes dart to Jade's hands.

"Such concern from someone who isn't ticklish," Jade says, taking another step.

"I just don't want your grubby hands on me!" Kit says, and she keeps inching backwards.

" Grubby? " Jade says, doing her best impression of aghast as she regards her own hands, "You think I'm grubby?"

There's something a little strange that's happening to Jade, as she watches Kit retreat and retreat. Something like how a cat doesn't grab for the mouse until it moves, something of the pounce not coming until the bolt. It makes Jade want to lick her lips, roll her shoulders. Kit's eyes are watching her closely, flicking between her hands and her face, and she must see the added tension to Jade's stance, because she plants her feet solidly, turns on a dime, and runs.

"Super convincing!" Jade yells after her, a moment before she gives chase herself.

Kit is fast , and she's nimble. She careens around corners and manages to bounce off them in a way that actually pushes her momentum forward, darts through the narrow space between the shed and the garden wall, scrambles up the pile of rocks the landscapers are using to lay a koi pond, and all around makes herself a slippery menace.

Jade has something else though-- enduring determination. The corners slow her, she has to shuffle sideways through the narrow space, stumbles on her hands and knees up the rock pile, scraping up the palms of her hands, but she keeps going. Kit is fast, but Jade is dauntless.

Kit whips around the trunk of a tree, her hand catching on the bark so she can do a 180 and race past Jade going the other direction, but Jade hurls her own balance off, throws herself to the side so she slam tackle into Kit's side, sending them both to the ground in a tumble.

Kit's a skittering little thing, and she's already trying to scramble to her feet by the time Jade gets her arms around her middle, pins her properly to the ground, Jade sat heavy on her lower back.

"Jaaade! Get off!" Kit huffs, her strength divided between trying to turn over beneath Jade's pin and trying to crawl away.

"I just want to try an experiment," Jade says, and she can hear the grin in her own voice.

Kit's arms are stretched out in front of her, tearing at clumps of grass that definitely aren't native to the environment and that Jade is certain Sorsha paid a fortune for. It means her sides are unprotected.

Jade runs the tips of her fingers from Kit's ribs to her hips.

Kit shrieks.

"No no no no no, Jade!" Kit yelps as Jade digs her fingers into Kit's waist.

Kit bucks underneath her, and Kit is always a whirlwind of movement, but this is uncontrolled and instinctual, like electricity through a livewire contorting to a stimulus bigger than it can hold. Kit manages little wheezing laughs in between her yells of Jade's name, and Jade can't help her own laughter in answer.

Jade lifts herself up enough that Kit can wriggle and twist her way onto her back, so Jade can see Kit's laugh pink and breathless face, her disheveled hair, her eyes that are slitted blue. She has Kit at her mercy, and perhaps she's even learned her lesson, but Jade doesn't want to stop-- if anything, Kit's pants and cries just make her want to torture her more.

Kit’s shirt has ridden up her stomach in her struggle, and Jade tickles fingers along the skin of her belly, her other hand finding the side of Kit’s neck. Kit wails with laughter, pinning Jade’s hand between her head and shoulder with her contortions, the muscles of her belly jumping under Jade’s hand with her stuttered breaths.

“So you’re not ticklish, right?” Jade says, and she has to speak louder to be heard over all of Kit’s noise.

“I’m– ah! -- I’m not!” Kit manages to get out.

“Okay,” Jade says, leaning forward to put more pressure on Kit, “Guess you won’t mind if I keep doing this then.”

“Nooooo!” Kit is laughing so hard that she hiccups, and it’s the most charming sound Jade can imagine.

Kit’s mouth has fallen open with laughter and gasps for air, her neck arched back as she tries to escape the sensation, a flush down her skin and it’s such a strange picture that Jade’s thoughts fixate on it, capture and memorize it to work over later.

“Please, please , Jade!” she gasps.

Jade can’t remember the last time Kit has said please.

Jade lets her hands slow down, the movement of them closer to a caress than anything else, but still light enough to make Kit’s body jump under the touch, to make her flinch periodically, but her breathing slows down, her eyes closing as her body has exhausted itself with tension finally released.

“So,” Jade says, her voice quieter now that the only sound is Kit’s deep inhales, “are you ticklish, Kit?”

Kit stays silent for a moment and Jade drifts her nails just above her belly button and Kit sucks in a breath, skin pulling away from Jade’s touch.

“ Yes! ” she gasps, and then her eyes open, glance away, “but only a little.”

Jade smiles.

“Only a little,” Jade repeats.

Kit 13, Jade 15

“How do you masturbate?”

Jade chokes on the soda she really shouldn’t be drinking this late at night, but it’s not a school night and Kit had handed it to her already opened and Jade couldn’t waste it. She sets the can down to buy herself time, wipes her arm across her mouth, clears her throat

“What?” she says.

“Like–” Kit flops herself around the bed like a fish that’s dying, but one that’s really chill about it, “how do you even do it.”

Jade watches as Kit leans the upper half of her body entirely off the bed, braces her hands on the carpet and attempts a sort of backbend-reverse sommersault that just sends her toppling towards the bowl of popcorn next to Jade that she quickly snatches out of the way. Kit reorders all her limbs and when she more or less resembles a person again, props her chin in her hands and stares at Jade.

Jade can feel herself reddening, can feel her fingers twitching to start fidgeting. This is fine. This is normal. This is girl talk.

“What do you mean,” Jade holds up her hands and then realizes she doesn’t want to pantomime anything and drops them back in her lap, “What do you mean how?”

Kit sigh-growls.

“Like whaddya do? ” Kit demands, “Do you have to like, do something special or have something special or whatever?”

Jade clears her throat again.

“No,” she says, because in Jade’s experience you didn’t, “You just sort of like…just make it feel good for yourself? Until you want to stop or until, you know.”

“ No ,” Kit says, scooting closer to her, and Jade fights the urge not to scoot back, “I don’t .”

Jade takes a calming breath, holds it, breathes it out. Approach this like a math problem. What were the knowns?

“Okay, so have you ever like, felt nice between your legs? Pressed up against something or maybe felt water there and it was just– good?”

Kit frowns, and narrows her eyes–her thinking face.

“Yeah, maybe,” she says, with the type of airiness that doesn't imply complete honesty. Jade lets it lie.

“Okay, so, you can use your hand or like…” Jade's hands rise again in an attempt to help explain and she again forces them down into her lap, “or you could lay on a pillow–”

“Like just any pillow?” Kit interrupts.

“Well, the point is that it's positioned like–” Jade sighs.

“Is it really this complicated?” Kit asks, and her frown deepens.

“No, it's not!” Jade snaps, “Most people just figure it out on their own.”

Kit’s silly string of a body coils up, goes wire tight and tension taut. She looks away from Jade, scratches hard at the skin of her ankle and Jade can see angry red lines.

“I know I'm not as smart as everyone else or whatever. That's why I'm asking,” she mutters.

Jade feels like a Disney level villain– someone who should be skinning puppies and killing lion fathers. Kit’s self-worth is like an overfilled balloon– enormous in her boasting and swagger and pinprick delicate in practice. Kit struggles, and she's been told struggling means not smart rather than determined.

“Why do you want to know?” Jade asks, keeping her tone even, not too pitying but soft,  “You don't have to do it or anything.”

“I don't want everybody else to know something I don't,” Kit says, speaking into the curl of her knees drawn up to her chin, “I don't want to get left behind.”

Jade takes a deep breath, clears her soda can and the popcorn bowl and the DVD case out of the way, and yanks a pillow down from the bed.

Kit’s eyes go huge, and Jade has to grin about it a bit.

“Calm down,” she says, “I'm just going to show you the positioning.”

Kit swallows and nods.

Jade tosses the pillow onto the floor and gestures to Kit.

“ Me? ” Kit squeaks.

“ You're the one so anxious to learn,” Jade says, “So learn.”

Kit scoots closer to the pillow and reaches out for it, Jade sits down cross-legged in front of her.

“Alright, so you want it kinda firm, I guess?” Jade says, and she pushes down the embarrassment– it's just a lesson, just the same as explaining a word problem to Kit, it's just a series of instructions. “So fold it over once, and then straddle it, alright?”

Kit nods, folds the pillow over in her arms, sets it on the carpet and then looks up at her shyly.

“Do people do it together ever?” Kit asks.

Jade flushes.

“I– I guess you could? It's sort of private though so…I don't think it's common.”

Kit frowns– thinking again.

“I'm your best friend though,” she says, like that's answer enough.

“Yeah,” Jade agrees, and how could Kit understand– Kit who would pry open any locked part of Jade, demanding that it was hers to share in?

Kit climbs onto the pillow, legs on either side, looking like a pretend cowboy. Different kind of bucking bronco though, Jade thinks hysterically.

“Now what?” Kit demands.

Jade's eyes flick up to the ceiling, like perhaps she'll be teleported out of this situation, abducted to some place less bizarre than Kit’s presence.

“You sort of lean forward and just like, rock back and forth?” Jade says, hands locked tight together, “Just try to feel nice, I guess?”

Kit huffs a little determined sound, and it does make Jade smile a bit at how seriously Kit is taking this. Jade hears the shuffling of Kit’s pajama pants, the sound of the pillow pushed against the carpet. Jade counts her breaths and waits.

“I don't think this works,” Kit says.

“Okay, well, sometimes it helps to think of something,” Jade says, “Something you like.”

She hears more shuffling, Kit readjusting.

“Something I like? ”

“Something or like, someone that you, you know,” Jade tries to shrug, but this is so extremely unshruggable that she just sort of twists her shoulders up to her ears, “that you like like.”

“What do you think of?”

“Kit you can’t– that's not– you can't ask me that!” Jade stutters out.

More shuffling and an impatient sound from Kit.

“Why not?”

“Because it's private!” Jade says.

She should have kept her eyes on Kit, because she's suddenly thwacked on the side of the head with the pillow. It doesn't hurt but it is startling, and by the time Jade gets her bearings Kit has already crawled back into the bed and thrown the covers over herself, tucking them tightly underneath her til she's a lump of sulk.

Jade lets her head fall back, gives a quiet groan of annoyance– at herself, mostly.

“Kit,” she says, but the lump doesn't shift, “Come on.”

No sound– not even a growl or a petulant no. Kit must actually be hurt then. Jade chews at her lip. She grabs the bottom of the blanket and starts to tug. Kit curls the blanket tighter underneath her, but Jade's steady pull starts to drag the whole mess of sheets and blankets and lump towards the end of the bed.

“Kit,” Jade warns, “I'm going to pull you off if you don't come out.”

Kit must latch on with her nails, because Jade has to tug harder and now the corners of the mattress are tilting up as the fitted sheet starts slipping off. Jade keeps pulling.

Eventually the curl that is Kit makes it to the edge of the bed and Jade wraps her arms around the sides of the shape of her and tugs her– blankets and sheets and all– off the bed and dumps her on the floor. Kit’s form squiggles like a worm pulled out of the dirt, rolls about in the blankets until she's a cocoon of fabric.

Jade kneels down beside her, starts to peel away layers, to dig her fingers into fissures and unwind Kit’s hiding. When she gets down to the base layer, to just the top sheet wrapped around Kit like a tiny ghost, her form outlined with the shape of her tucked in knees and sharp elbows, Jade lays down beside her.

“I guess I sort of tell myself a story?” Jade starts, and it’s easier because Kit’s inquisitive eyes are hidden away, she can only see the rise and fall of her breathing. “You remember that scene, in The Princess Bride near the end with the four white horses?”

Jade knows that of course Kit remembers it– they watch it all the time and Jade has to convince Kit not to fast forward to all the sword fights. Kit doesn’t care for it when Jade points out the irony of this action when taking the framing device of the movie into account.

The sheet ghost nods slightly.

“I think about the adventure done and the princess saved and about how Buttercup jumps from that window and just sort of…” Jade closes her eyes, “Just sort of flutters down all slow and she’s caught and then she rides off with Westley and they have that kiss, and well.”

Jade trails off, traces swirls in the carpet with her finger.

“That’s what I think about.”

Kit shuffles under the covers, and most of her head pops free, tousled hair in her eyes but an inquisitive blue flash beneath.

“You think about being the princess?”

Jade looks down at the carpet, stares at her fingers. She’s not afraid to say it, not really. It’s just the first time she has.

“No,” Jade says, “I don’t think about it that way.”

She would never be a pirate, but still, the service, the quest, the determination, the unstoppable force of true love–

“I think about being Westley.”

“Oh,” Kit says.

For a moment Jade feels adrift, like someone has cut her anchor line. It’s a feeling she’s familiar with, but there’s an ache to it, sailing out into a sea she thought she’d left behind.

“But Buttercup? ” Kit says, “She’s not cool.”

Jade snorts, her line caught again by Kit’s insistent hands.

“Not cool? ” she demands.

“No!” Kit says, fighting her way out of the mummification she gave herself, “Why not like…like Princess of Thieves! Gwyn has a bow and she doesn’t even have to marry the guy in the end!”

Jade grins and teases and makes faces by turns as she and Kit discuss who Jade should be thinking about instead. When Kit finally exhausts herself with her own nonsense, feet kicked up onto the bed as she lays on the floor, her eyes slipping closed, Jade takes a moment to slip into her own mind, examine her own thoughts.

It's not really Buttercup she's thinking of, not really. It's who Jade gets to be. Someone brave and strong, someone who comes to the rescue, someone who no setback can really stop. Whose villains are vanquished by the end, whose heart is pure. Someone who deserves the title, the princess, the love by the end of things.

Jade wants her arms to be strong enough to catch the princess, to be worthy of her heart.

Jade knows that's not how things work. Her villains are still out there. Her fear still clings to her. Her anger still ignites her. The world doesn't need knights, doesn't want them, would crush them down to valorous fragments.

Kit yawns massively, bright teeth and curled back tongue, and her sleepy blue eyes find Jade's.

“You tired?” Kit asks.

Jade keeps her smile to herself, nods instead. Kit needs Jade to be tired first. Kit lets her legs fall off the bed and rolls onto her stomach before finding her feet.

“Can't believe you pulled all the covers off. What a mess , Jade,” she clicks her tongue.

Jade picks Kit up around her waist and tosses her onto the bed. Kit giggles as Jade hauls the rest of the blankets and sheets up, not bothering to put them back on correctly– she'll do it in the morning, because Kit won't– and heaves them in a tangle over them both.

Kit squirms around, like a dog that has to make circles before it will settle, before finally shoving her back against Jade and yanking Jade’s hand around her middle.

It's how they always sleep, and nothing is different, except what they've talked about.

“So you’re like, gay then, right?” Kit asks, and Jade’s arm twitches around her, but Kit keeps her grip tight, doesn’t let her escape.

“Yeah,” Jade says.

“Cool,” Kit says, and Jade snorts a laugh.

“Cool?”

Jade can feel Kit chuckle against her.

“Yeah, cool!” Kit says, “Mom would freak, so obviously it’s cool.”

Jade stiffens a little at that– partially due to any mention of Mrs. Tanthalos in the same sentence as herself and partially because…she'd like it to mean more to Kit than that. 

“What are you, then?” Jade asks.

Kit goes quiet and the hand holding Jade's arm in place releases and goes up to Kit’s mouth, where she will no doubt chew it to pieces. Jade catches Kit’s wrist, pulls it back down, keeps them linked.

“Dunno,” Kit says, “Everyone else sucks. How can I even tell?”

Jade can't help but laugh again– of course Kit is too snobbish to have a handle on her sexuality, what a perfectly Kit problem to have.

“What ever, ” Kit grouses, “it doesn't matter, it's not like anyone likes me.”

Jade tugs her even closer, feels the urge to growl into her shoulder.

“ I like you,” she says.

Kit huffs and curls up tighter somehow.

“But not like that ,” Kit says.

Kit is incredibly touchy, in a way that Jade has never experienced with anyone else, would never allow with anyone else. Jade had accepted it stiffly at first, then with a sort of amused detachment that turned into the awakening of a strange excitable urge in Jade that had her putting her hands on Kit with almost as much frequency as Kit did with her, or at least wanting to. Jade had heard about rescue dogs that didn’t know how to play, how you had to teach them something they should have learned as puppies, and how it sometimes led to an explosion of playfulness that neared aggression– the gleam of teeth and the pleasure of the play bite. Jade has to stroke down that impulse often, and this is one of those times.

“I like you best, ” Jade says, and she means that she likes Kit best out of everyone in the world and also that she is the one who will like Kit best, not because Kit is convinced she's unlikeable, but because it's not possible for anyone to come close to how much Jade likes her.

Kit makes a little noise that Jade’s familiar with– a grumble of disagreement that’s steadily being broken down. It’s victory enough for Jade.

“Whatever you are, it's fine with me,” Jade says, speaking quietly into Kit’s hair.

“Yeah?” Kit asks, her voice soft, the dark and the closeness opening her up to Jade as it always does.

“Yeah,” Jade reassures, “As long as you don’t fall in love with that bitch Stacy Bowman.”

“Bleugh!” Kit makes a horrified sound and then giggles and Jade rubs her chin against the top of Kit’s head.

No matter how tired Jade is, she always manages to stay up long enough for Kit to fall asleep, waiting for the even huffs of breath and occasional sleepy twitches of her feet before falling asleep herself. Kit being settled and safe soothes Jade.

Jade doesn’t know how long she’s been asleep before she wakes up, but it’s still dark, and there is an empty place by her chest where Kit should be. Losing track of Kit always makes Jade’s heart race a little– there is so much Kit can’t protect herself from– and Jade is about to yank her sleepy self to full wakefulness when she hears a quiet little moan.

She knows it’s Kit, knows the quality of her voice, but the pitch, the length of it, the tremble in it is new. Jade slits her eyes open.

Kit is curled on her front, knees under her, forehead pressed down into the sheets, eyes closed tight in what might be concentration, and an arm disappearing underneath the covers. She can’t see where Kit’s hand is, but Jade can see the rhythmic movement of Kit’s shoulder. Kit’s mouth opens in another soft, secret sound before she grits her teeth closed, traps the noise behind her teeth. Jade has the strangest impulse to lever her jaw back open.

Kit is touching herself.

For the first time.

Next to Jade.

Jade has no idea what to do.

Kit had been so anxious about the whole thing, so blustery about it to hide her inexperience. Jade doesn’t want to embarrass her by catching her, because she can’t do anything that might shatter Kit’s nervous heart. Jade doesn’t want to pretend to wake either, because Kit deserves this. She deserves the pleasure.

But Jade can’t pretend it isn’t happening.

Jade doesn't know what she looks like when she touches herself, if she has the same crease in her forehead from frustrated want, the same short hitches to her hips that make Jade imagine how the muscles in Kit’s thighs look as they flex, the same crescent of pink tongue snapped between the tip of her teeth. She can't imagine that she looks anything like Kit in this moment, this desperate, struggling this hard, a flush to her pale skin that Jade knows would make her warm to the touch. The earnestness of the attempt makes something soft and possessive in Jade stir, a desire to help and to ease. Things are hard enough for Kit already– this shouldn’t be hard too.

What if she pulled Kit back against her chest, curled back in Jade’s arms, and took the hand that usually stayed protective and soft around Kit’s belly and slid it down the front of her pajamas? What if she used her fingers to work at Kit softly, what if she used her close attention to listen to the way Kit’s breathing changed and the way she would shiver against Jade’s hold and adjusted her every touch to Kit’s body? What if Kit’s skin burned warm and the space between her legs went wet and Jade could give her a little pleasure that might unwind the tension that was always so obvious about Kit? What if Jade made it better? What if Kit wanted that?

Kit’s harsh breathing stops, and Jade can tell she’s holding her breath, her shoulders flexing down like a cat, her eyes shut tight enough that Jade knows she must be seeing flashes behind her eyelids. Kit’s whole whole body goes stiff in the trembling way of overexertion. Her head twists to the side, and Jade slits her eyes so that Kit’s blue black ones won’t catch her in the darkness. They glitter dark and a little wet and then Kit lets out a single harsh gasp and begins to shake, and the way the experience rattles through Kit’s body makes Jade want to hold her, makes Jade ache for Kit not to be alone in this, because the sensation is new and it’s so much and she never likes letting Kit go anywhere on her own.

Kit curls further over herself, protected only with a blanket shell, soft bellied and still shivering intermittently, still a site for aftershocks, still worked up and worked over and Jade wants to tug her close, has to fist up her hands to resist. Kit softens again, with every deep breath she manages, and she's doing so well, Jade is so proud of her, wants to praise and pet. Jade breathes slow and deep, wills Kit to follow her lead, to pace her heart and relax her chest, to soften instead of prickle.

“Jade?” Kit whispers, quiet and small.

“Mmm,” Jade hums, convincingly wakened.

“Nothing,” Kit says, and then shifts her body back towards Jade, presses her over warm, slightly damp self against Jade's front.

Jade wraps her arm around Kit again, and when Kit flinches with oversensitivity at the touch, she snuffles into her hair, rests herself in the familiar of Kit’s hair and smell and neediness.

She hopes Kit liked it. 

Kit is oversensitive to almost everything.

Even her pale skin is delicate. Jade would be tempted to write it off as rich princess syndrome if she didn’t see the angry red skin, the raised lines, the aching rawness on Kit herself. Mrs. Tanthalos' wardrobe for Kit didn't help. Lace rubbed wrong, polyester burned, nylon rashed, and wool had Kit scratching herself to tears. The extremes were fine– silk and undyed cotton, but one was too fanciful for school wear and the other too plain. Clothes that were too tight or form fitting had Kit miserable, but Sorsha didn't tolerate anything she thought looked “sloppy.”

All of this means that whenever Kit comes over, the moment she gets into Jade's room she starts stripping off her layers, flinging them as far from her as they can get, and raiding Jade’s dresser full of carefully folded clothes.

Today Jade can see where Kit has scratched herself near bloody on her shoulder. It’s a combination of skin irritation and boredom during class– Jade had watched Kit wriggle and fuss all through science period. Jade winces as she watches the raw place flex when Kit tugs the expensive sweater over her head, her hair a fluffed fuzzball once she escapes. There is a scalloped line of lace along the bottom of Kit’s bra, and a redness that follows the same pattern along the skin there too. Jade wishes her touch was ice cool and soothing and she could press her hands against every red mark. Kit tugs her bra off and Jade turns around, face nearly as red as Kit’s flushed skin.

Obviously Kit doesn’t c are if Jade sees, and they’re friends and changing around each other is normal although Kit is weirdly skittish about it in the school locker room in a way she never is around Jade, but Jade’s body still has her turning away anyway, her eyes seeking out the ceiling until she hears the dresser drawer thunk closed and she can turn back to see Kit in an overlarge t-shirt shimmying out of her tight corduroys. She has a pair of Jade’s sweatpants for cold weather soccer practice tossed over one shoulder, and when she manages to kick off her pants she hops into them one awkward leg at a time. She’s a little twister, shedding and throwing and picking up things and Jade’s room and life continue to be made a pleasant mess by it, until Kit gets what she wants, until finally she is in something soft and loose that doesn’t make her chafe at every turn, and then she is still for one glorious moment– closes her eyes and takes a deep breath and her shoulders drop and the rattling tension of her eases. It’s rare and Jade wants to freeze her there forever.

“Music?” Kit asks, and she’s crackling energy and expectation again.

“Mmhm,” Jade says with a smile, pulling out the scuffed up turntable Ballantine is loaning her from under the bed. The record is already in place, Jade’s excitement great enough that she had to break it out and run her fingers over the grooves, but not so uncontrolled that she listened to it without Kit.

They both love music, though Kit’s taste runs more towards pop than Jade’s does– not that Kit will ever admit it. Whatever Jade loves Kit demands to sample herself, eager not to let Jade go somewhere she can’t follow, as if Jade would ever leave her behind in the first place. Kit settles crosslegged on the floor next to her as Jade drops the pin and Enter Sandman starts playing. Immediately Jade knows this is going to be a favorite album, something she can sink her anger into when it threatens to spill out, something she can indulge in safely and privately, something that will add a link to the chain that lets her emotions run free but keeps it just as securely leashed as it needs to be.

Kit sways to the guitar, tapping her feet with her fingers when the drums come in, and once the growly singing begins she grins at Jade.

“Hell yeah!” she says, and Jade bites back her own amused smile.

When the song ends Kit pulls the needle back and starts it again. Since Ballantine is still at work Jade cranks the volume as high as it can go. Jade flops onto her back, letting the music happen to her. Kit lays down with her head on Jade’s stomach, sprawled out at a right angle and Jade can feel Kit’s head bobbing against her, the music rumbling through the floor, a vibration along her spine. Jade closes her eyes and plays with the ends of Kit’s hair and it’s a little bit perfect.

Until Kit starts to squirm. Jade ignores it for as long as she can, but once she can’t, she cracks her eyes open to see Kit gnawing at her knuckles, eyes half-focused on the ceiling. Jade sighs. Kit picks and worries and frets and twists and chews and wriggles and the sight of it always makes Jade want to wrap her close and still. Something inside Kit will not settle, and it makes her outsides jerky with it, and Jade wants, more than anything, for Kit to find the thing that it is she wants, and to be still in it.

It's this impulse that has her finally wrapping a hand around Kit's wrist and pulling her fingers away from her mouth, Kit's sharp teeth having worried the edge of her finger to near bloodiness.

Kit rolls to the side and tilts her head up at Jade, frowning.

Jade raises an eyebrow.

Kit jerks the hand in Jade's hold, but Jade grips tighter.

"Just stop for a moment," Jade says, and the fury of the music makes Jade’s grip a vice.

"Why?" Kit asks, still twisting her arm in Jade's hold and Jade realizes the struggle is just another way to frenzy her body.

Jade sighs. Kit rolls her eyes. The music thunders.

"Give me something else then," Kit demands.

Jade doesn't always know what possesses her in these moments, what internal desperation cracks from underneath the icy surface where she freezes it down, but something breaches containment and her own fingers are at Kit's mouth, pressing at her chewed lips, sliding between them to tap at her teeth.

Before she can undo her fit of mania, Kit has opened her mouth to them, sucked them onto her tongue.

Jade sucks in a breath at the warmth of Kit's mouth, at the wetness, at the gentle pressure of Kit sucking on them.

It's intimate and strange, to be inside her this way. Jade's fingers slide just fractionally further in, she can see where they disappear behind Kit's pink lips, the first knuckle disappearing, and it makes her bite her own tongue.

On the record Metallica roars about misery loving company, but Jade has never wanted a companion for her dark heart. What longs for company in her, what longs for Kit, is the feeling of sliding between Kit and the world, Kit and herself, Kit and her body, Kit and her breath. It’s the feeling of Kit’s sharp teeth on her knuckles, soft tongue under her fingerpad, and the sight of Kit’s eyes closing and her going soft, dressed in Jade’s clothes, resting on Jade’s body, steadied and soothed and tamed.

Jade doesn’t know if she wants to be Kit’s friend anymore.

Chapter Text

Jade wasn’t the only one that knew how to wield pain on Kit’s body. Kit was a master of it long before her.

Freshman Year

“Kit, can you just stop so we can talk!”

Kit does not stop, if anything she pushes her legs to move faster. 

“Fuck talking and fuck you, Jade!” she yells back over her shoulder.

She knows they're making a scene with Jade chasing her across the center of campus and Kit spitting curses back at her, but spectacle has always made Jade more uncomfortable than it has Kit. Kit’s used to it, can't seem to shake it, no matter how hard she tries, the way she sticks out and makes a mess of everything around her, the way she's always the one people look at with confusion or anger or dislike, so it's nothing new to her.

And this is Jade's fault anyway– she could stop it all if she just quit following Kit around.

It twists something in Kit’s gut, the way Jade is stuck to her now– now when it's too late, when Kit would have begged for it before, when she had begged for it before. It makes her feel stupid for ever having wanted that, and there's a cruelty to only getting it now. Her body hurts like she’s sick, like seeing Jade is something she can’t keep down, like her insides are rejecting it. Kit is so tired of hurting this way.

Why Jade is doing this is the the real question, and the lock of it clicks and tumbles in Kit’s head over and over as she shifts into a sprint, deciding that she can't anymore with Jade right now– not with her voice or her words or her watching eyes. Kit can hear one last frustrated call of her name as she shifts her messenger bag behind her, tucks her head down and bolts. 

There's no distance on campus that Kit can run that feels far enough from Jade. She'd transfer schools, but it's too early in the year and Kit isn't confident anywhere else would take her. The university was Sorsha's choice, and she smoothed Kit’s entrance in the way only old money and gin and tonics at the club with family friends can.

Nobody wants a fuckup with bad grades and a worse attitude– you can only pay people to overlook it, can only bribe them to endure it for so long.

So why is Jade refusing to leave her alone now? She'd gotten away from Kit, had a life with a sister and friends and…whatever else happens in Europe.

Kit has class, but who gives a shit, it’s not like she’d actually be able to pay attention if she went now, not with Jade’s stern eyes on her mind, how her hair was in braids Kit’s fingers had never learned, how the tendons in her hand flexed when she tightened her grip on the shoulder of her backpack. Kit feels sixteen again and just as stupid as she’s always been, hates that the person she’s made herself in the years since falls apart in Jade’s presence, how Jade unearths her, unburies what should stay below.

She’s run in the opposite direction of her dorm, so she has to circle back around the entire campus, palm skidding up and down the strap of her bag, burning friction so she can focus on her skin and her breath and her steps rather than anything else. By the time she gets to her building, climbs the stairs, and throws herself into her room there is a horrible static inside her, emotion she refuses to feel turning into ants under her skin, like something that wants to pour out of her mouth black and alive and skittering. Kit runs nails across her scalp, tugs at her hair, and swallows hard over and over. Her eyes land on the first aid kit under her bed.

It would be easy, easy, easy, and Kit so prefers when things are easy.

She turns her back and throws open her closet instead.

Kit tears off the t-shirt and jeans she’s wearing, and she’s never bothered putting clothes away properly in her life -- instead she digs through the mound of probably clean clothing at the bottom of the closet, yanking out options. Kit knows what she looks good in. She knows what will accentuate the things that people like on her– her chest, her curves, her ass. She pulls on the black jeans that cling so closely they remind her of her old ballet tights. She pushes her arms into the cut off leather jacket, the one that stops well above her belly button, that can zip up just barely high enough. She lines her eyes dark and smudges black around them to make the blue into midnight. She drips gold chain around her throat that catches in her cleavage, pooling there to pull the eye. She finger combs product through her hair until it glistens, sweeps back perfectly punk. 

It’s still light out, so Kit blasts music, trawls facebook for parties, and pregames. It’s better if she looks a little lived in anyway, if her body is already a little loose, if a little bit of her hair flops forward for a girl to push back, wrist at just the right angle for Kit to lick.

By the time Kit trips back down her dorm stairs half the bottle of Grey Goose is gone. She brings the bottle with her– she’s definitely not on the guest list for the party she’s headed to, and while she has cash in her back pocket for the guy at the door, it’s still polite to bring something. Kit grins a little at the thought of her mother’s etiquette classes paying off in unexpected ways.

She can hear the music before she sees the party, the basic bitch house music with a beat a college bro can gently pump his arm to. Kit feels like fully half the girls she pulls are just because she has more moves than the “one step left, one step right” and “air palm bounce” that are all most people at these functions can manage.

There’s already a couple making out on the couch dragged into the front lawn, so Kit has arrived at just the right time. Some guy with frosted tips is on door duty, looking sullen with a solo cup and a clipboard. Kit gives him a two finger salute and keeps walking.

“Wait, wait, wait, hold up,” he says, putting an arm out across the doorway. Kit considers just ducking underneath it, but maybe she shouldn’t fuck with people quite this early.

The guy looks her up and down, eyebrows up and a slow smile.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

Kit leans against the other side of the doorframe.

“Kit,” she says.

“Kit, that’s cute,” he says, and Kit holds in her retch, “Kit what?”

Kit licks her lips.

“Tanthalos.”

His eyebrows go up again– he looks like such a dope.

“Oh, shit, the Tanthalos girl? Now I know you weren’t invited.”

Kit rolls her head back against the frame, looking at him sidelong.

“I don’t really need to be on the guest list though, do I? I feel like my presence is kind of implied at every party.”

“Yeah, why don’t you imply your way back home, party girl.”

Kit stands up straight, tosses away the unaffected vibe.

“Okay, let's cut the shit then,” Kit pulls the two hundred dollar bills out of her back pocket, “We good now?”

The guy snorts and takes the cash.

“Jesus, if you’re that hard up for a good time you could just buy an hour with a girl–”

“Bye door bitch boy,” Kit calls over her shoulder with a dismissive wave.

It’s loud and dark inside and someone has actually set up a fog machine which is hilarious and makes the air taste like ozone. There’s one of those Spirit Halloween color swapping light beams swiveling about on the ceiling and one of the house brothers has his iMac out on the table and appears to be curating the music selection. Crazy Frog comes on.

“Wow,” Kit can’t help but mouth.

She takes a deep swig from the Grey Goose bottle.

If this wasn’t meant to be a party for their sister sorority Kit doesn’t know if any girls would have shown up to this. As it is, there seem to be clusters of people bobbing around the room, mostly gender segregated, with a few of the brave and misguided attempting to dance in front of the “DJ” table.

They should have paid her to attend.

Kit heads to where what passes for a bar is– bottles of half full liquor, a handful of unopened mixers, and a scattered dozen or so shots. Kit sets down the Grey Goose, downs a shot, realizes it’s tequila with the burn through her sinuses, and grabs four more shots with dextrous fingers– always a selling point.

She heads over to a group of girls with aggressively flat ironed hair and pencil skirts, cocks her head, busts out her most roguish smile, and speaks.

“This party is kind of the worst, isn't it?” She says, gesturing with a full hand at…all of it.

An exchange of smiles, a little laugh.

“Yeah, it's not great,” one of them agrees. 

Kit hates her voice.

“Maybe we can make our own fun?” Kit offers, “Have any of you done body shots before?”

Kit clocks all their reactions– a blush from the blonde on the left, a scoff from the brunette, a confused look from the girl with the headband, a perked up smile from the one with feather earrings.

“No,” says the brunette, and there's a particular sneer that means she probably knows Kit, “and we're not doing one now.”

“That's a shame,” Kit says, not even looking at her, eyes set on the shy blonde, “I bet you've done one right?”

She definitely hasn't.

“Oh, no, I've never– I've never done that!” She says, somehow blushing even more. It's cute, in a tiresome sort of way.

“Really?” Kit says, “I mean, you have to try it once, just to say you've done it. It's easy, I can show you how.”

She turns her attention to the feather earrings girl.

“You can help me show her how to do it right , can't you?”

Feathers grins, and Kit can see her tongue working over her teeth behind her lips, an appraising look as she scours her eyes down Kit’s body. Kit pushes away an uncomfortable shiver.

“You going to be the one laying back for it, or me?” Feathers asks.

Kit keeps the stretch of her smile taut.

“Well, since I asked, it’s only fair you get to choose,” she says.

Kit knows what she would prefer right now, but if she doesn’t acknowledge it, then maybe it won’t be so bad.

“Find me a table that isn’t sticky and I’ll let you do one off me,” Feathers grins, and her eyes flick up and down Kit again.

Kit’s relieved enough that her smile is genuine, the bravado in the shake back of her hair and roll of her neck true.

Obviously there are no tables that qualify as completely free of stickiness, but Kit runs off some beer pong hopefuls from one that isn't so bad under the low lighting. Kit offers her hand to Feathers as she scoots onto the table, twisting in a way that should be awkward but she makes it work. Yeah, she's done this plenty before.

It's good, sometimes, for Kit to be matched with someone equally versed in the road to blackouts– someone who mixes their liquor and doesn't need to be asked twice to take a shot, and whines about last calls. There's a certain grimness in the eyes behind the headlong rush to oblivion, the knowledge that this was a bad decision a hundred times before and it will happen again long after this night is a blank patch.

Kit and Feathers know what they're about.

Kit digs around in her jean pocket. She thinks that– yes!-- the little packs of salt she swiped from the dining common’s tables are still crunched up at the bottom. Kit would have made a kickass boy scout.

“Where do you like it?” Kit asks, licking her bottom lip in the way she knows looks hungry.

Feathers draws a slow finger across her exposed collarbone.

Kit tears the salt pack open, dusts along the line. Feathers pulls up the hem of her shirt, exposing tanned skin and a belly button piercing with a dolphin charm in it. Kit hides her wince by grabbing for one of the shots she'd set down.

“You good?” Kit checks, because whatever, it's the right thing to do.

Feathers nods with a smirk.

“You stalling?” She asks.

“You like Rocky Horror?” Kit asks.

“No, I don't watch horror movies.”

Well, her line about building antici…pation is out now.

Kit slides one hand along Feathers’ bare midriff, and the heat of her skin and the pleasant way her breath hitches under Kit’s palm almost makes it all worth it. Kit leans towards the line of salt, but flicks her eyes up when she's just inches away.

Feathers is a match for Kit, but she's not the only one she's trying to impress. The over it brunette has fucked off from the scene, but headband girl and the shy blonde are still in it. It's her that Kit locks eyes with as she runs her tongue along the salt, slow and encompassing, catching every crystal on her tongue with a flick of the tip at the end. Blonde girl shivers. Kit winks.

The hand Kit has on Feathers shifts from her belly down and over to the curve of her hip, slots her thumb into the empty belt loop and tugs appreciatively. Kit pours the shot over the hollow below her ribs, presses her mouth down against the hot, flexing skin, gathering tequila with her lips, chasing it with her tongue, tightening her grip as the shot becomes the excuse for an open mouthed kiss against tender skin that it always was.

Feathers arches a little against Kit’s mouth and Kit grins into it– eager, eager.

Kit laves her tongue across the skin one last time and then leans her head up. There's no lime– the idea of finding fresh fruit in a frat house unbelievable– but Feathers grabs the lapel of Kit’s jacket, yanks her up in a way that almost makes her stumble, and kisses her.

It is hard and insistent and the trapped feeling Kit gets when she's not the one driving the trainwreck starts to close in.

It finishes with a sharp nip to Kit’s bottom lip that has her swallow a whimper, but by the time she straightens up she's smoothed her features back into cool mystique. Feathers licks her lips– she’d tasted of strawberry chapstick– and Kit holds out a hand to help her down from the table. Feathers keeps hold of her. Kit’s palm feels itchy.

“See?” Kit says to Blondie, “Easy.”

Feathers leans close to Kit’s ear.

“I’ve heard that something else here is easy.”

It’s…it’s not like it isn’t true, and it’s not like Kit is embarrassed by the crassness of it, or shocked by the obviousness, it’s just that she’s usually the one that comes on this hard and it’s catching her on the backfoot trying to somehow escalate to get back in the lead.

God, is she acting like the Blondie for Feathers? Pathetic.

Kit has only a moment to process this before she’s being tugged away from the table, through the crowd of people that have finally decided to start dancing, past the makeshift bar– her Grey Goose is drained– and pulled down a hallway with holes in the plaster walls. 

The bathroom is shockingly unoccupied, and Feathers tugs her inside the dim space, shuffling over the damp and balled up bath mat, and pushes Kit against the counter where the sink is full of dried toothpaste blobs and beard hair. Kit’s eyes flick to the still open door.

Feathers grins.

“Thought you liked being watched?” She says.

Kit swallows back the nausea, grins back.

“Maybe I want you to myself,” she says, wriggling out of Feathers' hold to kick the door shut.

Feathers is back on her instantly, wrapped around Kit from behind, one hand running up her stomach and under her jacket, the other pressing between Kit’s legs, rubbing at the seam of her jeans. It chafes. Kit wants to squirm free. She doesn't. Feathers’ mouth latches onto the side of her neck, sucks hard, and Kit hisses. She doesn't like the idea of seeing herself marked tomorrow, of wearing someone's touch on herself, the subtle claim, the constant reminder, the evidence of who she is, a memory she can't outrun. Kit can't do anything about it now. Feathers unzips Kit’s jacket and her hand is suddenly on Kit’s bare chest, kneading at her and she doesn't like to be touched there, even if it is sensitive, even if it makes her skin warm, it locks Kit into her body in a way that feels claustrophobic and misunderstood and Kit whimpers and hates herself for the sound.

“Knew you just needed someone to touch you right,” Feathers says in her ear, “All you tough girls do.”

Someone to touch her right, is that what Kit needs? Or does she need the right someone to touch her?

She doesn’t remember Jade’s touch well enough, hadn’t catalogued it like she should have, hadn’t memorized the weight and pressure, the texture and slide, the placement and the timing. Her young, stupid self had thought she’d get to experience it fresh every day, hadn’t known that she should have been hoarding it. Jade had promised forever at ten years old and somehow Kit had thought it was as binding as a blood oath. It certainly felt like it had bled Kit dry.

Feathers is working open the button to Kit’s jeans and biting at her shoulder. Kit rests her forehead against the closed door, shuts her eyes, braces.

She couldn’t tell anymore what Jade was thinking just by looking at her eyes. She can’t tell if it’s disappointment or frustration or pity when Jade calls out to her. It feels like judgment, and it’s so unfair– Jade had evacuated out of a storm zone and now that she’d returned she had the nerve to be shocked by the damage? Kit had never been much, but now she’s leveled.

Her jeans are skintight, and it takes Feathers time to wriggle her hand down the front of them, to press aside Kit’s underwear and run fingers across her. The other hand comes up to grip at Kit’s chest, to work it into an aching soreness. Kit bites her lip.

Fingers brush at her clit, rub it through the seam of them as they dip further down, press at Kit’s hole. Kit jolts, takes a deep breath, steadies. So it’s going to hurt, that’s just how it is, how it always is, it only ever has. She can turn gasps of pain into pleasure, she can make her vice grip into lust, her shift onto her toes a roll of her hips– she always has before.

It will be the same, exactly the same, as it was a dozen girls ago, except it’s not, except the escape it needs to be isn’t materializing, except Kit’s mind is full of anxiety and fear and not the simplicity of touching someone who might actually want her.

Feathers presses into her and Kit gasps and grinds her forehead into the door, clenches her teeth and her eyes and she’s fine, she can make this fine, she can turn this around and it can still have been worth it, she can–

“Let me go down on you,” Kit groans, already tugging at Feathers’ wrist to pull her away, already turning in her arms.

She catches sight of herself in the mirror. She looks all wrong– too young, too open, too sad, everything so obvious. She can see herself from the outside and it's pathetic– some wasted almost drop out college girl with an ego she needs stroked more than her clit. What the fuck is wrong with her?

Kit goes down hard on her knees, focusing on the crack of them against the tile, the sharp that turns to ache. She works at Feathers’ belt with hands that are shaky for all the wrong reasons, lets Feathers run hands through her hair.

Kit can do this in her sleep. She can tune her mind to snowfield static and let her tongue and mouth do what they need to, can follow the cues with barely any direction, noticing only vaguely the tightening fingers in her hair, the hard jerk of hips, the high pitched whine-squeal of Feathers coming.

Good. At least Kit hasn’t embarrassed herself there.

The afterglow gives Kit time– time to cut the grin into her face and say something sexy (she doesn’t even hear what she ends up saying, it’s probably fine) and get herself out the door before Feathers has a chance to reach for her again, before she has a chance to insist on returning the favor.

She stumbles back down the hallway, nearly knocking down a framed picture of a Guinness ad– incredible what frat boys thought was cultured decor– and makes it back to the main party wiping her mouth on her sleeve. The taste, which she had barely registered before, turns sour in her mouth as she sees familiar red hair across the room.

God damnit .

Jade is here for her, obviously. Kit can’t make sense of it– she thought she understood Jade when they were kids, but clearly she’d been delusional from her own want, hopeful idiot heart seeing things that weren’t there, and now she just…Kit doen’t know.

She does know that it probably didn’t cost Jade 200 dollars to skip the guest list either– Jade had a way of staring unnervingly at people until she got what she wanted, which was exactly why Kit tries to stay out of sight. She ducks over to the drinks table, shoots something blue and then something clear.

“Have fun?”

Kit jumps at the unfamiliar voice behind her, completely forgetting to wipe the anxiety off her face before she turns around. It’s the Brunette from before, the one who didn’t like her. Fair.

“You know Jen really doesn’t need to be seen disappearing with someone like you. Fuck up your own life, but leave my friends out of it.”

There is clearly some social web going on here that Kit is completely unaware of and could not care less about, but the Brunette is looking at her with such disdain it’s sort of startling.

“People fucking you is not the same as people liking you,” Brunette spits.

“Jesus,” Kit says, “And do people like you?”

Kit’s been slapped before, so she’s not worried about Brunette hitting her, and she definitely looks like she might, but of course that’s when an excitable Blondie bumps her way into the conversation, already giggling and tugging at Kit that it’s “her turn” to do a body shot.

So much of tonight feels like it’s happening to Kit, when she was intending to be the thing that happened to other people, and she can still taste tequila and a girl’s come on her tongue and she’s not sure she really wanted either. There’s a vertigo sick spin out her mind is doing right now where she’d thought she was just leaning into the turn but she’s realizing that the momentum is going to flip her instead. She’s never been a safe driver. The only person she’d given the wheel over to was Jade, had put her in the driver’s seat of her dad’s car and her own heart and had been certain Jade would have been as careful with the second as she’d been with the first. As Blondie tugs her over to the table and Kit lays back on it, she has a crazed thought about cars depreciating in value the moment they’re driven off the lot, how every time she’s taken out for a spin she’s worth less and less.

There’s no salt this time, but Blondie still holds the shot over Kit’s stomach like it’s a holy ritual, missing steps and all. Before she can pour it across Kit, the Brunette is there, snatching her away in a scuffle of drunken protests Kit can’t make out over the music and her own indifference. Kit considers whether she should sit up or just roll off the side of the table when someone puts a too warm hand on her stomach.

“Since you’re already here, right?”

It’s just some guy– tall and dark haired with a palm big enough to cover most of Kit’s middle, to make her feel pressed down and vulnerable and for the first time tonight actually frightened. He’s not anything special, not anything particularly more or less malicious than anyone else, but when he pours the shot on Kit’s skin and dips his face down to lick at her she inhales so sharply that the liquor spills across her side, makes his tongue follow further. It’s hot and wet and Kit’s on her back and his hand is on her thigh and his thumb is sliding against her jeans, and he mouths at her skin, a graze of teeth that makes her prey freeze and she is both scared and disgusted and then he’s done.

It couldn’t have been longer than twenty seconds. It was fine. He helps her off the table even. It’s so, so familiar.

Kit stumbles.

“Whoa, hey there sweetheart, don't go down just yet,” he says, wrapping an arm around her waist as she loses her footing. The petname feels awful, the innuendo worse, his hand on her bare skin where her jacket is still riding up almost intolerable.

“I got it,” Kit says, pushing at his chest to get away, she manages another two steps before her knees go wonky again and he catches her once more.

“I get it, tough girl, you can do it on your own,” he says, laugh in his voice as if he's indulging her.

He’s a foot taller than Kit, almost bigger than he appeared looming over her, and his shoulder width is twice hers. She squirms and he keeps hold of her, lifting her up effortlessly so that her feet find the flat of the floor again.

It’s a dodgy situation, Kit can tell, she’s not a complete idiot, but she’s been in worse, and she can handle him and his too big hands and his roving eyes and the smell of menthol on him. She could squirm her way out of this, scuffed but safe.

But maybe, what if she just…let him have her?

Why not? He wanted her– Kit could see that he did in the way that his eyes tracked a line down her neck and to her chest, could feel it in the way his thumbs were pressing into the skin above her hip bones. It hurt every time someone wanted her, every time someone wanted to take her, to be in her, so why not go back to the source of that pain? If she was never going to get away from it, why not throw herself into its jaws?

She’s already sore there anyway.

“You got a room here?” Kit asks.

He smiles like a horror movie.

“Sure do,” he says, “Think you can handle stairs?”

Kit’s insides squeeze.

“I can handle more than stairs,” she says.

His arm tightens around her waist, and she wonders at the bruises his thumbs might leave.

“I’m cutting in,” and Kit knows the voice because she’d know Jade’s voice anywhere.

He turns, Kit still in his grip, and of course it’s Jade. Jade, somehow, with her dark coat on and a darker look, brown eyes made black with threat, hands tense in a way Kit learned years ago to look for.

“No, I don’t think you are,” he says.

Kit has an instinctual surge of fury towards him– how dare he say no to Jade, about anything -- but then Kit remembers it’s about her , Jade is trying to extricate her from a mess Kit’s willfully made and stubbornly set herself to going through with. So fuck Jade, actually.

“Fuck you, Jade, actually,” Kit tells her, for the second time today.

Jade’s eyes slide over her and she’s always so damn cool and collected that Kit can only catch the barest twitch of her eyebrow. Jade’s attention goes back to the guy holding onto her.

“She’s drunk,” Jade says, and it’s not like that’s ever stopped Kit before so Kit thinks it’s a bad argument, “And she’s not into you.”

“Hey–!” he starts.

“Am so!” Kit tumbles in. She’s not, but whatever.

Jade arches an eyebrow. Kit wants to stick out her tongue. She wonders what the adult equivalent of that is– flipping her off? She starts to make her fingers do that.

“Listen, she doesn’t need whatever protective bull dyke move you’re trying to pull here, okay? She wants this.”

Kit’s been called her fair share of names– names about how stuck up she is, how mean, how stupid, how gay, how slutty– and they used to bother her, used to cut her and worm their way beneath her skin til she’d learned to just affix them to herself before anyone else could. Nobody could say meaner things than Kit could. For Jade though, it wasn’t right. It wasn’t that Kit was afraid of it hurting her– what could possibly hurt Jade?-- but it was incorrect to treat Jade that way, incorrect in a way that meant Kit was sinking her teeth into his arm before she could think twice.

“Oh, what the fuck! ” he yells, shaking his arm as Kit latches onto him like one of those weasels that have to be dead to let go, “Fucking psycho bitch!”

His other hand yanks at her hair, and Kit sinks her teeth down harder, but then Jade is there, doing her protective bull dyke thing, and he’s yelping because his balls have just been kneed and then not yelping because his chin has been snapped up with a swift fist from her.

And then Jade touches her.

It’s fast and rough and all over– grabbing Kit to pull her away, to get them both moving and Kit wants to cry. She didn’t want Jade to ever touch her again, because it would be like falling headfirst back into an addiction. It would ruin her.

Jade shoves her way through the party, Kit clutched close to her side, and the lights and the smoke and the drinking and Jade’s touch are making everything too much, and the moment Jade gets them out the front door Kit shoves away from her and tries to fill her chest with cold air.

“What the fuck was that, Kit?” Jade demands, and how dare she.

Kit rounds on her. She can’t look at Jade’s eyes, can only manage to sort of generally look near her face.

“What the fuck were you doing?” Kit spits back.

“Watching you let some guy drag you off alone?” Jade says, and she sounds so…is she disgusted with Kit? Kit shouldn’t be surprised, shouldn’t let it hurt her, but it does.

“So what! I can fuck who I want!” and she can, and she has.

“You don’t fuck guys, Kit!”

"You don't know, maybe I'm bisexual!"

"Then be bisexual when you're sober!"

Kit’s trying to breathe, but it gets harder and harder the more words that come out of Jade’s mouth, the more disappointed she seems in Kit, the more fucking audacity Jade has to give her opinion about Kit’s life. 

“What do you want from me? Why can’t you just leave me alone!” Kit yells.

“I can’t just watch you hurt yourself!”

Kit can’t pull in air anymore, her insides hurt and it’s terrifying that being so sad and so angry actually makes her feel like she might be dying, like she can’t breathe, like she can’t think around the scream in her head, like even when she keeps swallowing it feels like something vile but essential about her is about to come up, like her muscles might shake apart, like she can’t find one single reason to keep pulling herself miserable step by step through this wretched thing that is her life.

“ You hurt me!” Kit screams, and it’s true and awful and that’s exactly who she is, “Nothing else can hurt that much! I’ve tried, I’ve tried so hard, but nothing else hurts as much as you!”

It stops Jade, she can see that it stops Jade, and thank fucking god, because that’s all Kit has left in her.

Kit gasps, and it’s just enough air to get her through the next second, just enough to get her legs moving forward again, to send her stumbling away and into an impossible run that she shouldn’t be able to manage, but is taking her towards her room, taking her somewhere she can split into pieces and scream and no one will get to see exactly what Jade has done to her, what Kit can’t fix about herself.

When she gets to her dorm she has to lean heavily on the stair railings, hauling her body upwards more than walking, the vivid white of the walls and lights making her feel like if she lets go she’ll be swallowed into a falling, featureless void. The closer she gets to her room the more impossible each step seems. She’s breathing so heavily but it feels like it’s not doing anything, like her brain is short circuiting on lack of oxygen and that’s why it’s just an alarming screech sound that has her looking for the emergency exit of her own self. Every flight she climbs makes her shakier, slower, like if she doesn’t place herself so terribly, perfectly carefully with every movement the vibration of her body will turn into shatter, every part of her repelled from her own center of being, desperate to get away from her, to not be her.

Getting to her door and managing the opening and closing and locking of it spends so much of herself she slips to the floor, crawls the rest of the way towards her bed, leans against it and pulls the corner of the comforter around her head. Her heaving breaths are louder this way, echoing and hot and if she doesn’t do something, if she doesn’t do something right now Kit is certain she’ll die.

Kit is making a sound now, trying to match the tone in her head so the hurt can be outside instead of inside and her chest aches with it and she could claw off her skin but the best she can do is pull off her clothing, tight and damp with sweat and disgust, smelling of alcohol and sex. Her skin is so warm, but she shivers anyway.

She grabs for the first aid kit under her bed, fingers struggling with the latches but she gets it open, flips the lid and sees what she needs and wants to sob with relief. Thank god for the set of razor blades inside, for the gauze and the alcohol wipes and the antiseptic, for the carefully cleaned box cutter and the click-click-click of the blade extended. Thank god, she thinks, as she presses it against her inner thigh, as she scores a line deep enough to run red, long enough to satisfy. When everything else fails, thank god for the silvering lines on her skin, for the ones still pink, for the scabs, for the smudge of blood. Thank god for the unfailing friend that is pain.

Every cut makes the thing inside her less roaringly loud, every drop of blood makes her thoughts run a little clearer. This hurt makes sense, this hurt she can let spill out and it takes all the things that wouldn’t fit inside her with it. Her head has the tender ache of fury and terror crushing at her skull, but it finally feels like there’s room for herself inside, like she’s come back to the disaster zone and everything is torn apart but at least the storm has moved on, the pressure in the air that summoned it dissipated. It doesn’t matter how many it takes, five or a dozen, she’ll get there, she will, she holds the solution in her hand and she can fix it. Her body feels limp and weak, all the tension and shakiness exhausting her, and even the razor in her hand gets a little hard to keep a tight grip on. Kit sighs and closes her eyes, and there are tears and a grateful smile. Dead quiet inside. Dead dark. Relief.

Jade might be twisted up in every cell of her, but one of these days Kit will bleed her out.

Chapter Text

Jade's world had gone so quiet on the other side of the ocean. Not in an obvious way– she had more friends and kept busy and she learned a lot, but something inside went dormant. If there were seasons in life, it was Jade's winter. When she got back Jade expected a thaw, to emerge a new and ready thing, but Kit was ice, a cold burn to touch. Jade had left so that she could change. She hadn't expected Kit to. She knew Kit better than anyone– what was Jade if she didn’t have that privilege, and what was Kit if no one else did?

“And how’s the Tanthalos tyrant?” Scorpia asks.

Jade is thankful every day that eye rolling is silent because she’s fairly certain she’d burst Scorpia’s eardrums with the force of it right now.

“She’s fine, ” Jade says.

“Oh, she’s speaking to you now, is she?”

Kit isn’t, actually, unless Jade can count profanity, and sometimes, when she’s feeling low, she does.

Jade is an embarrassment to herself.

It's one thing to move across an ocean to live with a sister you didn't know you had, to overturn your life for the promise of belonging, to realize you're a prop in someone else's family drama and decide to make yourself a player in your own story instead, but now Jade has flipped it all over again, tumbled herself into chaos once more, all for a girl.

Or at least, that's what it looks like to Scorpia.

Jade knows, and has always known, deep in the place of her heart where some people have basements and she has a bomb shelter, that Kit is the axis point the rest of Jade's life spins around. Orbit Jade further or closer, Kit remains the center.

Except Kit doesn't seem to think so. 

It doesn’t feel like Kit’s life has a center– she operates like the most unpredictable gravity well, yanking things to herself and then when they get too close slingshotting them away. She acts like she wants everything and nothing. Jade just wants her.

“Well, when the shine wears off that, let me know. Erika was asking after you.”

Jade closes her eyes and imagines pinching the bridge of her nose. It’s almost as good as actually doing it.

Erika was– is -- lovely. Jade’s time with her had been lovely. She was altogether loveable, and Jade didn’t love her, and didn’t want to. Jade had enjoyed spending time with Erika, and a few other girls that she'd met at school, or events, or soccer. She'd liked talking with them, kissing them, dancing with them, sleeping with them, all in a distant sort of half there kind of way, like a dog waiting for the sound of a door. Eventually they all seemed to notice that Jade's distraction wasn't just butch mystery or fuck boy playing around. They got tired of not being able to reach her.

Jade was grateful for the experience, for the accumulated knowledge of the human body, to learn what most seemed to like and where her own skills lay. She wouldn't reduce them to research or practice really, it was just…

Well, placeholder wasn't any nicer.

She hadn't been cruel to anyone, hadn't meant to break any hearts, had barely realized that there had been hearts handed to her to break. There had been a few startling surprises when a girl had let Jade know exactly how much she'd missed going on, loud and angry and Jade didn't do well with that intensity directed towards her. There was only one person whose rage she trusted around herself. Erika hadn't been the volatile type. Worse, she'd been sort of wistful about Jade's distance, an attitude Jade associated with people who read Plath and liked to stand dramatically on widow’s walks.

Jade wonders what Erika and the others would think if they could see her now, trailing after a snarling Kit like a big dumb shadow. Maybe they'd think she'd got what she deserved.

“Okay, well, I have things to do now,” Jade says, not bothering to elaborate on what those things might be. There's always something she could be doing rather than poorly parrying Scorpia's words. It's not an excuse , it's being busy.

“Jade, seriously though,” Scorpia says, and Jade warms and bristles both at the familiarity and bossiness of a sister , “You can always just stop. You'll always have a home here.”

A few years ago the thought of a forever home would have been unthinkable for Jade, even with the stability she'd found with Ballantine. She had always been biding her time, even after she was fairly certain Ballantine wouldn't get rid of her, wouldn't wake up someday and decide a teenage girl with anger issues had been a shockingly bad idea and cut her loose. She would graduate highschool and then whatever commitment he'd made to her would end. He could arm her for it, but she'd have to face her life alone.

The first bad fight she'd had with Scorpia had left Jade sick with terror once the rage had passed. Jade could count on one hand the number of fights she'd been in. She doesn't count Kit, that wasn't the same. It wasn't that Jade didn't have the rage, didn't feel it stalking behind her rib cage like it might bend the bars and leap out of her, but fear made a strong chain around it. The boy she'd hit in 8th grade, the one she'd knocked down flat on his back after he'd called Kit a filthy name, had threatened to have her expelled, and Jade had felt fear clawing up her throat with every gasping breath until Kit launched herself at him, threw her own wild punches and told him that he must be really stupid to get so confused, because only Kit had hit him, and that was all he was going to tell any body. Jade kept herself more tightly in hand after that, but the anger didn't go away, just turned into grinding teeth and a pounding head, shoulders and neck so tense they burned to the touch. If she wouldn't let anger out, it would pull the prison down from the inside. Jade had gotten almost used to it though, but Scorpia was new and difficult and pressed at things, wouldn't leave them alone, wouldn't let Jade just be quiet, would tug at her for words and feelings and when Jade had finally blown up, raised her voice and snapped and shown her true colors she was terrified that Scorpia would turn her out that night, leave her wandering cold streets in a foreign country, angry and terrified and stupid.

She hadn't.

Scorpia had gone to work and then come home and they'd ordered takeout and she hadn't even brought up the fight. When they'd fought again two weeks later Jade's fury had been less explosive, like maybe a regular release of it made it somehow more manageable, and Scorpia had handled it much the same way– by moving on.

Part of Jade was tempted to lose it completely, just to see what would happen, just to test exactly the limits of this unexpected tolerance, to burn it down and see if she was still invited to the ashes. She didn't though, and eventually the primary thing keeping that impulse back wasn't fear, it was just that she didn't want to tear apart her own home– she lived there after all. Home made Jade bolder. She joined a GSA. She played pickup games of soccer– football properly now– on the weekends. She talked back to girls, when they talked to her, made second moves when they made firsts. She'd always volunteered, but Scorpia's youth shelter had Jade doing less organizational work and more practical skills classes, more interacting with actual people rather than stacking cans and taking inventories like she was used to. It was all still vaguely weird and uncomfortable, she'd still felt like a sandpaper person, but when she dutifully added pictures of events and fundraisers to her Facebook she looked mostly normal. It made her hope that England was working.

She would come back as the person she was supposed to be. She would come back for Kit. Squires might go on years long quests to become knights, fight crusades, get trapped in enchanted glades, spend seven years on an island fucking goddesses, walk across Spain, wait for true kings to show themselves, but they always returned to their kingdoms, always found the princess waiting.

Jade had come back to something razed to the ground.

Kit was not as she'd left her, not even as she had been that last night, the one Jade had handled so poorly, certain that she was doing the right thing, sparing Kit the worry, when really she'd been sparing herself the conflict.

“I've gotta go, Scorpia,” Jade says. There were things Scorpia could understand about Jade's heart that no one else could, and there were things she couldn't. The core of Jade, the person she was alone with herself, a version of herself that even Jade didn’t look at too closely, had only ever been opened up to one person. Jade doesn't even really understand how it happened, some alchemy of youth and need and kinship, only that it had, and now, like a wild animal that had gotten used to being fed by hand, she couldn't be without it.

Jade hangs up and the silence of her dorm room makes her restless. A freshman as an RA was out of the ordinary, but Jade had made the case for herself with all the work she’d done with Scorpia. Jade took the job seriously, but the real reasoning behind it was the single room– Jade couldn’t imagine sharing intimate space with a stranger. She’d been spoiled by her own room in Ballantine’s home. She’d never been much of one for decorating, and it hadn’t ever seemed to occur to Ballantine that she might want to. Jade had a desk and a bed and a bookcase in her room and that had covered everything she needed and just that was a relief. Scorpia had been less inclined to let Jade get away with bare walls and overhead lighting. Scorpia’s insistence and Jade’s bewildered attitude had led to some aesthetic choices that were bizarre and the soccer ball twinkle lights had remained in England with the excuse that the voltage would blow them up back in the States. It had put the idea on Jade’s radar at least and she’d made a solid attempt with her dorm room. There was her order of cetacea poster, a framed photo of Scorpia riding on her boyfriend Boorman’s shoulders, both of them so leggy that he was cut off above the knee in order to keep both their faces in frame, the punching bag on its sturdy steel arm in the corner, and on her desk a little glass bottle of origami stars, the last ten of the thousand Kit had tried to fold to get a wish but had bored herself with halfway through and Jade had completed privately for her.

Jade thinks that it gives a decent enough reflection of her, not that she lets people in her room.

It makes her wonder about Kit’s dorm room. She hasn’t seen it.

Kit’s childhood room hadn’t been reflective of her either, though for reasons of excess that left no room for Kit rather than Jade’s own barren lack of interest. Sorsha hadn’t let her put up posts because the sticky tack would have stained the paint. She hadn’t let Kit pick the furniture because everything in their home was either designer or antique and even in highschool Jade was certain if allowed Kit would have preferred a racecar bed to the princess four poster. Even the books on Kit’s shelves were wishful thinking from Sorsha– first editions of classic children’s books that Kit couldn’t have read even if she wanted to.

What was Kit’s room like now, without the oversight?

Jade's seen what else Kit is like without Sorsha’s daily picking and smoothing and it makes Jade ache in a different way than watching her struggle under her mother's binds. Kit seems to have replaced them with her own.

Jade is so familiar with Kit’s body, in a way she can't bring herself to care is strange, not when they've never been together in the usual way that brings that knowledge. She knows how Kit’s skin chafes against too tight, reddens and raws itself at anything that is ungentle or over manufactured. That seems to be all Kit wears now.

Kit’s hair had been a surprise.

She had begged for it to be short for years, but Sorsha had been adamant about it– it had never been above Kit’s shoulders as long as Jade had known her. Jade never agreed with Kit’s mother on anything, so she kept her private fondness for Kit’s hair to herself, even as she didn't do the same with her hands. Watching movies with Kit meant wrapping her fist easily in the long tail of Kit's hair, the soothing slide between her fingers settling them both when Kit would inevitably get the squirms halfway through. Kit would braid Jade’s hair and Jade would return the favor with fingers that never seemed as deft at the twists and tucks as Kit’s were. It wouldn't have been fair to pull it during their scraps, and Jade always fought fair, even if Kit didn't, but sometimes when Kit used her sharp white teeth Jade considered what it might be like if she–

Jade hadn't liked that asshole’s hand grabbing and yanking it. She hadn't liked that at all.

There is a bruise on Jade’s knuckles that aches every time she makes a fist, and every time it reminds her of him and beneath the initial flare of anger there is a cold river of it that runs through her, that could drown someone in its depths.

That can’t happen again.

Jade grabs her keys, pulls on her coat, and abandons her room for the night. It’s Friday and there are parties.

She knows Kit’s dorm, knows her floor and room number even though she’s never been, and she walks with confidence behind a group of girls heading through the keycard door, acknowledges and then immediately dismisses the front desk attendant with a single tilt upwards of her chin. Kit lives on the top floor.

Outside her doorway, Jade shifts her weight from boot to boot, once, rolls her shoulders, and knocks on the door that the enterprising RA of the floor has decorated with bubble letters of the last name’s of the residents. Tanthalos is missing half the letters, gummy glue residue clinging to the wood instead. She has to knock again before the door opens.

It’s not that she ever forgets what Kit looks like, but her heart forgets what it’s like to be near her now, after so long apart. It’s a little jolt through Jade, every time. Kit and her blue eyes and the fall of her hair and the sharp cut of her face, yes, but also the way Jade’s tension goes momentarily slack, warm ebb, slow undertow. Silence covers over the moment it takes Jade to acclimate.

“What are you doing here?” Kit says, and the low pitch, the boyish bite to her words has always made Jade purr.

Jade shrugs, hands in her coat pockets.

“It's easier if I just go to the parties with you rather than try to track you down later.”

Kit makes a face, and a disgusted sound to go with it. The sleeplessness under her eyes has gone from black to yellow, like tiredness has bruised her. Jade hates it. Kit stares at her, and Jade can see the muscles where she’s grinding her jaw. Jade keeps her face impassive, fists her hands where they are hidden. When Jade doesn’t shift from her post outside the door, Kit finally rolls her eyes and brushes past her. Jade can tell Kit is trying not to touch her, but the space is narrow enough that she skims the edge of Jade’s coat as she shoves by. With Kit’s back to her Jade pulls a hand out of her pocket and runs her fingers along the part of the fabric she touched. It feels like it should be damp with something, blood or tar or whatever Kit’s heart bleeds. Jade has an urge to put her fingers in her mouth, but she doesn’t.

Kit finds a party, she has some preternatural ability to seek them out, homing in on liquor and girls and loud music. Jade follows.

Kit meets a girl at the party, equally gifted at finding them too. Jade watches.

Kit rakes her eyes down the girl, cocks her head and grins. It makes Jade want to roll her eyes. It makes Jade want to step between them, drag Kit home where she can shake her and ask why are you doing this , makes Jade want to sit Kit down and tell her every single thing that Jade knows about her and then beg Kit to tell her the rest, makes Jade want to pull that grin against her own mouth, makes Jade want to pit her own grin against it and see whose stays on longer. 

The girl smiles back, runs her nails through her hair to push it back and Jade winces at the sharp of them, the angle filed claw. There’s jealousy and Jade can understand that in herself, but there’s something else too, an indignation. You are mistreating what’s mine , some shadowed part of Jade wants to say to Kit, equal parts longing and demand. 

Jade is a shadow for the seduction, lingers near but not close as the group of partiers talk.

“You should settle a bet for us, Trevor thinks his body count is higher than yours,” one of the boys says. 

The girl looks uncomfortable and Kit raises her eyebrows.

“I mean, if you can remember that is,” he goes on.

Kit laughs like she’s in on the joke.

“Not all of them were worth remembering. But you never forget your first,” Kit says and winks to the girl, “Of any kind.”

Jade can see how Kit has righted the shakiness of her pursuit, watches the girl relax and her attention turn fully to Kit again.

“Do you remember yours?” the girl asks.

“That’s a funny story actually,” Kit replies and Jade stiffens.

She needs a moment. It’s fine.

Jade steps away just long enough to get a drink, returns to find that her chair hasn’t been taken, something about her presence sharp enough that she’s retained the space even in her absence. Kit holds court on a ratty couch, limbs sprawled out and solo cup held by the tips of her fingers, swinging it over her propped up knee as she speaks. Jade watches how others watch Kit. Kit had never been popular, too volatile for that, but she knew how to pull and hold attention. She could tell a story or cause a scene, and there was a magnetism about her when she switched it on. Jade has never needed that extra effort from Kit to be attentive.

“This poor guy,” Kit is saying, “or maybe not, I mean, he had to know what he was getting into, there was really no hiding this ,” Kit makes an expansive gesture to her whole queerly seated self and there are grins and chuckles. Kit’s own grin is brightest. Her eyes are too wide.

“His dad had gotten him a hotel room, because that’s the kind of skeevy fucker her was, but honestly this guy needed the assist, so when prom gets absolutely too horrific to stand anymore, we take the limo– of course we had a limo– and go to our ‘after party.’” Kit makes the quotes with her free hand and Jade knows if she held them they would be shaking.

The girl doesn't notice. She watches but she doesn't see.

“We get there and we go through the motions and I think he's trying to be romantic which is just, like, embarrassing, but he manages to get it up and in and I'm like ow and sock him in the jaw.”

Kit laughs. Jade sees.

“So obviously the only way forward from there is to empty the mini bar and decide how we're going to tell our parents that I'm just too gay for a beard and he has a glass jaw and that makes us tragically incompatible.”

Kit downs what's in her glass while the girl laughs and runs her hand up and down Kit’s thigh. Jade finishes her drink too, alcohol laying in an unsettled layer over the pain in her gut.

The conversation moves on to other people's firsts or worsts, the flow of it leaving Jade and Kit in a bubble of semi-privacy. Jade feels adrift in the choppy wake of that story, the weight of it still sinking through her.

"Come to think of it," Kit says, rolling her head to look at Jade, but not really looking at her, something masked about her eyes, "didn't you text me out of the blue that night?"

Out of the blue? Jade thinks, and fury layers over the pain and the alcohol.

She remembers exactly why.

Kit had stopped using social media the day that Jade had left. It left her profiles a ghost of who they had been together– every photo Kit had ever cared to post connected to something they'd done together, their smiling faces, their stupid jokes, their embarrassing middle-school fashion sense. Jade could scroll through the timeline of their friendship anytime she wanted, until it abruptly ended that summer before she left. The cut off was jarring, like Kit's life had been obliterated from existence and only Jade's had gone on in the stubborn updates that she would make, proof of her progress. Jade had looked for hints of her, on mutual friend’s pages, Airk's nonstop feed of his life, embarrassingly even on the school website . There were only glimpses– Kit at a piano recital, Kit standing between her brother and another boy tagged "Graydon Hastur" at a dinner to celebrate Airk's basketball team, Kit with a tight mouthed smile in a green dress, standing next to the Graydon boy who looked nervous holding a pink corsage. None of it was real though, none of it Kit , there was nothing to let her know that Kit was safe, or happy. Or that she missed Jade. In the absence of anything new, Jade had to assume Kit was the same. Jade had flipped through the old photos frequently– that was the Kit she knew, that was the Kit waiting for her, that was the Kit whose heart Jade knew every crevice of.

At 5am when the Instagram notification had come through of a new story from Kit, Jade had clicked it without bothering to think about the consequences of Kit knowing she'd watched it.

It was a blurry photo of Kit in that green dress, a suit jacket draped over her shoulders, her room date, Graydon, wide eyed and blank looking. They were reflected in the mirror of an elevator, Kit's most feral grin partially obscured by her phone and a hotel room card held up between her fingers. Jade had paused the story, read the caption.

Prom night after "event"– guess what's going doooown?!

Jade's mind had clicked to a stop, like Kit had doused the lights in her head and left her with only this overwhelming sense of dread.

This wasn't Kit. This wasn't what she wanted. It didn't make sense. Kit was asking for help, Jade was certain of it.

So Jade texted her, hands shaking in a way she hated, in a way she would have hidden in a clenched fist.

Don't do anything. Call me.

She'd stared at her phone for hours. Morning turned into afternoon as Jade couldn’t get herself to start her routine, stalled out on this impossibility, worry and anger and something she tried not to call jealousy twisting painfully in her gut. Confusion, too. Why was this happening, why hadn’t Kit waited?

Nothing back.

Silence from Kit.

Now here Kit is, a year late, bringing it up with nonchalance like Jade didn't turn that moment over in her mind constantly. Jade does her best not to crush the solo cup in her hand, tries to make the architecture of her stance as flippant and casual as Kit's had been while she described a night that Jade knew must have terrified her.

All Kit had needed to do was wait.

“That was you that texted, right, I'm not blanking?” Kit asks again.

Jade's jaw feels almost too tense to talk. 

"Maybe? I guess so,” she manages. It's not a lie.

Something in Kit's eyes flashes at that and her smile is sharp, mean.

"What did you even want?"

They lock eyes. Kit might be on her way to drunk, but her look is laser focused right now. Jade lets her eyes search Kit’s face, lets Kit see her do it. Jade has always been so certain she knew Kit, but there's an unfamiliarity there and guilt eats at Jade, breaks her heart.

"I don't know any more," Jade says.

She meant it to hurt, but the moment she sees the flinch on Kit's face her insides scream to take it back. 

Kit stands abruptly, the girl leaning against her overbalancing and flopping on the couch. The girl says something Jade ignores.

“Kit, wait–” 

“For what?” Kit demands.

The words don't come.

Kit sneers.

“That's what I thought.”

Kit shoves her way out of the party, out the door, onto the street. Jade follows, as always, at a loss.

“I'm sorry,” Jade says.

Kit laughs. She doesn't stop walking.

The thing making Jade chase after her is panic. She doesn't know what she expected but not this, she thought she could fix it easier than this. She has retained all her affection for Kit, all her feeling, all her...need...for Kit, but Kit hates her. Jade feels like she’s carelessly left something out in the rain and now when she’s come to collect it the sodden treasure of it tears apart under her tenderest touch.

“I love you,” Kit had said at nine years old, her arms tight around Jade in a hug as Jade’s own hands tightened and wrinkled the pages of the book she'd just finished reading aloud, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the first one she'd ever read to Kit. 

“I love you,” Kit had yelled across the soccer field as Mrs. Tanthalos dropped Jade off for practice, dragging Kit away from the sidelines to be taken to her own ballet lessons.

“I love you,” Kit had whispered with her face pressed to Jade's back, holding and rocking her as Jade cried when she'd been sick and missed a day of class and the teacher refused to let her take the pop quiz and the precarious tower of Jade’s anxiety had toppled.

“I love you,” Kit had laughed as Jade had attempted to help her with the steps to the waltz Kit needed to learn but had only succeeded in stepping on her feet and leaving a crease line in the set of heels Sorsha was insisting Kit wear to practice.

“I love you,” Kit had said, the words half swallowed by a yawn as she fell asleep in Jade's arms, the way she always did when they shared a bed, the way she was always meant to.

That can't have all disappeared. It hasn't for Jade.

“You love me,” Jade tries, because she can’t say it the other way around, has to hope this is enough, “I know you do!”

Kit spins around, dark and furious.

“So what?” Kit snarls, “ I don't want to! ”

It’s the most miserable feeling Jade can imagine, that they both know they belong to each other, but that Kit doesn’t want it.

“Hurt me then!” Jade says, and she doesn't know if she's ever sounded more panicked, “Hit me, hurt me– I deserve it!”

Jade is terrified. Every hit, every slap, every bruise and cut and burn, every place that angry hands have ever touched her feels numb. That's every part of her. She doesn't know how to make it up to Kit, how to get underneath all the pain and start lifting it away from her. She doesn't know how to make it even, how to possibly rebalance this. She can only think to offer the thing that frightens her most, that makes her feel smallest and most powerless, the thing that had her locking doors and making escape plans and learning how to punch and when to run, the thing that pulls her back to who she used to be, and how could she have expected that Kit wouldn't change at all when Jade had, Jade had because she can feel how much smaller this fear makes her, how much younger.

Kit’s hands are on her and Jade can't even think to flinch, too desperate to have Kit’s touch to ever pull away. Kit’s cold hands are on Jade's cheeks, her thumbs brushing against the tears there and this is new of Kit too, the acknowledgment of them, and Jade finds that her heart isn't so fragile about that anymore, that it soothes rather than shames. She cries harder.

“What’s wrong with you?” Kit demands, and she sounds angry and sad, and Jade knows those emotions in her so well, so so well, “How could you ask me that? I would never , Jade, I would never. ”

Jade remembers I don't hurt my friends , she remembers I'd kill anyone who hurt you now but they aren't friends and Kit made those promises before Jade broke her own.

“I don't know what else to try,” Jade says, “I don't know what else to give you, how else to make you stop running so that I can try to fix this, I don't–”

Kit’s touch becomes firmer.

“You can't fix it, Jade,” she says.

“I don't believe that.”

“Stop trying to fix it,” Kit says, “It’s fucking insulting.”

“Kit–”

“Jade. Something about me broke, when you left. Something on top of all the other shit that's broken. If you keep trying to…” Kit trails off, grits her teeth, “Some things don't get fixed. I can live with that. If you can…if you still want to be around me, I need to know you still want me even if it stays that way, even if this is all there is to me now.”

Jade looks at tired, furious, half-drunk, terrible perfect Kit.

“You’re everything to me.”

Kit closes her eyes and presses her head against Jade's shoulder. It's only for a moment, but it's a key turned in a lock, the relief of coming home. Kit pulls away.

“I want to believe you,” Kit says, “We'll see.”

It's not the sun, but it's the hint of a thaw. Jade can wait.

Chapter Text

Pain haunted Kit’s life. The scratching open of her skin where the fabric itched, the slicing line across her shins from ballet, the ache in her rib cage from running, running, running, the crack of the switch against her skin, the deep ache in her joints from her illness, the soothing bite of Jade’s teeth. For awhile pain belonged to the world, and it infuriated her. Later it belonged to Jade, and Kit fell in love with it. In between, Kit had learned to wield it herself.

Senior year, prom

Kit, 18

Everything about that night had been horrible.

Sorsha had taken her shopping for the dress three weeks before, an outing that had them at each other's throats, and the changing room attendants disappearing into the menswear department on the other side of the store. Kit had been furious– she was always furious– and Sorsha had been…

Kit knows her mother doesn't like her. She is obliged to care for her and raise her, maybe even love her, but Kit has never felt liked, never felt like her presence is enjoyed by Sorsha. It wasn't like Kit hadn't given it a real try– she did all the after school activities, attended all the charity events, made her appearances at her mother's parties, she was fucking dating Graydon for fuck’s sake, but no matter how much Kit pared down of herself, there was still the core of her that just wasn't what her mother wanted.

Wasn't what anyone wanted.

Stood in the unforgiving light of the changing rooms, letting her mother zip and tie and button her into clothes Kit could hardly look at herself in, Kit felt so misunderstood she didn't even know where to begin.

And if she did begin, would her mother care?

“Well, that one does nothing for your breasts,” Sorsha sighed, as Kit tugged at the tight waist.

“Yeah, it's really important that my tits have a great time at prom, for sure,” Kit snapped, and she knew her shitty comments didn't help, that if she just shut up and let it happen it might be over quicker, but there was something wrong with her.

Sorsha rubbed at her temples.

“ Must you, Kit?” She sighed.

“I don't know,” Kit said, scratching at the redness the unwashed fabric left on her over sensitive skin, “ Must I try on every item made of taffeta in the store?”

“You only get to do this once, Kit,” Sorsha said, as if that wasn't the only good thing about this, “It would be nice to have a pleasant memory from your school years before you run off.”

Run off made Kit sound like her dad, and she'd never blamed him for doing exactly that– this must have been a nightmare for him. Of course he didn't stay, who would want to? It had been three hours of this already and Kit was hungry and tired and itchy and she could feel herself about to do something bad.

“I'd just have a dress made for you if I thought you'd appreciate it, but after what you did to that beautiful dress at Christmas–” Sorsha began.

Personally Kit thought her modifications to that dress had made her apparel significantly more gay, but Sorsha had dragged her away from the party and told her that she could spend Christmas Eve in her room if she couldn't behave herself.

Kit couldn't, so she had.

Kit reached up to the collar of the dress, and curled her fingers into the vile material.

“You have such a beautiful figure Kit and I don't understand why you're always hiding it under hoodies and–”

She stared at her reflection, and she hated every single thing she could see in that mirror.

“-- eventually you're going to have to stop being a child and learn that–”

Kit yanked down as hard as she could, and the dress dug into her painfully for a moment and then something gave and she could hear the shred of the zipper pulled out, the popping of seams, the satisfying sound of fabric tearing. It didn't pull all the way off her, the dress left hanging in a strange unstructured way at her waist, half a shoulder still clinging to one arm.

Sorsha gaped, and Kit thrilled.

“What on earth is wrong with you?” She demanded, and there was real confusion in her voice, along with the fury.

“I don't know,” Kit spat, “Probably the same thing that's wrong with you.”

The slap didn't even hurt that much, not really.

She ends up in a green dress, cinched tightly around her waist, sleeves that fall off the shoulder and a neckline that drops lower than anything else she owns. With her hair styled and her makeup done and standing on the twisting staircase to have her picture taken, Sorsha calls her beautiful.

Kit remembers at 12 years old the razor she was given for her legs, her underarms. She remembers how she'd locked the bathroom door and lathered shaving cream on her face, covetous of what she could not have. How she'd sliced the underside of her chin open and bled red into the towel she shoved against it, how she'd known it was not a wound she could go to her mother to bandage, how she stuffed the bloody towel to the bottom of the kitchen trash.

There is a wish to be handsome.

But Kit is beautiful.

Kit knows that her mother will never see her as she wants to be seen– as she is. There is no one who recognizes Kit, who knows her. She can't be the only one who knows herself. It's killing her.

Graydon certainly doesn’t see her.

He’s shaved for the occasion and he somehow looks more like a terrified rabbit without the facial hair obscuring some of his expression. His hair is slicked back and when he stands near her she can smell his cologne– something that smells expensive and like it comes in a blue bottle in the airport dutyfree. He’s wearing too much of it. His suit is tailored but too much in the same way that Kit’s dress is– it has a vest that matches the inner lining of his suit jacket and he has a pocket square. It’s highschool prom, and yes, everyone they go to school with is a rich prick, but this is embarrassing.

Airk is wearing a dark blue suit with a white button up that is not buttoned up enough, and his date– Kit cannot remember her name– has matched her dress to the precise shade of blue he’s wearing. When he presents her with a blue corsage she beams. Graydon has a corsage too, and Kit hates the smell of store flowers, something chemical and unnatural about them, but she stays still as Graydon ties it to her wrist.

The photos take forever.

Sorsha directs them onto the stairs, to the front door, against the tree in the front lawn. Each location requires a full group photo and then couple’s photos and then twin photos and then single photos. Airk makes his date laugh the entire time, and he has “dynamic poses” in all his pictures. Graydon hovers his hand at Kit’s waist and Kit fights not to scowl.

When they’re finally done Sorsha kisses Airk’s cheek and smooths the fabric wrinkles at his shoulders. She tells Kit she “doesn’t want to ruin her hair” and doesn’t touch her.

Sorsha has taken care of the limo for Airk and his date. Mr. Hastur has taken care of Graydon and Kit’s. Once Sorsha’s attention is off of her, Kit retrieves the flask she’d hidden in the living room couch cushions. She’s been allowed a small gold clutch, but it barely holds her phone. She shoves the flask at Graydon.

“You have pockets,” she says, and it’s not a request.

Graydon pales but nods and tucks it away. He opens the limo door for Kit and she rolls her eyes as she gets in.

She knows she's being mean to Graydon, but sometimes– most times– she can't help her meanness. It just pours out of her mouth from a black well in her body and if she doesn't let it out she chokes on it. Kit agreed to date him, after repeated requests from Sorsha that Kit let him take her out. Requests that started to sound a lot less like requests as time went on. Kit just got tired, so here she is.

Graydon is probably fine. Well, not fine , he seems like a cowardly little limp fish, but it's not like Kit is some fabulous catch either. Every time she's been in the Hastur's house, Kit has the distinct feeling that Graydon is as much a disappointment to his father as Kit is to her mother. Throwing the two of them together is a sort of investment in some future yield, a calculation in a financial portfolio.

The ride to the “event space”-- no gym proms for them– is quiet and it would be uncomfortable if Kit cared. It is cold, and when she rubs at the goosebumps on her arms, Graydon gallantly turns one of the AC vents away from her.

What a fucking nightmare.

Fuck prom. Fuck stupid plans. Fuck Jade.

They’d had a plan for prom.

They’d talked about it in 9th grade when Airk had been invited as a freshman to prom and Sorsha had hired a professional photographer and fretted over Airk while Kit sulked upstairs with her legs hanging through the bannister, throwing red hots at her twin’s head every time his back was turned. He looked perfect and that made him look like a dork.

Jade had come over after he’d left, and they’d decided to watch every highschool movie they knew of that had a prom storyline and devise how they could do it even better.

Jade had suggested making a list, so Kit had ripped out a piece of notebook paper, grabbed a metallic gel pen, and painstakingly written “Cool” and “Uncool” on either side of it. Jade hadn't said anything about how long it took her.

Dresses, corsages, promposals, prom photos, and couples matching had all been scribbled on the Uncool side.

Slow dances and photo booths were written across the dividing line, with Jade having put up a surprising fight in favor of the slow dance concept. 

Ditching early, not going at all, and spiking the punch (Jade had pointed out that no prom ever actually served punch anymore and Kit had exasperatedly defended it as an expression ) were all classified as sufficiently Cool behaviours.

“What about people who hook up at prom?” Kit asked, now fully upside down on the bed, her head hanging over the end next to Jade’s, who sat cross legged on the floor. They'd caught each other’s eyes and Kit could have sworn Jade blushed before they both looked away.

“That seems,” Jade started, picking at a raised piece of the carpet before she stopped herself, “kind of dumb?”

“Yeah,” Kit said, and cleared her throat, “like why wait, right? If you wanna hook up, just like. Hook up or whatever.”

“Yeah,” Jade agreed, and they'd lapsed into silence while Kit drew shiny swirls on the page with fingers that would not stay still.

Jade had started to stand and Kit immediately sat up, almost overbalancing and tumbling off the bed if Jade hadn’t caught her shoulder.

“You’re staying over, right?” Kit said, “We’ll order pizza?”

“I didn’t bring anything to sleep in, Kit,” Jade said, “And I have a volunteer shift in–”

“Mom will drive you tomorrow!” Kit said, taking Jade’s wrist like the physical contact could convince her more than the words, “and we’ll just steal one of Airk’s dumb basketball shirts for you to sleep in like always, it’s whatever.”

Jade looked at Kit’s fingers circling her wrist and Kit pulled them away with an achy and embarrassed feeling. Jade rubbed where Kit’s fingers had been.

“Yeah, okay,” Jade agreed.

“Yes!” Kit crowed, fully rolling off her bed to leap to her feet and grab at the landline on her sidetable, pizza delivery number taped to the side of the receiver.

“ No anchovies you absolute freak,” Jade ordered.

“Picky, picky,” Kit grinned, as if Jade finally being picky about food didn't delight her.

It’s the memory of that night, the memory of that list still stuffed under her bed, smeared with something indescribable from the garbage truck she’d saved it from, that runs through Kit’s head as Graydon’s elbow lands on the button for the limo privacy screen and he jolts at the surprising buzz.

They’d had a plan. Jade had fucked it up.

It was remarkable how every single thing Kit had ever maybe looked forward to in highschool suddenly curdled in the light of Jade's disinterest. It was like Jade was some sort of filter over Kit’s life and when she was removed Kit could see it for the shit it really was.

When they pull up to the entrance, Graydon hops out of the car and skitters over to Kit’s side. She opens her own door so hard and so fast he has to jump out of the way.

Kit makes a face as she looks at the balloon arch over the double doors, a pretentious PTA mom’s perfect banner printed with the theme Kit had not bothered voting on.

Once Upon A Time…

Kit has a funny flash, like she might have caught a glimpse of an alternate universe, but more likely it's just the deranged thoughts of a mind high on bad cologne– she and Jade walking up the steps, laughing, swords strapped to their sides as they fought over who would get the door for who.

Embarrassing.

It's such a stupid thought Kit has to kill it dead with something awful instead.

“Hey,” Kit calls to Graydon, “C’mere.”

Graydon dutifully moves to her side, looking at her with expectation like he's waiting for exact instructions. Fine, she'll give them.

“We're gonna kiss, okay?” Kit says.

“Oh!” Graydon says, and his eyes go wide, “Yeah, yeah sure, for sure.”

It's not the first time they've kissed. That was in Graydon's basement home theater after Kit had been invited (strongarmed) into coming for dinner. They'd watched some dumb horror movie and Graydon had actually pulled the ‘yawn and put your arm over the backrest’ move. Kit had felt like she was in a bad movie.

And just like a bad movie script, the credits had run and then the DVD menu had come up and it was just playing a repeated loop of music and Graydon had leaned in close to her and Kit had thought, well, okay.

She'd let him kiss her, and there was a furious, sparking moment where she raged that this was her first kiss, screamed in her heart the name of who it should have gone to, but after that it was just…the movement of lips, the sound of Graydon's saliva, the tickle of his fucking goatee. She'd had to suppress a shiver when his tongue had slipped into her mouth, and when he'd slid his hands to her neck she had recoiled.

“Sorry,” he'd said, and he had no idea what he should be sorry for, “Was that too fast?”

“No,” Kit had said, because nothing was ever too fast for her, only torturously, hatefully slow, and she'd let him kiss her more and she'd let him touch her and she'd let him and she'd let him and she'd let him.

So it isn't the first time they've kissed, as he takes her hand and she fights the urge to yank it away. He leans forward– Kit never can, she can only let -- and he kisses her and his cologne is giving her a headache and his skin is razor burned and Kit thinks maybe she just doesn't like kissing.

It's up to Kit to push him away, when she's buried the thought of Jade not loving her under something that Kit cannot love.

“Pass me the flask?” Kit asks, and Graydon does. The taste of whiskey washes the taste of him away. Kit decides to actually be a little decent, “Do you want some?”

Graydon hesitates and Kit is just about to sneer about it, but then he nods and takes the flask, takes a bigger drink than she thought he would. He chokes on it afterwards, but she expected that.

Kit grins, and it’s like a dog’s grin, tight with terror and aggression but everyone’s too stupid to realize it.

“Let’s get this thing over with,” she says.

Kit can’t believe there was ever a time she’d actually looked forward to prom. That person feels so far away and dumb, like someone Kit’s glad she killed.

Inside is private school over the top opulence. Chandeliers and thick carpets, tables of sparkling juice in champagne flutes, glittering strings of lights twisted around gauzy ribbons, swag bags and prom royalty voting ballots– fairy tales on an infinite budget. It's exactly the sort of substanceless prettiness that Kit is meant for. It is exactly what she deserves.

Through yet another set of double doors are the tables, each meticulously decorated after a specific storybook. Kit can't imagine that anyone actually gives a shit about these details, surely this is PTA parent trauma turned crafting. It's embarrassing– Kit can't bring herself to look that closely at sincerity. There's also a dance floor where it looks like fully half their class is deciding who can give the yearbook team the most awkward photo– circles of boys in suits too tight at their shoulders cheering on some lackluster dancing from an overhyped jock, clusters of girls giggling and tentatively grinding on each other in that self conscious way where they hope they're being watched. 

Kit swallows down the rest of what was in her flask. It was supposed to last her til the after party at least , but this was desperate. Graydon fidgets beside her.

“Should we get a table, or–” his eyes flick to the dance floor, “did you wanna dance maybe?”

Kit scans the room for Airk and his date, is entirely unsurprised that she doesn't find them. Some cash and instructions to “take the scenic route” were definitely handed over to his limo driver.

“Sure,” Kit says, “Whatever.”

She tosses her clutch on the nearest table– everyone here is rich enough that they only steal for fun, but even so, Kit goes through phones like confetti so who cares– and marches towards the dance floor like it's a battlefield.

Kit refuses to be relegated to the edge, shoves her way to the center of things and grabs at Graydon, yanks his hands down onto her waist as she presses up against him. She knocks elbows with Stacy Bowman– who, Kit is certain, is the name on most of those ballots for prom queen– and she turns to make a sound of disgust at Kit.

“Watch it,” Stacy hisses.

“Or what?” Kit asks, staring her down as she runs a hand through the back of Graydon's hair, trying not to immediately wipe the feeling of product off onto the back of his jacket.

Stacy laughs, and that desperately isn’t what Kit wants.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Stacy says, “Just go play pretend with your Ken doll somewhere else. Somewhere not near me.”

That Graydon is a concession that hadn’t even worked infuriates Kit. There were rumors about what Kit was before even Kit knew. If Sorsha had been some sort of weird religious nut Kit would have preferred it, instead it just wasn’t acceptable , in the same way that wearing converse to a restaurant wasn’t– some meaningless societal rule that was somehow more important than the actual human person that was Kit. It hadn’t mattered when Jade was there, hadn’t mattered what anyone guessed or joked, because Jade had said it didn’t matter, that she loved Kit whatever she was, and then Kit had hoped that Jade would love her because of what she was, and she thought Jade had except…

Except if she had she wouldn’t be dancing with Graydon, a sick feeling in her stomach and a sicker one in her heart. Jade hadn't ever said she loved her– that was all in Kit’s head.

For a second Kit ducks her head into the side of Graydon’s neck, closes her eyes to block out the sight of him, holds her breath to block out the cologne, slips her fingers from his hair down to his shoulder, and she squeezes her whole self so tightly that her vision flashes red and she can live in that color for just a moment.

“Hey,” Graydon says, and she hates him, hates him not because of anything he is, because there’s barely anything to him, hates him for who he can’t be, “can I get you something to drink?”

It’s nice of him. Kit has never been nice, and she doesn’t understand where it comes from with Graydon– she certainly hasn’t earned it. Pity? Lust? Fear? She doesn’t particularly care for any of those options. She wonders what a life of nice would be like. He lacks the spine to stand between anything their parents might hurt her with, lacks the curiosity to know her enough to be a friend, lacks the spark for Kit to care to know him back, lacks a number of things to be a lover. A perfectly pleasant little death.

“Yeah, okay,” she says, and she’s afraid she’s going to say that to too many things.

He disappears off the dance floor, slipping between moving bodies like something that wriggles in the dark and Kit shoves after him, looks for the table with the Rapunzel theme and her clutch, but sees Airk laughing with the rest of the basketball team and heads in his direction instead. He sees her coming and wisely steps slightly away so that she can’t cause a scene for him.

Kit had read about vampire twins in biology once, perked up enough at the word vampire to manage her slow way through the rest of the paragraph, and learned of the particular way that twin parasitism worked. There’s nothing physically about them to suggest that Airk had stolen all the good stuff for himself in the womb, that he’d left Kit an emotionally anemic weirdo, but she can’t help but look at him in a crowd, at the way people reassess the situation when he smiles, how his meaningless but somehow effective words seem to smooth over every conversation in a way Kit finds as impossible to follow as the garbled words on a page, and not think that she had come out deficient. She feels the pull between them still, Kit dragging behind him, dead weight at best, a leeching demand at worst. There is only so much Airk can be expected to do with her.

“Hey,” Airk says, his eyes already scanning her even as he keeps his smile loose, “Some party, huh?”

“Sure,” Kit says, and cuts to the chase, “I know your friends have alcohol. I want some.”

“Uhm, Kit,” Airk puts a hand on her shoulder and she slips out beneath it, “I don’t think that’s a great idea–”

“I don’t care what you think.”

“Okay, well, that’s both true and hurtful, and you’re usually only good at one of those things unless you’ve already had enough to drink–”

“Airk.”

“Kit, can’t you just try to have a nice time?”

”Airk.”

“Why does everything have to be a fight with you?”

“Come on! ”

“No, seriously, I’m asking!” Airk says, running a hand through his hair in beautiful exasperation, “Would it kill you to just…is it really that bad?”

He waves an arm behind him, to a scene where his basketball friends are snickering around someone’s phone, where one of them is wearing tennis shoes with his suit, where Airk's date is standing a little alone and looking at him expectantly, waiting for his sunshine, where clusters of metallic balloons shimmer in the light of a disco ball trying to be a storybook lover’s moon, where somewhere Graydon is fetching her a glass of something that won’t grind the harsh edge off any of this, where Airk is perfectly content and Kit is going under.

It’s too much to possibly explain to Airk, it always has been. Nothing about the life their mother picked out for them seems to fit on Kit, but Airk acts like the one-size-fits-all of people. Perhaps if their roles were reversed it would change things– boyscouts and basketball don’t seem so bad, and Airk would probably adapt just fine to ballet and gymnastics, but it’s more than that. Airk is even . What matters most is everyone in the room playing along just long enough that they can implode privately . Everyone just smile and get through dinner, get through this fitting, get through dad’s funeral. Kit is the one at odds.

“Listen, there's gonna be a hundred college parties you can cut me off at, but for right now can you just–”

“No there won't be, Kit!” Airk says.

Kit has developed a sixth sense for the world giving way under her feet. She feels the shifting now. He's not coming with her.

“No,” she says, like that has ever worked.

“It's not like you want me around anyway– ”

“Fuck you, why?”

“Because I meet just enough of her expectations that she stays off my back, Kit, so I get to have this.”

“Her expectations? And what are those exactly?”

Airk sighs and doesn't meet her eyes– he knows she's right. He skates by on what comes naturally to him, but he's never had to rise to expectations because they've never been put above him in the first place.

“You could make things easier on yourself too, you know,” Airk says, “I know you aren't happy like this , so maybe getting on board with her plans might not actually be the worst thing in the world?”

Kit shakes her head because she can't even make that thought fit right– she tries to be what she's supposed to until she can't and then she explodes. Whatever mythical “better” exists at the end of the road she can't seem to keep the wheels on long enough to reach. She switches thoughts.

“Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you like– talk to me about it like a fucking human –”

“You would have tried to fuck it up!”

Not that she would have asked him to stay, not that she would have been mean about it, but that she would have tried to ruin it for him.

“That's not true,” Kit says. She hadn't, with Jade, she'd just let it happen she was so good at just letting things happen now, she wouldn't have–

“I couldn't take the risk,” Airk says, looking away from her with a shrug of his shoulder, like he hasn't just reduced her to powder.

“How dare you ask me if it's that bad, ” Kit snarls, “You asshole. You fucking traitor.”

Airk scoffs.

“Nobody can betray you, Kit because you don't let anyone be on your side!”

She feels the words like the snap of a trap on her heart. It's an ouroboros– do people leave her because she doesn't let them in, or does she not let them in because they leave her? She can start from either end and still get left.

The thought is acid inside her, and like always she can't keep it down, pours it out her mouth instead.

“You're just like dad.” she says, “You were always going to leave.”

She can see the hurt on his face and the triumph of it slicks by the guilt, oil and water all unsettled in her, too turbulent to be satisfying. She's seen Airk angry so rarely, but he is now, she can see it and part of her dares it, all of her deserves it.

“I thought maybe after you nuked whatever was going on with Jade you'd realize you needed to get your shit together and not run people off, but–”

Her name makes Kit see red.

“You think I ran Jade off?”

“I don't know what happened, but since you act like she's dead , I figured–”

“That it was my fault?”

“You think I'm like dad? Well, maybe you're like mom, Kit. Maybe sometimes people need a fucking break. ”

She hits him. 

She hits him because it's reflexive, it's unbearable, it's true. Kit needs a break from Kit, and she's never going to fucking get one, but Airk will, her dad had, Jade had. It's monstrously unfair they can run away from her and she can't run away from herself.

Airk stumbles back and his friends are there to catch and console him, to make sure his crazy fucking sister doesn't try to get him again, his date checking his nose to make sure it's not bleeding and who would surround Kit with that kind of care, vapid as it is?

“Oh, shit,” Graydon says, suddenly by her arm with two glasses, “Is everything…alright?”

It’s such an infinitely stupid question to ask that Kit nearly screams. It’s obviously not , but everyone would strongly prefer if it was , if she was, that they ask like it’s a shape that Kit can contort herself into, just one more awful feeling layered over top of her, insulation so the rest of the world is safe from her too much. Kit is unbearable and now all she’s left with is Graydon.

“Let’s get out of here,” she says, tugging him by the arm behind her. She tries not to listen for Airk’s voice as she finally finds and snatches up her clutch. She knows he won’t call after her– it’s better if she can pretend she’s just blocked him out.

She can feel the eyes on her as she storms out, can feel the way that the story of this night is going to form in people’s mouths, the many ways it will get back to her mother, the snide comments it will become, the way it so exactly fits everyone’s idea of who Kit is, how she has so perfectly met everyone’s expectations, how she’s gifted everyone here the feeling of superiority they so desperately want.

Kit careens out the doors and onto the steps and lets the cool night air shock her overwarm skin. Getting outside where she can actually breathe helps, but her chest still heaves against the too tight material around her stomach, the pinch of a strapless bra cutting into her side with each inhale. She feels too squeezed to take a breath big enough to actually calm her, or maybe that much oxygen just doesn't exist.

“Um,” Graydon says, and Kit lets go of her claw grip on his arm, shakes her hand out, “Are you going to be okay?”

“Let's go somewhere,” Kit says, knowing there is nowhere to go and no way to get there.

In a moment of true surprise, Graydon takes out his phone and starts dialing. At Kit’s impatient look, he blushes– odd– and begins to explain.

“I’m calling the limo back early,” he says.

“I don’t want to go home ,” Kit growls. Airk might have had the cash on hand and the charm to get his limo driver to take the longer route, but she knows their parents have given strict instructions on the locations they can be left at.

“No, we can–” Graydon’s face flushes harder and he isn’t looking at Kit as his thumb hovers over the call button, “The after prom party is at The Four Seasons, so we could– I mean, my dad got us–”

Kit feels her whole self prickle and blush, a shiver of cold and then full body heat.

“Your dad got us a hotel room?”

Graydon fishes in his pocket, pulls out a black plastic keycard. Kit has the hysterical thought that there should be two– what if she needs to go to the ice machine?

She looks at the way he holds the hotel key, the pinch of his fingers making the skin paler. The number is dialed. Kit takes a deep breath and Graydon’s eyes skitter across the way it moves her chest. 

It's what everyone wants them to do. It's the path of least resistance and for all of her fury and effort she's ended up exactly where she doesn't want to be, so maybe she should just save her energy. She doesn't care about Graydon, so when he leaves, when she drives him away, it won't hurt. He wants to, he wants her , and that's not nothing. There's lots of reasons to do it.

It's all so incredibly reasonable.

She also just wants to wreck everything.

The insipid romance of prom, of highschool sweethearts, the juvenile dream of it, it's a filmy sour taste in her mouth that she wants to spit out and spit on . She isn't going to have a Once Upon A Time dream night, but she can make it as twisted up and filthy as she feels inside.

She takes the key out of his hand, presses the edge of it hard against her thumb, a little white scar line that will disappear too quickly.

“Yeah, sure,” she says, because treating this moment like a shrug is the only way she can move towards it, keeping it in the corner of her eye rather than head on, walking a parallel line that slowly drifts itself untrue as it draws closer to him. 

She hears his voice but doesn’t listen to the words as he makes the call, only takes in the way he murmurs and stutters, a background drone she’s trying to get used to, a fuzzy radio station she can tune out. They sit on the steps while they wait for the limo to come and he takes his suit jacket off. Her dress is uncomfortable to sit in. She does it anyway. She unsnakes the strappy lines that criss-cross up her legs holding her shoes in place, rewraps them tight around her ankles until her feet feel numb. Eventually she pulls off her shoes entirely, considers slinging them out the car window as they drive but Graydon is probably already sweaty with anxiety and she doesn’t want to push him over the edge. He can’t bail on her now.

When the car arrives she’s not thinking quick enough to stop him from opening the door for her again, and the gesture makes her feel queasy– she doesn’t want to be wooed. The limo is still freezing and when she leans forward to fuss with the backseat controls he drapes his jacket across her shoulders. It reeks of his cologne and it frightens her, this little claim he’s placed on her. She refuses the feeling, clings to the lapels of the jacket, makes her head ache with the smell.

The Four Seasons is nice -- too nice for a prom after party, embarrassing in that way that too rich kids can be, eating oysters when they should be eating cheetos, classless because the best option is obviously the most expensive one. Kit can feel the judgment that isn’t entirely her own, can practically hear the familiar quiet scoff in her ears, can picture the impassive face that she could always still read so much in.

The memory of her could make Kit fall apart if she let it, so instead she lets herself be angry. How dare she judge Kit, when she’s not even here to do it in person? Fuck* her . In the elevator Kit takes a blurry picture, types a caption, and only barely resists the urge to send it only to her, makes it her first Instagram story in a year instead. The moment she sends it she feels small and stupid. Jade won’t see, won’t care. The Jade that gives a shit, even just to judge her, lives only in Kit’s mind. She turns her phone off before she can do anything more embarrassing.

The room is…

Well, it’s the room she’s going to lose her virginity in.

It smells like all hotel rooms do, even nice ones, somewhat chemically sterile, like they’ve had to work hard to erase other people’s mistakes so that Kit has a semi-blank canvas to make her own on. Her’s will be bleached out by tomorrow too.

If she could jump from deciding to do it, to it being done she would, but instead there are the interminable preparations. She needs his help to unzip her dress, a humiliation she almost just tears herself out of the fabric to avoid, but then what would she wear after? The idea of putting the wretched thing back on after what she assumes will be the heat and stickiness of sex seems unbearable, like a worse version of putting on sweaty clothes after a shower. She feels itchy already. All of her skin feels strange– waves of numbness and tingles, flushes of heat, a shivering that she tightens down on, holding herself too closely to allow any shakes. Over the sound of the zipper and his shaky apologies at the inevitable little jerks when it catches at the small of her back, she can hear his breathing turn heavy, flinches as he touches an exposed freckle on her back.

In the movies everyone keeps on their underwear or wraps sheets around themselves and she wishes she could get away with the swiftness and convenience of that, but nothing about what she’s wearing makes things easy. All of Graydon’s clothing comes off too– he can’t fuck her in a vest– and that’s…Kit lets her eyes unfocus. It’s not hard, after she’s been drinking. He says something about her body, compliments softness-beauty-femininity, and Kit tries desperately not to let the words settle in her mind, can't bear to accept how he sees her as true. She flushes at the words and hates that he'll think she's just gone shy at the praise.

So much about what it would be like hadn’t occurred to her. It's harder than she thought it would be.

He touches her so much. He has before but this is with intent , this is what all his previous fumbling has been aiming towards. His hands have a softness to them that feels oddly pillowy, that makes her think of something congealing, and the pressure seems all off, both too gentle and too heavy. His thumb skims down her throat and she swallows hard and there is a momentary pressure where her breath pushes against him and it makes the alcohol in her gut burn with nausea. His hands find her chest and he squeezes and it aches, his fingers on her oversensitive nipples send an uncomfortable zing through them that makes her want to squirm. There’s nothing wrong with him– her body’s response is just all off. 

The sheets feel bad.

Kit hadn't thought through how trapped she'd feel with him above her like this, but this is just the usual way it’s done , and she can let this happen to her but she doesn't think she can manage a more active position, so lying underneath him while he’s propped up on his elbows it is. 

When he's hard enough he sits up, leaving Kit feeling uncomfortably exposed but the idea of covering her chest with her hands makes her feel like a prude so she just lies there and looks at the ceiling while he puts on the condom. Obviously she's glad he has one, but the implication of him having one on hand makes Kit feel tired and predictable and gross. She can feel the niceness of a future with him crawling across her skin and it's starting to feel like an inevitability.

The sheets really do feel awful, the comforter even worse. It's cold in the hotel room but the only real heat is from Graydon's body and where that warmth touches her Kit feels the tightness of a sunburn.

“Okay,” he says, “Do you need me to do anything to–”

“No,” Kit says, and she bites back the get on with it that threatens to spill out. She has to be…she has to be nice enough that he still wants to do it, and maybe that just means being as quiet as she can manage.

She closes her eyes and the door kicks open and Jade strides in and Kit is so relieved and Jade isn't mad at her, because she can see a stupid angry message and dig down to the truth of Kit like she always has and Jade loves her enough to save her, please Jade, please Jade, please Jade–

One moment Kit is whole and the next she is something to be pushed inside of.

It hurts.

It hurts so badly that Kit can't tell if she's made a sound, can't tell if she's moving. It's gone white behind her closed eyes and it feels like she's lost time because it hurts and it hasn't stopped and it needs to stop, it has to, when will it, she needs it to stop.

She feels, impossibly, another wrench of movement, a push deeper inside herself and that can't be happening, there's no way this can feel worse, and now she can hear herself, can hear her gasping voice and she's begging , oh god, she can hear herself saying please and I can't. His hand is on her cheek and now she can feel how wet they are, she's crying , she never cries, never , and she can hear him making panicked hushing noises, like he's broken something and is afraid someone will have heard the shatter and she can't she can't she can't–

She hits him, and her knuckles are already sore from the first punch she'd thrown that night, and her hand is a spark of pain in a bonfire and he overbalances to the side and it shifts and tangles them and Kit howls and squirms backwards and her shoulders slam against the headboard and she needs him out right now and then he is, finally he's gone, and Kit sobs and curls over herself, clutches between her legs like she can press the hurt back in and away, like she isn't bleeding it everywhere.

Jade would never get to be her first now.

Kit sobs and every tear feels like it's charging interest from when it should have been shed– a thousand disappointing moments with her mother, picking through her father's shitty apartment and then his awful funeral, the years of dislike from her teachers, the constant disdain from her classmates, and Jade leaving her, Jade abandoning her, Jade not wanting, never loving Kit.

Graydon makes a little pained noise, and if Kit weren't hurting so much herself she'd claw him to pieces for it, but she curls tighter instead, feels shattered eggshell in her body, like she's leaking something vital.

“Are you–” she can feel Graydon reach out to touch her, flinches back before pride can stop her, “Sorry! Are you– what can I–”

” Quiet, ” Kit hisses, because her body is so loud right now she can't take on anything else, not a touch, not a noise, not a guilty emotion. She clenches herself tight as she can, blackholes her body into smallness, whines out the excess that she cannot make manageable. She shakes with the tension, her whole body the thumping pulse of her heart. When she finally goes limp she feels like something that's moulted– crawled out of its shell and is pink and delicate and far too permeable.

She blinks her eyes open and Graydon is still watching her, hand cupping his jaw. If Kit could die of embarrassment, now would be the moment. She can't bring herself to apologize , can't think of a joke, doesn't know what sincerity might look like, can’t just lay here like a dying animal. He hurt her and it’s pathetic that someone like him could, that she allowed it, that the wound feels so deep.

“Can you–” Kit gasps, “Can you just…go somewhere. Be somewhere else.”

Graydon nods, nearly trips over himself as he drags the comforter off the bed. He snatches some of his clothing on his way to the bathroom, has to keep yanking the blanket through in order to be able to close the door.

After a minute Kit can hear the shower turn on. It makes her insanely jealous.

He gets to wash Kit off himself. What he’s left on her is inside.

The thought has her convulsing with another sobbing retch, pressing her face into the pillow so she can howl it quiet as she’s able. Her knuckles between her legs feel wet, and she shivers at the thought of having to see them ruddy with blood. She’s never liked her own blood, especially during the days it aches between her legs, reminding her over and over what she is supposed to be. Tonight it reminds her what she can’t bear to be. With her eyes closed she rubs her fingers along the bottom sheet, keeps herself fetal as she hides the evidence from herself, starts tugging the sheet harder so that it lets go of the corners. She tries to keep her movements small, but they’re jerky, her grip weak, her legs shaky as she curls them to her chest. She gathers the edges of the sheet to herself by inches, clawing it underneath herself until it’s a ball of fabric she can tuck tight against her belly, any stained evidence hidden deep in its center. It takes her so long she doesn’t notice the shower has turned off until she hears a knock breaking the silence.

She has a sudden irrational surge of hope.

“Can I–” Graydon starts, knocking again from inside the bathroom, “Do I need to stay in here?”

Kit swallows her feelings down, crushes them as she squeezes the ball of sheet against her tighter. It takes several deep breaths before Kit can muster the courage to move herself. It embarrasses her to move so gingerly, but she feels like a barely sealed cut and any shift of herself is a sharp pain. Her body wants to flinch and whine and huddle small, but she can’t let it. She tugs the top sheet off the bed and slithers to the floor with it wrapped shapelessly around her, still curled around the balled up other sheet. The layers of fabric and herself are an insufficient shell. Tears keep pouring out of her, and every few seconds her chest hitches horribly. She’d really like it to stop. Her chin and neck are slick with it. The excess is beginning to frighten her.

“We could always– the mini bar has alcohol,” he offers.

She sputters a wet laugh.

“Hope your dad is ready for us to absolutely fuck the credit card he left for the room,” her voice is too gaspy.

“He won't notice,” Graydon says and even through the muffled door Kit knows bitterness well enough in herself to hear it in his voice.

Graydon emerges from the bathroom, a mish-mash of half dressed in boxers and his suit jacket. He’s buttoned it up, hilariously. Kit snorts a laugh and the shake of it through her body makes her feel tired.

Graydon squats down and opens the mini bar, beginning to arrange the little bottles in lines on the carpet. Kit grabs the vodka, cracks open the top with the satisfying sound of perforated plastic and downs it. It burns in just the way she needs it to, but she still can’t seem to stop crying.

“No cheers?” Graydon asks with a raised eyebrow, and maybe he is actually a little funny. Kit likes him better knowing she just absolutely can’t with him.

“We’ll toast on the next one,” Kit says, reaching for the clear rum.

Graydon takes the whiskey and they clink bottles before shooting them.

“So I guess I don’t need your ring size,” Graydon says, after he’s coughed a little.

Kit laughs and she’s still fucking crying, and she’s so over it.

“Yeah, turns out I’m gay. Love wins, or whatever.”

Graydon winces.

“Yeah, I– well, that doesn’t surprise me.”

She considers throwing the bottle at his head, clenches it in her fist instead.

“Content just to get some however you could?” she snipes.

Graydon looks at her and there’s an expression on his face that reminds Kit a little of their parents.

“Takes two,” he says.

He’s right. Kit was willing to use him to make her own attempt. They have a matching desperate cutthroatness about them, Graydon’s is just quieter. It’s too bad they couldn’t make it work– they’d be quite the pair. Kit takes the tequila, Graydon takes the bourbon.

“So what should we tell them?” Kit asks, resting her chin on her sheet covered knees.

Graydon spins his empty bottle on the carpet. It points to no one.

“Depends,” he says, “We could still…pretend.”

The tequila still coating her tongue feels like it burns fresh at the thought. Kit swallows and it’s thick with tears and alcohol.

“No.”

Whatever fortitude she had for this particular game is gone. Whatever broke is broken irreparably, down at the base of things where nothing can be built on top of it. Kit is good at painting over damage, but this is uninhabitable.

“Are you planning to…come out?” Graydon asks.

Kit considers it. What else does she have to lose? If she can't make her mother happy, then maybe Kit can take some pleasure in making her as miserable as possible.

“Yeah, maybe I'll do something psycho during graduation.”

“Just wear a shirt that says dyke underneath your robes and tear it off when they hand you your diploma?” Graydon suggests.

“Yeah, and then steal the microphone and make a really impassioned speech for gay marriage.”

“Didn't you flunk speech class?”

“For refusing to argue the prompts, not for lack of persuasiveness.”

“Paint your car rainbow and do wheelies in the lot before taking off?”

“God, I don't know if that would have my dad rolling in his grave or not– I have no idea how he felt about the gays. He had long hair and piercings, but who knows.”

“ My dad will be convinced it's my fault somehow.”

Kit can't help her snicker.

“Oh, it definitely is– you fucked so bad it put me off guys entirely.”

Graydon surprises her by laughing along.

“Yeah, this is going to be a really pleasant memory for me too, for sure.”

Kit feels a twist of guilt at that– for all of it. Graydon has wasted a lot of time on her, a lot of niceness that maybe someone else would have really liked and Kit is just…sometimes when it hasn't rained in too long the ground is too hard packed to absorb the water when it does come. Niceness feels like that to her, like she's too starved for it to sink in.

She looks over at him, sitting crosslegged with the comforter over his lap. She wonders if he's still worked up , if she should…if she should offer to take care of him, if that would be the polite thing to do. She shifts her palm across the carpet towards him, feels the static build up under her skin.

He looks between her hand and her face and shakes his head. Kit feels so relieved that she almost isn't mad about the fresh flood of tears.

They decimate the mini bar.

They laugh more and Graydon seems more like himself than Kit has ever seen, and she feels exposed in a way that prompts an uncomfortable honesty. They both know this over exposure is just for tonight, but for now they are allies, both stuck in lives that don't suit them. Eventually Graydon stumbles to his feet, modesty comforter gripped in his fist and his other hand grabbing for the bed for balance, hauling himself onto it with a tired groan. When he starts snoring Kit feels a momentary hysterical thrill at the knowledge that she’s not going to have to sleep next to that sound her whole life. She has to cover her mouth to keep the laughter in, though the way the air gasps out of her doesn’t feel entirely like a laugh.

Kit shuffle crawls her own way to the bathroom, head spinning, pushes the door closed and wedges herself against it. The bathroom is still slightly muggy from Graydon’s shower, the uncomfortable wet film of someone else’s washing clinging to her skin. Kit takes a deep breath before she pulls the sheet away to survey the damage.

There's a little blood and some redness. Nothing to cry about. Kit sniffles and bites her tongue to keep from doing just that. She doesn't want anything inside her ever again.

She presses a wet washcloth between her legs, dabs at the blood. Kit hisses at the contact– the coolness of it helps, the roughness of overbleached hotel material doesn’t. It stains the white material, reds and pinks. She can't bear the thought of leaving the evidence here, of someone seeing and suspecting her hurt this way, even though she can't imagine anyone giving a shit. She balls the washcloth up in her hands. She'll take it home and throw it away there. Kit doesn't want to go home. She doesn't want to stay here, either.

She should text Airk to text their mother so Sorsha doesn't call the cops at least. She retrieves her phone, wincing at the rattling drunken snores from Graydon, and retreats back into the bathroom.

When she turns it on a text comes through.

Jade.

Don't do anything. Call me.

She wants to scream. She wants to yank the sink off the wall and shatter the porcelain. She wants to throw herself against the tile of the shower until it breaks open and the innards of the building are exposed and she can tear into them with her teeth, root into the core of something and bite its heart out. She wants to throw her phone against the wall and watch it shatter and step in the shards and kick the floor red.

She wants to call Jade back.

Kit can’t do that, not now, not after this. Something is still sluggishly bleeding inside her, ugly and her own fault and she can’t bear for Jade to see it. There are places where fire burns forever, old mines where human error means the flames will burn and burn and burn for hundreds of years until the guts of the earth are scoured clean of any fuel for it. When Kit shifts her legs she can feel the lick of pain between them, an accident that will soot her insides, blacken her bones with smoke for the rest of her life, crackle her skin like broken charcoal. She carries the remnants of disaster inside herself. She wonders if she glows with it. Jade can't know.

Kit will never be Jade's, and she's known this for years, but it hits her now with a force that rocks her back against the bathroom door, that sinks her to her knees, that presses her forehead against the cold floor, that has her teeth gritted so her sobs can't echo. Perhaps she'd still been hoping, a little. Perhaps this is what it feels like when hope dies.

She's so tired of everything hurting her, of thinking she’s trying her best and her best being bad. If the outcome is all the same, she might as well throw herself at what she wants.

She grabs the edge of the sink and yanks herself to shaky feet, slipping on the sheet that falls away from her. She stares at herself in the mirror, naked and wrong and a mess. Her hair is a long tangle, crunchy from hairspray and ratty with sweat, too hot down her back and she’s sick of it. The hotel comes with every amenity– soaps and toothbrushes and even a razor. Kit rips the plastic off it and attacks her hair, scraping it over chunks of it over and over, watching lengths of it come away in her hands. It takes ages– her hair is thick and the razor is disposable but the person on the other side of her reflection looks different, like someone Kit can be instead. She tilts her chin up and to the side, scrapes an uneven piece so that it falls against her cheekbone. She likes the rough edges, the way it falls in her eyes. Perhaps a razor could make her handsome after all. She yanks one more piece against the blade and it slices into her thumb on the way down, making her hiss and snatch at her wrist like she can pinch off the pain, starve the wound of blood before it squiggles out of her in a messy red line, half caught under the flap of skin. It makes her feel nauseous.

It makes her feel powerful too.

She remembers the moment of falling out of the treehouse, the breathlessness of hitting the ground, the starburst of pain from snapping her arm, how all consuming, how pure it felt. Tonight’s pain had been like its dark mirror, an open black maw that sucked her down, crushed her into a single moment of agony she couldn’t escape from. Both had erased everything else, for a moment. They were powerful. Maybe she could take them for herself.

She snaps the handle off the razor, levers open the head to get her fingers around the blade, blood from her thumb slicking it slippery to the touch, like dissecting a squirming animal. She manages. The blade comes free. It’s so small in the palm of her hand, almost unassuming, a powerful secret that Kit can learn to wield.

No one is going to open Kit up again. No one is going to hurt her like she was hurt tonight, or two years ago. She draws the edge along her skin, fascinated and repulsed and her attention sinks into the single inch of red. Everything else fades. Only Kit gets to hurt herself like that again.

It hurts. It’s right that it hurts.

She cuts again.