fic: my head is an animal (young justice)
title: My head is an animal
fandom: young justice
character/pairing: Jade Nguyen, Paula Crock, Artemis Crock. Jade/Roy (Cheshire/Speedy RED ARROW)
rating: T
wordcount: 4,000ish
FOUR WEEKS
Jade wakes up one morning with her head saying go, go, go, and her heart buckling under the weight of the arm Roy has thrown over her chest. She lays still for a long count of moments, feeling the way her husband’s stress-twitches carry through his triceps and biceps, even in his sleep: she thinks, unsustainable, she thinks, unacceptable, rolls out from under him and shoves a pillow into the place she’s vacated. Aside from his tremors, he doesn’t move.
She makes it halfway away from him, halfway across the room they’re calling an apartment before she trips over their scattered weapons and can’t hold her balance; on her way down to the floor, preparing to roll with it, she thinks, oh,, she thinks, no, no, no. Jade doesn’t make a sound when she hits the ground, but she stays down and remembers one night the month before, when Red had a mishap with a condom and she had a bout of deep sentimentality.
Her suspicions are confirmed after a careful trip to the closest library and few specific consultations with the reference section, and then she scavenges the apartment for the most essential of her things-she refuses to think of it as their apartment, it’s a sty and the walls are covered with maps and dead-ended searches for what Red calls “the real Roy Harper.” Up until now, her husband has seemed obsessed, unhealthy, and unhinged, but Jade knows the revenge business up and down and all the way within, and she knows when enough finally has to mean enough.
Love’s for children, and he looks so young when he’s sleeping, but she’s her mother’s daughter and Jade has never believed in playing the fool.
She wakes him, before she goes; and there's enough of her father in her to kiss him and say, "It's been fun, Red, but it's getting old and these bones need to roam."
Red’s never been fast at waking up-Jade's always suspected it’s a holdover from when he was programmed and out of his own control-and the last look he gives her before she gets up to leave is hollow and gone, the look of a man falling off a building. She’s known from the start that she was going to have to put it there.
*
Jade has barely set foot in the old apartment where her mother still lives when Paula looks her up and down and says, “how long have you been pregnant?”
“Nice to see you, too, Mom,” Jade says. “How’s tricks?”
“Don’t change the subject,” Paula says, already maneuvering her wheelchair into the ridiculous kitchen of Jade’s childhood. “I’m your mother, I know how this works.”
“It’s too soon for any kind of test,” Jade says, as if the news does not bother her. “I noticed something off this morning.”
Paula emerges with a rough hunk of ginger on her lap, and reaches out to palpate Jade’s breast and abdomen. She’s soft about it, clinical, but it still hurts; Jade’s whole body feels tender. “Four, five weeks,” she says. “You’re going to have to stop running around roofs, your balance is going to fall out from under you.”
“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” Jade says.
“How do you think I fell?” Paula’s voice is mild, laced with very little of the old pain. Times like these remind Jade why she hates her father, as if she could forget. “Years running jobs and never a hitch, and then out of the blue, I miss a jump. This chair isn’t for style, you know. I was eight weeks pregnant.”
Jade mulls that information over, storing it up so she can be angry later, and decides to avoid scaling any buildings in the near future. “What’s the ginger for?”
Paula holds the knotted root out with such an air of disapproving imperiousness that Jade takes it immediately.
“It will help with nausea,” Paula says. “You need hot food now. Next trimester you need cold food.”
“That’s an old wives’ tale,” Jade says.
“Don’t disrespect me,” Paula says. “I learned this from my grandmother. You don’t get to decide what’s good for you anymore, you only get to do what is good for the baby.”
“Who says I’m keeping it,” Jade counters, sullen.
“Don’t be stupid,” Jade’s mother reaches out and clamps her hands around Jade’s skinny wrists, either holding her together or chastising her; it’s hard to tell which. “This is not about you at all.”
*
NINE WEEKS
Jade tells herself she's going to stop over at the apartment Artemis shares with West for something to do, now that she's stuck running ground-level reconnaissance. (She hasn’t told Artemis she’s coming, and she has every intention of breaking and entering. In her family, it’s a damn love language, she’ll laugh at anyone who suggests otherwise.) She'd forgotten how boring it was, to move from secure facility to secure warehouse, even if she was hacking records and calling in favors left and right, but she can't even run along the rooftops anymore, not with her mother's story ringing in her ears, and she's too damn careful to put her mask on when she's going underground.
She takes an Amtrak from New York to Fremont-almost five fucking days in transit, splurging on a sleeper car- and amuses herself by stealing data from all the passengers in her block. It's petty, but it passes the time. Jade even scores a copy of a screenplay for one of the next year's projected summer blockbusters, which will be worth some cash once she uploads it to the right server.
In Fremont, she catches a series of buses until she gets fed up and gets out in order to walk the last few miles, pretending to ignore the heat and the way her carry-all is digging into her shoulder. It’s awkward, not heavy, but she hadn’t really planned for this; Jade feels ill and strung out by the time she stalks into Artemis’ neighborhood.
Artemis is home when Jade climbs the stairs to the apartment. If her sister hadn't learned her tactical awareness from Jade and their father, Jade might consider breaking in, but she did, and Jade is tired. Artemis meets her at the door.
"Hey," she says, her guard, as ever, full of holes no one seems able to fix.
Jade says, "What, you get rid of your eye candy? Too bad, I like redheads and mine's a little shopworn."
"Mom said you might stop by," Artemis says. "Maybe you can tell me why while I make dinner for my boyfriend, who by the way is in class."
"Domestic," Jade croons, and pushes past her sister in order to flounce bonelessly onto the couch. The cushion has recently been protected against stains, but the stiff fabric is still softer than the upholstery on that bus, or the strap of her bag.
"He cooked yesterday," Artemis says.
Jade thinks yesterday might have been Artemis' birthday. She can never remember things like that. She makes a noncommittal sound and stretches, rolls out her limbs, kicks off her shoes, carefully not thinking about how Red used to cook for her, a long time ago.
Artemis makes her way back into the kitchen and goes about the business of keeping Wally West fed, which is a stupid, romantic notion if Jade has ever heard one. Jade dozes on the couch, the soft noises of knives against wood the most familiar thing in memory.
*
If Jade had never known or given much thought to how appallingly nice Wally West is, how much he adores her sister, she is made aware of it now, as he washes the dishes and wipes down the table, refills Artemis' water glass before she quite realizes it’s close to empty. He fills Jade's glass, too, and then makes himself beautifully scarce.
Later, he kissed Artemis with no sign of shame and went to sleep on the couch. Artemis had hit him-playfully, not hard, or else Jade would have recognized the movement-and Jade lay on what she thought was Artemis' side of the bed, if the books on the night table were much to go by.
After Wally had lain down on the couch, Artemis crawled into the big bed with Jade.
“I’m pregnant,” Jade tells her. Her eyes have adjusted to the low light, so she’s rewarded with the slow dawn of shock on her sister’s face. “Not sure what I’ll do about the little parasite.”
“Pregnant,” Artemis says, like the word is a hope and a prison.
“Don’t ask if I’m positive,” Jade warns. “I took the tests. It’s horrible.”
Artemis rolls over, onto her belly-fuck, Jade thinks, I won’t be able to sleep on my front-and stares at Jade.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do,” Jade says again, even though she hates repeating herself. Her sister reaches out and touches Jade’s shoulder, soft. It’s very nearly reassuring. “I’ll need to figure that one out sooner before later, I suppose.”
"What do you want," Artemis asks.
The question gives Jade pause; it has been a very long time since anyone asked her what she wanted. Jade thinks about memorizing the sound of those guileless words in the dark, before realizing she already has.
"I want for someone to be responsible," she finally says.
"Good luck with that," Artemis says, with feeling. At least she sounds like she means it, but it’s strange how young it makes Jade feel; Jade, who launched her career by feeling a thousand years older than she really was, has never expected Artemis to catch up.
"Don't worry, sis," she says. "I'll keep the baby."
"Jade--"
"This is my choice," she says, awake to the soft knowledge that this is going to be her responsibility, hers and hers alone. Jade has always lived with all her faults; even if she never wanted any of them. "This is my call."
*
That night, sleeping alongside Artemis in Artemis’ bed, Jade dreams. Usually when she sleep, she dreams of dark places, high and hot and slick, and of the runs she made up and down the face of the earth; this time she dreams of her mother’s village in Vietnam, a tiny hamlet Jade has never actually seen (Jade has never made it all the way to the country her mother used to call home). She dreams of rain torrenting out of the same sky she remembers from the scene of every crime she’s ever committed. It’s all the same, really, the heat and the water and the knowledge that your life will find a way of ending when you are least prepared for it. When you least hope for it.
She dreams that the water covers up the world and everyone in it, and as she drowns, she thinks she can see a hand above the waterline, the hand of a child-half formed, too small to grasp at anything-and the hand reaches down for her, and Jade wakes up not remembering if she even tried to take it, the chance for another chance.
“Oh, that,” says her mother when Jade bothers to call. “You’re going to have a lot of dreams like that. Pay attention.”
*
TEN WEEKS
After almost a week of sitting around in her sister's apartment and making fun of her sister's boyfriend, Jade decides it's time to move on. She calls in a favor and offers up one of her own, and by Tuesday she's flying a supply plane to a black ops army base in Okinawa, and by Friday she's made her way to Vietnam. Jade has no intention of looking for what remains of her mother’s people, and even with her considerable resources, she’d have little luck doing so-Nguyen is a common name, and the war gutted Paula’s life a long time ago.
Here, she’s at least free of a few of her husband’s ghosts-when Jade married Red, she’d married his terrible decisions and his night terrors-and free, too, to pursue a few of them, if she wants. Jade knows how easily she becomes bored, and her pregnancy doesn’t promise to be so diverting that she quits working entirely. She knows Red’s ghosts, knows them perhaps a little better than her own-or at least sees them with more clarity. It’s a habit, thinking of him, and until she decodes whether or not to break that habit, she might as well have a little fun.
It’s almost a holiday, running down leads without giving a thought to who might be suffering at the other end. Jade has missed this. She blows up a warehouse and steals a cache of illegal weapons as soon as the jetlag wears off.
*
TWELVE WEEKS
"I'm on sabbatical," Song, the new office assistant, told Fa, shortly after they'd taken lunch, had an inappropriate supply requisition, and Fa had a knife pulled on her by an anonymous thug. "But I am a topic expert. Don't mind popping in for a bit of fun."
Fa watched in mild, shocky amazement as the new assistant broke her attacker's fingers, dislocated his shoulder, and wrapped her hands around his throat, one-two-three; then she twisted, and there was a body next to Fa on the floor.
"Oh my god," Fa said, but her own assailant put his knife harder against her throat and the words shifted from intelligible to more of a choked sob. The office assistant, who Fa suspected was not really named Song, seemed unimpressed.
"It seems as though we want the same thing," Song said. "Well, there's something to be said for healthy competition, hmmm?" She studied her nails for a moment. "I really shouldn't engage in anything strenuous--first trimester, you know--but light exercise is encouraged." With that, she plucked a knife out of her boot and reared up fast, like an animal on a nature program, and threw herself at Fa's attacker. Song's knife hit him in the eye, and Fa felt herself pressed tight between Song and the nameless thug, as Song shoved and twisted and Fa's attacker screamed and twitched and his knife scraped Fa's throat, harsh and dull and deep. All three of them were on the floor by the time the thug had gone quite still, and Fa was becoming lightheaded. Song lifted herself off the pile and stated down at Fa for a long series of moments; she had the sort of look on her face that Fa always associated with statisticians calculating the odds.
"Where do you keep the experimental files?" Song asked. "Quickly now, before you pass out. You’re not going to wake up again."
"Trials are under 'Elm.'" Fa said. Her voice sounded, to her own uneducated ears, wet and raspy. "The boss keeps a file called ‘watershed’ in the safe."
"Thanks," said the girl who wasn't really Song. "Sleep well, Fa. Thanks for the tour.”
She put her hand against Fa’s throat, over the cut, and waited until the blood ran out.
*
TWENTY WEEKS
Dara knew the job had gone to shit when the pregnant girl showed up and started demanding answers.
She didn't look like much, or rather, she didn't look remarkably different from any other war-baby from Dara's own childhood: slim except where she was round, Viet except for how her skin marked her as white, shoulders up around her shoulders like she was upset about something even as the rest of her posture conveyed an unspeakable, smug ease with the world and her place in it. There was blood on her sleeves, but the traces were faint enough that it didn't seem like her own blood.
"I need a favor," the pregnant girl told Dara, and he believed her.
"Can't do nothing, sweetheart," he said, feeling along the edge of the counter for the silent alarm, knowing in his heart that the wire had probably already been cut to pieces.
She looked him in the eye and Dara realized he was being read; the girl was looking at him like he was a book laid open, or a note left out in plain sight. She must have seen a truth she could get behind because she nodded before moving with incredible, fluid violence to hit him in the face.
Little stars rose up in his vision, and before they could clear, before he could think to cry out at the stinging pain, she hit him again. And again. And several more times, without asking questions, until Dara closed his eyes and cried and blacked out.
When he came to, the blood all spread out on the floor was his own and the girl was long gone. So was buried documentation recording every bribe the military had taken in six provinces.
Dara couldn’t find a gun to end things with before his boss checked in.
*
TWENTY WEEKS, CODA
Jade knows it’s time to stop ground infiltration not because the body count is obscene-and it is, she’s not particularly fond of explicitly ending so much of her opponents’ organization-but because after she walks out of the warehouse with a stick of data tucked into her shirt, she has to stop and square her feet against a traitorous feeling: the baby, fluttering, pressing against her side. She has never felt such a thing before, in all her life.
It’s such a small feeling, but it throws her and frightens her, and she wants, simultaneously, to run and run and run across the black earth, to find a place to hide and never show her face again. She thinks of Red, the way he’d press against her in their bed, the way he shuddered against her skin. Her hollow husband: Jade puts her hand to her side and presses against her belly firmly, until the weight inside of her shifts and settles. When she gets back to her safehouse, she thinks about calling Artemis, about calling her mother, about telling them: I did not think this would change me.
She doesn’t call them. Jade hates being the last to know anything, and she’s not about to give either of them an opportunity to rub it in her face.
Still, after that-as the movements deepen and quicken within her-she steps back from the job’s usual violence. She has plenty of favors to cash in on in the meantime.
*
TWENTY-SIX WEEKS
Sometime late in her second trimester, as her body bulges around itself and prepares for another three months, Jade begins dreaming of her mother's fall. Specifically, she thinks about what was lost in that fall, all the prices the Crock family had to pay without agreeing to the sum total. She dreams about the little barely-formed fetus that faltered; she dreams about Artemis and the years Jade couldn't bear to look at her: she thinks about the child she herself will have, if she can bear the weight of it any longer.
Artemis calls her a week shy of the unsafe-to-fly date and shrieks hoarsely at her over the phone until her minute card runs out. It's seriously adorable.
“I’m not saying that staying in Vietnam to have your baby is a bad idea,” Artemis says, her tone of voice clearly implying that not only is it a bad idea, it is in fact Jade’s worst idea, certifiably, ‘I’m saying that of our admittedly dysfunctional family, or maybe just of the majority of reproductively capable beings in the known universe, you are perhaps the least qualified to give birth to and raise a baby alone.”
“I’ve known plenty of children,” Jade says, conveniently omitting the fact that she has actually killed almost every child she’s ever met. She felt bad about it, so she’s pretty sure that doesn’t count.
“Come home,” Artemis says, and the way her voice cracks and rattles on those two words reminds Jade that ‘come home’ is all Artemis really could say to her, for years. The baby kicks, hard, and rolls over, and Jade grits her teeth; if her sister and her baby ever gang up on her at once, while Jade is still reeling from hormones, she’ll have to get used to losing a few battles.
Jade says, “stop fucking calling me,” and trashes the phone.
*
THIRTY WEEKS
Too long away from a job and Jade's mind always went sharper than glass, her skin grew a size too tight. She would forget that she was something besides the sum of damages other people had dealt her. It was dangerous to feel that caught and delicate and wrong, and Jade usually only managed to shake herself out of that sense by remembering that she was more dangerous than any odd feeling ever could be.
This is perhaps why Jade is always performing, always going to great lengths to remind others how dangerous she can be, how badly she is willing to hurt them in order to protect or amuse herself. It's subtle and bright and fine, and probably only her father and Artemis can recognize it--Dad because he's a professional, Artemis because she has always been on the receiving end. (Jade doesn't know how not to hurt her, something Artemis has never held against her. They are sisters. It's the most and least complicated thing Jade has ever experienced.)
Jade knows--has known since she felt the child quickening, felt that first notion of something somersaulting inside her--that she will go back to Red after this, with this. She will go back to him and his stupid, meaningless quest, and she will present him with their child. As damaged as they both are, walking away would mean abandoning too much of who they used to be and who they’ll probably become.
This knowledge aside, what she told Artemis was: he was becoming impossible. Jade could still feel that odd love, though, deep inside herself, below her heart and even with the baby, scratching at her insides. She was in too deep, beyond any way of measuring that depth: she didn’t want him dead, and that was all he had in store if she left him to his own devices.
*
THIRTY-TWO WEEKS
In the end, she does go back to the United States. This time, she flies as a passenger, with a forged note from a fake doctor so that the airline will let her onboard. She sleeps on the plane, despite her seatmate’s elbows finding her ribs on one side and the baby’s incessant kicking from deep within her.
Jade dreams about giving birth to full-grown twins, one of the children a girl holding the hand of a boy who must be Speedy; he looks exactly like her husband.
“I found him,” Jade’s daughter says, and Jade wakes up with a jolt; a flight attendant is shaking her, letting her know it’s time to disembark.
*
THIRTY-NINE WEEKS
Jade wakes up to a low, shuddering cramp in her back, a bit like having pulled a muscle. She spends most of the morning rattling around her safehouse, cleaning halfheartedly between contractions; she even manages a nap.
At dusk, she scrounges up her fake ID and goes for a long looping circuit around one of the sprawling ethnic communities on the edge of Gotham’s poorer neighborhoods. Her contractions-stronger now, and more painful, and harder to shake off-interrupt her stride.
If Jade were less practical, she would have this baby at home and be done with it. But maybe the screaming matches she has with Artemis over the phone have left a mark, because she gets up and walks again, all the way to the little women’s shelter she knows is in the neighborhood. The Cambodian doula sitting at the front desk doesn’t ask anything irrelevant about Jade’s personal life, and doesn’t say anything about a husband despite the ring Jade still wears. After the harsh reality of her mother, and her sister’s hovering anxiety, Jade takes to the woman’s cool professionalism and follows her orders without complaint. She’s no stranger to hard or painful work, and this is something of both.
Eight hours later, Jade is no longer pregnant, but she is finally a mother. She holds her daughter-her daughter-in her arms, touches her face; the baby is ugly in the way of all newborn children, squashed and red and strange. She names her Lian, but couldn’t say why, even to herself-even to the shadow of herself that Jade endeavors to keep safe. At the last moment, Jade writes “Harper” on the birth certificate, and includes Red’s legal name in the fields for father, not even flinching althought it’s a title she hates. She doesn’t know what is about Red that compels her to create an incriminating trail of legal documents binding them together. For lack of a better word, someone less cynical might call it love. Even in the rushing wake of childbirth, Jade can’t bring herself to think it.
Somewhere in this same city, in a shitty apartment that she used to tolerate, her husband is falling all to pieces-she has eyes on him, it doesn’t pay to be legally tied to another person and not know what they’re up to-and she wonders when telling him about his daughter will sound like a good idea.
*
notes: Technically, you’re supposed to start calculating your pregnancy from the period before conception (so, the week of your menstrual period, plus the fertile days until conception, and implantation, a time ranging from two to three weeks). Jade isn’t doing that here, so her eight weeks is more like ten weeks on one of those pregnancy websites.
Theme: Mountain Song, of monsters and men
fandom: young justice
character/pairing: Jade Nguyen, Paula Crock, Artemis Crock. Jade/Roy (Cheshire/Speedy RED ARROW)
rating: T
wordcount: 4,000ish
FOUR WEEKS
Jade wakes up one morning with her head saying go, go, go, and her heart buckling under the weight of the arm Roy has thrown over her chest. She lays still for a long count of moments, feeling the way her husband’s stress-twitches carry through his triceps and biceps, even in his sleep: she thinks, unsustainable, she thinks, unacceptable, rolls out from under him and shoves a pillow into the place she’s vacated. Aside from his tremors, he doesn’t move.
She makes it halfway away from him, halfway across the room they’re calling an apartment before she trips over their scattered weapons and can’t hold her balance; on her way down to the floor, preparing to roll with it, she thinks, oh,, she thinks, no, no, no. Jade doesn’t make a sound when she hits the ground, but she stays down and remembers one night the month before, when Red had a mishap with a condom and she had a bout of deep sentimentality.
Her suspicions are confirmed after a careful trip to the closest library and few specific consultations with the reference section, and then she scavenges the apartment for the most essential of her things-she refuses to think of it as their apartment, it’s a sty and the walls are covered with maps and dead-ended searches for what Red calls “the real Roy Harper.” Up until now, her husband has seemed obsessed, unhealthy, and unhinged, but Jade knows the revenge business up and down and all the way within, and she knows when enough finally has to mean enough.
Love’s for children, and he looks so young when he’s sleeping, but she’s her mother’s daughter and Jade has never believed in playing the fool.
She wakes him, before she goes; and there's enough of her father in her to kiss him and say, "It's been fun, Red, but it's getting old and these bones need to roam."
Red’s never been fast at waking up-Jade's always suspected it’s a holdover from when he was programmed and out of his own control-and the last look he gives her before she gets up to leave is hollow and gone, the look of a man falling off a building. She’s known from the start that she was going to have to put it there.
*
Jade has barely set foot in the old apartment where her mother still lives when Paula looks her up and down and says, “how long have you been pregnant?”
“Nice to see you, too, Mom,” Jade says. “How’s tricks?”
“Don’t change the subject,” Paula says, already maneuvering her wheelchair into the ridiculous kitchen of Jade’s childhood. “I’m your mother, I know how this works.”
“It’s too soon for any kind of test,” Jade says, as if the news does not bother her. “I noticed something off this morning.”
Paula emerges with a rough hunk of ginger on her lap, and reaches out to palpate Jade’s breast and abdomen. She’s soft about it, clinical, but it still hurts; Jade’s whole body feels tender. “Four, five weeks,” she says. “You’re going to have to stop running around roofs, your balance is going to fall out from under you.”
“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” Jade says.
“How do you think I fell?” Paula’s voice is mild, laced with very little of the old pain. Times like these remind Jade why she hates her father, as if she could forget. “Years running jobs and never a hitch, and then out of the blue, I miss a jump. This chair isn’t for style, you know. I was eight weeks pregnant.”
Jade mulls that information over, storing it up so she can be angry later, and decides to avoid scaling any buildings in the near future. “What’s the ginger for?”
Paula holds the knotted root out with such an air of disapproving imperiousness that Jade takes it immediately.
“It will help with nausea,” Paula says. “You need hot food now. Next trimester you need cold food.”
“That’s an old wives’ tale,” Jade says.
“Don’t disrespect me,” Paula says. “I learned this from my grandmother. You don’t get to decide what’s good for you anymore, you only get to do what is good for the baby.”
“Who says I’m keeping it,” Jade counters, sullen.
“Don’t be stupid,” Jade’s mother reaches out and clamps her hands around Jade’s skinny wrists, either holding her together or chastising her; it’s hard to tell which. “This is not about you at all.”
*
NINE WEEKS
Jade tells herself she's going to stop over at the apartment Artemis shares with West for something to do, now that she's stuck running ground-level reconnaissance. (She hasn’t told Artemis she’s coming, and she has every intention of breaking and entering. In her family, it’s a damn love language, she’ll laugh at anyone who suggests otherwise.) She'd forgotten how boring it was, to move from secure facility to secure warehouse, even if she was hacking records and calling in favors left and right, but she can't even run along the rooftops anymore, not with her mother's story ringing in her ears, and she's too damn careful to put her mask on when she's going underground.
She takes an Amtrak from New York to Fremont-almost five fucking days in transit, splurging on a sleeper car- and amuses herself by stealing data from all the passengers in her block. It's petty, but it passes the time. Jade even scores a copy of a screenplay for one of the next year's projected summer blockbusters, which will be worth some cash once she uploads it to the right server.
In Fremont, she catches a series of buses until she gets fed up and gets out in order to walk the last few miles, pretending to ignore the heat and the way her carry-all is digging into her shoulder. It’s awkward, not heavy, but she hadn’t really planned for this; Jade feels ill and strung out by the time she stalks into Artemis’ neighborhood.
Artemis is home when Jade climbs the stairs to the apartment. If her sister hadn't learned her tactical awareness from Jade and their father, Jade might consider breaking in, but she did, and Jade is tired. Artemis meets her at the door.
"Hey," she says, her guard, as ever, full of holes no one seems able to fix.
Jade says, "What, you get rid of your eye candy? Too bad, I like redheads and mine's a little shopworn."
"Mom said you might stop by," Artemis says. "Maybe you can tell me why while I make dinner for my boyfriend, who by the way is in class."
"Domestic," Jade croons, and pushes past her sister in order to flounce bonelessly onto the couch. The cushion has recently been protected against stains, but the stiff fabric is still softer than the upholstery on that bus, or the strap of her bag.
"He cooked yesterday," Artemis says.
Jade thinks yesterday might have been Artemis' birthday. She can never remember things like that. She makes a noncommittal sound and stretches, rolls out her limbs, kicks off her shoes, carefully not thinking about how Red used to cook for her, a long time ago.
Artemis makes her way back into the kitchen and goes about the business of keeping Wally West fed, which is a stupid, romantic notion if Jade has ever heard one. Jade dozes on the couch, the soft noises of knives against wood the most familiar thing in memory.
*
If Jade had never known or given much thought to how appallingly nice Wally West is, how much he adores her sister, she is made aware of it now, as he washes the dishes and wipes down the table, refills Artemis' water glass before she quite realizes it’s close to empty. He fills Jade's glass, too, and then makes himself beautifully scarce.
Later, he kissed Artemis with no sign of shame and went to sleep on the couch. Artemis had hit him-playfully, not hard, or else Jade would have recognized the movement-and Jade lay on what she thought was Artemis' side of the bed, if the books on the night table were much to go by.
After Wally had lain down on the couch, Artemis crawled into the big bed with Jade.
“I’m pregnant,” Jade tells her. Her eyes have adjusted to the low light, so she’s rewarded with the slow dawn of shock on her sister’s face. “Not sure what I’ll do about the little parasite.”
“Pregnant,” Artemis says, like the word is a hope and a prison.
“Don’t ask if I’m positive,” Jade warns. “I took the tests. It’s horrible.”
Artemis rolls over, onto her belly-fuck, Jade thinks, I won’t be able to sleep on my front-and stares at Jade.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do,” Jade says again, even though she hates repeating herself. Her sister reaches out and touches Jade’s shoulder, soft. It’s very nearly reassuring. “I’ll need to figure that one out sooner before later, I suppose.”
"What do you want," Artemis asks.
The question gives Jade pause; it has been a very long time since anyone asked her what she wanted. Jade thinks about memorizing the sound of those guileless words in the dark, before realizing she already has.
"I want for someone to be responsible," she finally says.
"Good luck with that," Artemis says, with feeling. At least she sounds like she means it, but it’s strange how young it makes Jade feel; Jade, who launched her career by feeling a thousand years older than she really was, has never expected Artemis to catch up.
"Don't worry, sis," she says. "I'll keep the baby."
"Jade--"
"This is my choice," she says, awake to the soft knowledge that this is going to be her responsibility, hers and hers alone. Jade has always lived with all her faults; even if she never wanted any of them. "This is my call."
*
That night, sleeping alongside Artemis in Artemis’ bed, Jade dreams. Usually when she sleep, she dreams of dark places, high and hot and slick, and of the runs she made up and down the face of the earth; this time she dreams of her mother’s village in Vietnam, a tiny hamlet Jade has never actually seen (Jade has never made it all the way to the country her mother used to call home). She dreams of rain torrenting out of the same sky she remembers from the scene of every crime she’s ever committed. It’s all the same, really, the heat and the water and the knowledge that your life will find a way of ending when you are least prepared for it. When you least hope for it.
She dreams that the water covers up the world and everyone in it, and as she drowns, she thinks she can see a hand above the waterline, the hand of a child-half formed, too small to grasp at anything-and the hand reaches down for her, and Jade wakes up not remembering if she even tried to take it, the chance for another chance.
“Oh, that,” says her mother when Jade bothers to call. “You’re going to have a lot of dreams like that. Pay attention.”
*
TEN WEEKS
After almost a week of sitting around in her sister's apartment and making fun of her sister's boyfriend, Jade decides it's time to move on. She calls in a favor and offers up one of her own, and by Tuesday she's flying a supply plane to a black ops army base in Okinawa, and by Friday she's made her way to Vietnam. Jade has no intention of looking for what remains of her mother’s people, and even with her considerable resources, she’d have little luck doing so-Nguyen is a common name, and the war gutted Paula’s life a long time ago.
Here, she’s at least free of a few of her husband’s ghosts-when Jade married Red, she’d married his terrible decisions and his night terrors-and free, too, to pursue a few of them, if she wants. Jade knows how easily she becomes bored, and her pregnancy doesn’t promise to be so diverting that she quits working entirely. She knows Red’s ghosts, knows them perhaps a little better than her own-or at least sees them with more clarity. It’s a habit, thinking of him, and until she decodes whether or not to break that habit, she might as well have a little fun.
It’s almost a holiday, running down leads without giving a thought to who might be suffering at the other end. Jade has missed this. She blows up a warehouse and steals a cache of illegal weapons as soon as the jetlag wears off.
*
TWELVE WEEKS
"I'm on sabbatical," Song, the new office assistant, told Fa, shortly after they'd taken lunch, had an inappropriate supply requisition, and Fa had a knife pulled on her by an anonymous thug. "But I am a topic expert. Don't mind popping in for a bit of fun."
Fa watched in mild, shocky amazement as the new assistant broke her attacker's fingers, dislocated his shoulder, and wrapped her hands around his throat, one-two-three; then she twisted, and there was a body next to Fa on the floor.
"Oh my god," Fa said, but her own assailant put his knife harder against her throat and the words shifted from intelligible to more of a choked sob. The office assistant, who Fa suspected was not really named Song, seemed unimpressed.
"It seems as though we want the same thing," Song said. "Well, there's something to be said for healthy competition, hmmm?" She studied her nails for a moment. "I really shouldn't engage in anything strenuous--first trimester, you know--but light exercise is encouraged." With that, she plucked a knife out of her boot and reared up fast, like an animal on a nature program, and threw herself at Fa's attacker. Song's knife hit him in the eye, and Fa felt herself pressed tight between Song and the nameless thug, as Song shoved and twisted and Fa's attacker screamed and twitched and his knife scraped Fa's throat, harsh and dull and deep. All three of them were on the floor by the time the thug had gone quite still, and Fa was becoming lightheaded. Song lifted herself off the pile and stated down at Fa for a long series of moments; she had the sort of look on her face that Fa always associated with statisticians calculating the odds.
"Where do you keep the experimental files?" Song asked. "Quickly now, before you pass out. You’re not going to wake up again."
"Trials are under 'Elm.'" Fa said. Her voice sounded, to her own uneducated ears, wet and raspy. "The boss keeps a file called ‘watershed’ in the safe."
"Thanks," said the girl who wasn't really Song. "Sleep well, Fa. Thanks for the tour.”
She put her hand against Fa’s throat, over the cut, and waited until the blood ran out.
*
TWENTY WEEKS
Dara knew the job had gone to shit when the pregnant girl showed up and started demanding answers.
She didn't look like much, or rather, she didn't look remarkably different from any other war-baby from Dara's own childhood: slim except where she was round, Viet except for how her skin marked her as white, shoulders up around her shoulders like she was upset about something even as the rest of her posture conveyed an unspeakable, smug ease with the world and her place in it. There was blood on her sleeves, but the traces were faint enough that it didn't seem like her own blood.
"I need a favor," the pregnant girl told Dara, and he believed her.
"Can't do nothing, sweetheart," he said, feeling along the edge of the counter for the silent alarm, knowing in his heart that the wire had probably already been cut to pieces.
She looked him in the eye and Dara realized he was being read; the girl was looking at him like he was a book laid open, or a note left out in plain sight. She must have seen a truth she could get behind because she nodded before moving with incredible, fluid violence to hit him in the face.
Little stars rose up in his vision, and before they could clear, before he could think to cry out at the stinging pain, she hit him again. And again. And several more times, without asking questions, until Dara closed his eyes and cried and blacked out.
When he came to, the blood all spread out on the floor was his own and the girl was long gone. So was buried documentation recording every bribe the military had taken in six provinces.
Dara couldn’t find a gun to end things with before his boss checked in.
*
TWENTY WEEKS, CODA
Jade knows it’s time to stop ground infiltration not because the body count is obscene-and it is, she’s not particularly fond of explicitly ending so much of her opponents’ organization-but because after she walks out of the warehouse with a stick of data tucked into her shirt, she has to stop and square her feet against a traitorous feeling: the baby, fluttering, pressing against her side. She has never felt such a thing before, in all her life.
It’s such a small feeling, but it throws her and frightens her, and she wants, simultaneously, to run and run and run across the black earth, to find a place to hide and never show her face again. She thinks of Red, the way he’d press against her in their bed, the way he shuddered against her skin. Her hollow husband: Jade puts her hand to her side and presses against her belly firmly, until the weight inside of her shifts and settles. When she gets back to her safehouse, she thinks about calling Artemis, about calling her mother, about telling them: I did not think this would change me.
She doesn’t call them. Jade hates being the last to know anything, and she’s not about to give either of them an opportunity to rub it in her face.
Still, after that-as the movements deepen and quicken within her-she steps back from the job’s usual violence. She has plenty of favors to cash in on in the meantime.
*
TWENTY-SIX WEEKS
Sometime late in her second trimester, as her body bulges around itself and prepares for another three months, Jade begins dreaming of her mother's fall. Specifically, she thinks about what was lost in that fall, all the prices the Crock family had to pay without agreeing to the sum total. She dreams about the little barely-formed fetus that faltered; she dreams about Artemis and the years Jade couldn't bear to look at her: she thinks about the child she herself will have, if she can bear the weight of it any longer.
Artemis calls her a week shy of the unsafe-to-fly date and shrieks hoarsely at her over the phone until her minute card runs out. It's seriously adorable.
“I’m not saying that staying in Vietnam to have your baby is a bad idea,” Artemis says, her tone of voice clearly implying that not only is it a bad idea, it is in fact Jade’s worst idea, certifiably, ‘I’m saying that of our admittedly dysfunctional family, or maybe just of the majority of reproductively capable beings in the known universe, you are perhaps the least qualified to give birth to and raise a baby alone.”
“I’ve known plenty of children,” Jade says, conveniently omitting the fact that she has actually killed almost every child she’s ever met. She felt bad about it, so she’s pretty sure that doesn’t count.
“Come home,” Artemis says, and the way her voice cracks and rattles on those two words reminds Jade that ‘come home’ is all Artemis really could say to her, for years. The baby kicks, hard, and rolls over, and Jade grits her teeth; if her sister and her baby ever gang up on her at once, while Jade is still reeling from hormones, she’ll have to get used to losing a few battles.
Jade says, “stop fucking calling me,” and trashes the phone.
*
THIRTY WEEKS
Too long away from a job and Jade's mind always went sharper than glass, her skin grew a size too tight. She would forget that she was something besides the sum of damages other people had dealt her. It was dangerous to feel that caught and delicate and wrong, and Jade usually only managed to shake herself out of that sense by remembering that she was more dangerous than any odd feeling ever could be.
This is perhaps why Jade is always performing, always going to great lengths to remind others how dangerous she can be, how badly she is willing to hurt them in order to protect or amuse herself. It's subtle and bright and fine, and probably only her father and Artemis can recognize it--Dad because he's a professional, Artemis because she has always been on the receiving end. (Jade doesn't know how not to hurt her, something Artemis has never held against her. They are sisters. It's the most and least complicated thing Jade has ever experienced.)
Jade knows--has known since she felt the child quickening, felt that first notion of something somersaulting inside her--that she will go back to Red after this, with this. She will go back to him and his stupid, meaningless quest, and she will present him with their child. As damaged as they both are, walking away would mean abandoning too much of who they used to be and who they’ll probably become.
This knowledge aside, what she told Artemis was: he was becoming impossible. Jade could still feel that odd love, though, deep inside herself, below her heart and even with the baby, scratching at her insides. She was in too deep, beyond any way of measuring that depth: she didn’t want him dead, and that was all he had in store if she left him to his own devices.
*
THIRTY-TWO WEEKS
In the end, she does go back to the United States. This time, she flies as a passenger, with a forged note from a fake doctor so that the airline will let her onboard. She sleeps on the plane, despite her seatmate’s elbows finding her ribs on one side and the baby’s incessant kicking from deep within her.
Jade dreams about giving birth to full-grown twins, one of the children a girl holding the hand of a boy who must be Speedy; he looks exactly like her husband.
“I found him,” Jade’s daughter says, and Jade wakes up with a jolt; a flight attendant is shaking her, letting her know it’s time to disembark.
*
THIRTY-NINE WEEKS
Jade wakes up to a low, shuddering cramp in her back, a bit like having pulled a muscle. She spends most of the morning rattling around her safehouse, cleaning halfheartedly between contractions; she even manages a nap.
At dusk, she scrounges up her fake ID and goes for a long looping circuit around one of the sprawling ethnic communities on the edge of Gotham’s poorer neighborhoods. Her contractions-stronger now, and more painful, and harder to shake off-interrupt her stride.
If Jade were less practical, she would have this baby at home and be done with it. But maybe the screaming matches she has with Artemis over the phone have left a mark, because she gets up and walks again, all the way to the little women’s shelter she knows is in the neighborhood. The Cambodian doula sitting at the front desk doesn’t ask anything irrelevant about Jade’s personal life, and doesn’t say anything about a husband despite the ring Jade still wears. After the harsh reality of her mother, and her sister’s hovering anxiety, Jade takes to the woman’s cool professionalism and follows her orders without complaint. She’s no stranger to hard or painful work, and this is something of both.
Eight hours later, Jade is no longer pregnant, but she is finally a mother. She holds her daughter-her daughter-in her arms, touches her face; the baby is ugly in the way of all newborn children, squashed and red and strange. She names her Lian, but couldn’t say why, even to herself-even to the shadow of herself that Jade endeavors to keep safe. At the last moment, Jade writes “Harper” on the birth certificate, and includes Red’s legal name in the fields for father, not even flinching althought it’s a title she hates. She doesn’t know what is about Red that compels her to create an incriminating trail of legal documents binding them together. For lack of a better word, someone less cynical might call it love. Even in the rushing wake of childbirth, Jade can’t bring herself to think it.
Somewhere in this same city, in a shitty apartment that she used to tolerate, her husband is falling all to pieces-she has eyes on him, it doesn’t pay to be legally tied to another person and not know what they’re up to-and she wonders when telling him about his daughter will sound like a good idea.
*
notes: Technically, you’re supposed to start calculating your pregnancy from the period before conception (so, the week of your menstrual period, plus the fertile days until conception, and implantation, a time ranging from two to three weeks). Jade isn’t doing that here, so her eight weeks is more like ten weeks on one of those pregnancy websites.
Theme: Mountain Song, of monsters and men