#it's gonna involve impressing the hell out of a card sharp with her mad skills

[clonerightsagenda]

*Pacific Rim voice* In the beginning these prompt responses were a few hundred words. Then a thousand. The last one was nearly 2k. This one is nearly 3. If this keeps up we could be seeing the blogger writing fuckin novellas every week because they don’t want to focus on their actual responsibilities.

Anyway this is not what the prompt meant by “witch” but here we are. This probably needs a cw: for child abuse.

Tuesjade prompt: witch

 "Are you sure you don't know anything else about the session we're headed toward?"

Jade's voice is rough from disuse. She sounds like she did when she first came aboard, when she'd spoken slowly and with inflections in the wrong places. The boys had teased her about mispronouncing common words, until that and all the other incongruities piled up and John asked, "Jade, how old *were* you when your grandpa died?" and you'd finally learned the details about what happened to your brother.

You wonder if you should be honored that you're the first person she's spoken to in a few days. She's sought you out in the kitchen, your favorite haunt. The carapaces and consorts aboard need to eat, and most of them don't know their way around a fork, let alone a healthy diet. It's something to do, and you have more to offer as a cook than a consultant at this point in your journey.

You drift over to the counter where she’s settled with her arms propped up on the slick gold surface. The admonishment to get her elbows off the counter dies on your tongue. She doesn’t look in the mood. "I've told you all I know. I'm only a guide for John, for a session you've completed. This is new territory. Can't you check your own knowledge banks for confirmation?"

She makes a face. "Most of that is buried. I can't even open the calculator application without 'program either moved or deleted' errors."

"Shame. It's handy for things like converting grams to ounces. Can’t you ask Dave? He’ll back me up."

Her ears go back. "He won't talk to me. Or anyone."

You hadn’t known that was still dangerous territory. It’s been months since they all started squabbling with each other, and it has mostly settled into silence. Maybe you were wrong to think quiet meant a peaceful resolution. "Haven't you three patched things up yet?"

She kicks a foot against the leg of her stool. "If they don't want to, I'm not going to be pushy."

You purse your lips but don't say anything.  Sometimes you wonder if you should have done something when the three of them first fractured. Surely whatever it is could be fixed with a little conversation. But what is your jurisdiction here? You are John and Jade's mother, but only biologically. You weren't here to watch them grow up. Would they even listen if you tried to intercede?

The one time you floated up to Jade and suggested, "Dear, can't you take a break? What has that training dummy ever done to you?" she'd brushed you off as easily as the puffs of polyester filling strewn around the room. "Someone has to focus on our end goal,” she said. “I don't want SBURB taking us by surprise again." You’d drifted away, defeated. Indecision was always your greatest flaw. Being brought back from the dead hasn't changed that. A second chance, another life, and still you hesitate.

At least you can feed her. Whenever she stops by, you make sure to fix her a plate or at least a sandwich. She always wolfs your offerings down; you think she forgets to eat. Between swallows, she asks, "What *can* you tell me?"

You take her plate back, consider running it under water, and instead start filling it up again. "I could relate some charming stories about John's father when he was a baby."

"Actually..." She gestures, and a piece of paper appears in her hand with a flash of light. "Maybe you can tell me something about your brother."

"Your grandfather? As long as it relates to our childhood together."

"It doesn't, but..." She places the paper on the counter and slides it your way. "I went through his things after he died, and I found some photographs."

You pick it up. There's Jake, all grown. He's standing next to an elegant woman in a peacock-blue dress. In front of them are two young children. The girl has Jade's smile. “Ah,” you say. “This.”

"He had a *family*." Jade bites her lip. You guess she didn't want to admit it without confirmation. "And he never told me."

"I don't know how long it lasted." You cast your mind back. "Anna Claire was a dancer, a talented one. Neither of them were celebrities by modern standards, but their marriage got some attention in the papers. They weren't Clark and Carole by any means, but I saw a story or two."

"Clark and Carole?"

You chuckle. "That's a bit dated, isn't it? Does Brangelina work better?"

She shakes her head, bewildered. You sigh. "Even when I try to keep abreast of your pop culture, I swing and miss."

Jade pulls the photo back toward herself. "They had children. They would've been my..."

"Half-siblings. Yes."

"What happened to them?"

"Anna died, if I remember rightly, and soon after Jake was voyaging again. He never could stay still. That's how I kept track - the occasional story about where he was headed next." Oh, you'd envied him, after living as you did under your stepmother's claws. If only you could have run away and never looked back. He never did. Maybe he found it easier to forget.

"What about the children?"

You shrug. "I lost track of them. This was before the days of Google. Although I did hear some strange rumors."

Jade flips the photograph over and looks at the date. It’s written in curly handwriting you don’t recognize. Anna’s, you suppose. "My meteor landed not that long after this picture was taken. Is that why he left?”

"I can't say."

"They must have hated me, if they'd known." Jade stares down at the fragile, faded family. "Do you think he knew? That SBURB was going to come, and they would have to die?"

You sigh. "My brother was very brave in some ways, but he didn't deal well with things he couldn't fight. Often instead he'd leave them behind."

Jade doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she waves her hand, and the photograph disappears with another flash of green. "People shouldn't just leave."

You rest a hand on her shoulder. She doesn't shrug you off, but she doesn’t acknowledge your touch either. "They shouldn't. But inevitability is a terrible foe. You and your friends know a little about that, don't you?"

"It didn't stop me from doing what I had to." She leans back to stare at the ceiling, dislodging you. You glance up too – there’s nothing but the mess of pipes and ductwork that makes up the battleship roof. Above that, all you’d be able to see is the endless blur of green that makes up the borders of your reality. Oh, you miss stars. "Sometimes he'd disappear for weeks. Or maybe it only felt like weeks. I was too young to have a good grasp on time. He'd come back with these terrifying monsters he’d shot. I hid the first time, but he told me it was nothing to be afraid of, because he'd beaten it. They were underling corpses. He was getting into the Medium somehow. Even going across the globe wasn't enough for him, he had to leave the whole world." She shakes her head. "I thought he'd abandoned me when I found his body. Maybe if he'd lived he would have."

These are thoughts you had, when you crumpled up a news article about Jake leaving on a ship for another land and then smoothed it out again. Both you and your daughter tend not to voice them. You're not sure whether that's a good thing. The silence keeps you steady and safe, but that leaves it locked away inside of you. "Jade..."

She looks back at you, mouth set. "Tell me about the witch. You've dropped hints about her."

You sigh and slide another full plate across the counter. "I know she wasn't human."

"How could you tell?"

"She acted so strange, it was clear she didn't know what to do with children. One day I made her angry, and..." At the time you'd been terrified, but the memory is fangless now. You’ve seen much worse in your two lifetimes. "She showed me her real face. No one will ever believe you, she said. I never even tried to tell.”

Where did you learn to hold your tongue? At your mother's knee, as they say. Cheek got you slapped, or worse. You never pointed to a bandage and said, “It wasn’t an accident." Who would they listen to, the wealthy wife of a colonel or the ungrateful girl she'd taken in out of the goodness of her heart? You'd heard people whispering behind their hands. What a self-sacrificing woman, trying to make something better of a girl of that color. The boy had been so wild. It's probably for the best he ran off, he'll come to nothing good. How did the colonel die, anyway? For a creature from a planet without variation in skin colors, she’d caught on quickly. "Low caste," she sneered at you. "No one would care what happened to you."

“I slipped in grease. I brushed up against the stove. I’m careless with a knife.” The excuses slid off your tongue like oil. She laughed at your screams and mocked your tears, so you dispensed with both of them. Instead, you played along, dutifully measuring flour into bowls and creaming butter. Eventually she let you get a job, and you dropped coins into a jar trying to save up for a ticket away and a few month's rent.

In another, more secretive spot you collected evidence. Scraps of writing in a jagged alien script. A used-up compact of the makeup she used to cover the flat gray of her skin. A tissue stained with fuchsia blood from a time she’d cut herself and dabbed at it while holding her hand away where she thought you didn’t see. The dream of one day exposing her helped you keep going, when everything in your life took on the image of an oven-hot cage.

The job brought you a little money, if not friendship. When you turned down social offers from your coworkers, fearing your mother’s reaction, they assumed you thought you were above them. Most of your shifts were spent in silence, while other employees gossiped or joked with local guests. One regular around your age liked to awe the other diners with flashy card tricks. One day he caught you looking and shuffled the cards with exaggerated care. “Looks like magic, doesn’t it?”

The words came out without you meaning them to. It had been so long since you’d practiced tricks and pranks with your brother – seeing a deck of cards made your fingers itch. “You’re good. I almost didn’t see it when you palmed the Queen of Hearts.”

His eyebrows rose. “Do you know much about card tricks?”

“A little.” You hoped that would end the conversation, but instead he slid down the counter and handed over the deck of cards.

“Show us something.”

The familiar feel of the cardstock made you bold enough to run through your adoptive father’s toughest trick. The movements came back to you at once, and the cards flowed through your fingers like water. You plucked out the ace of spades with a flourish and laid it down beside his empty plate. Some of your coworkers stared. He laughed.

“Don’t gamble with this girl, she’ll fleece you for everything you’ve got.”

“I don’t play poker,” you said.

“Want to learn?”

During your breaks he taught you card games, and you taught him a few coin tricks he didn’t know. After that, he struck up conversations with you while you were at work, and the rest of the staff began to thaw. It was… something. Enough that you asked around casually about what places might rent to a young woman living alone. A job and a young man speaking to you (even if you refused to let him call on you; there was no telling what your mother would say) put ideas in your head.

Freedom is like vanilla. It smells sweet and tastes bitter. The country was gripped by what would one day be called the Great Depression, and your hoard of dollars wouldn’t get you far. At home, as terrible as things were, you at least had a roof over your head and food on the table. Your dreams of escape were just dreams, and the flowers your suitor brought you lined the ditches on your walk back home. One day, you returned to find your secret jar empty. At dinner, you kept your hand gripped on your knife, but your mother only smiled and asked you to pass the food. Maybe taking away your earnings was enough, or maybe your minor show of defiance impressed her. You imagined it would have been worse if she’d found your other hoard.

As usual, someone else made the decision for you. One day, your mother was just… gone, leaving everything to your brother as one last act of malice. Even your freedom was her idea. Even so, you were free, and you let your memories of your brother and the not-quite-human witch fade until it all seemed like the half-formed fantasies of a child. You lived through two world wars and the era of Civil Rights, and at some point you realized you’d grown old without noticing. Life passes, and then it’s gone. But here you are, a risen ghost, and there’s a chance you might come face to face with your mother again. It’s too bad ripping away her disguise won’t suffice to defeat her this time.

Jade sits in front of you. For as long as you’ve been alive, children have been asked to grow up too fast. If anyone can defeat an alien queen, you’d trust it to them, even if it’s a burden they shouldn’t have to bear. All you can do is try to arm them as best you can. Isn’t that what the game brought you back for, anyway? To teach children how to fight your wars.

“After hearing about your close encounters, I suspect she was a troll. We're traveling to meet a few of them, so we might see her again. But I don't know for sure, I told you that. I have no inside information on the subject."

Jade drags her fork against her plate and stops when the metal draws a screech from the porcelain. "I don't think she's any of the ones we talked to." You agree with that. From what you've seen of their trollslums, none of them have your stepmother's bite. They were children - rude and abrasive, but awkward even in their malice. The witch had practice at cruelty. "What is she like?"

You tap your fingers on the counter. "She was... determined. She always got her way. It was almost admirable, in a sense.

"Admirable?"

"Yes, even if it was horrible too." You smile a little at her surprise. "Don’t think I didn’t hate her. But I envied her freedom, in a way. I didn’t have much power growing up. We can't all be legendary heroes like you, Jade. Some of us sit on the sidelines wondering if we should have done something else."

"I guess you'll have a chance to see."

"Yes, I guess I will!" That's one tidbit you could share. The Scratch has reshuffled the deck, and the faces you fly to meet will include your own.

Jade stands up and carries her plate to the sink. “I can get that,” you begin, but she nudges you away and reaches for the sponge.

“One last thing,” she says. “Why did you call her a witch?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She was wicked, and she could do things regular people couldn’t. Chase animals away with a thought, lift objects with her mind. Plus.” You chuckle. “I was too well-bred to use something stronger.”

She doesn’t look at you as she works at a stubborn spot of grease. “Do you think SBURB made me a witch because I’m bad?”

Where did that come from? “Of course not. It’s just a class, and a strong one at that. There are good witches too. And you’re the best one I know.”

That gets a faint smile out of her. “I wonder what you’ll be.”

“I’m as eager to see as you are! If you ever need someone to talk to before then…” You gesture vaguely with your disembodied hand. “I’m always here for you. You know that, right? We *are* family.”

“Of course.” She gives the clean dish a swipe with a towel and sets it down. “I’ll see you later.”

You wave at her retreating back. As always, you have the feeling you could have said something more, missed opportunities nipping at your spectral heels. The game wouldn’t make you a witch, someone forthright and full of power. Or maybe that’s your own failure, rather than something born into you. What your sixteen-year-old self will think of you, an old woman and a jester-themed ghost to boot? Will she step forward more? You hope so. You hope this time, you get it right.