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Summary
"If you wanna come here after we find Airk, to live, I would tag along, if that's okay. Because I don't want to have any adventures unless they're with you."
Kit and Jade, building something in the Wildwood while Jade figures out what it means to belong.
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Bookmark Notes:
From twitter recs
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Bookmark Notes:
“It’s enough, Scorpia,” Jade says.
“I say when it’s enough.”
“No, you don’t. Kit does.” Jade walks towards her, steadfast. “You’re behaving like you’re her master. I thought we didn’t do that in the Wildwood.”
“Don’t you dare,” Scorpia warns her.
“Or have you forgotten why you came to the Wildwood in the first place?”
“Watch it,” Scorpia snaps, and Jade knows she’s gone about as far as she can. Scorpia takes several visible breaths, all the while glaring at Jade. “You know I give you leeway because we’re family, but don’t you ever say that to me again. You trivialize our suffering, and for that girl-” Scorpia spits the word. “-who has never known true hardship.”
It’s Jade’s turn to snap. “You don’t know that. You don’t know the days we wandered with no food, no water, no hope. There was a point we both thought we would die.”
“How can I know when you refuse to tell me?” Scorpia cries. “You won’t tell me about who you were. I want to know you. I want to be there for you. But you refuse to let me.”
“You don’t make it easy for someone who claim to want to know me,” Jade says. “Always insulting my friends, the people who raised me, the life I made for myself in Tir Asleen. Why would I ever want to tell you about something you hate so much?”
“The people who stole you!” Scorpia says. She stabs her finger at Jade. “They stole you and lied to you! They robbed you of the life you should have had with me, with your family!”
“But I did have family,” Jade says, even though it feels somewhat feeble. The love she can still feel for Ballantine has taken up residence next to this hard fact, that he took a child from her people and taught her to hate them. It’s rubbed like grit inside an oyster, wearing its way deeper and deeper inside her love, her memories, her gratitude that he saw greatness in her. And it brought her to Kit, who makes her feel like she’s complete with or without Scorpia, all while she mourns something she hadn’t even known was supposed to be hers until she left Tir Asleen.
“I’m your family,” Scorpia says. “I love you and I care about you enough to tell you that girl will never be one of us. She’ll always see us as Bone Reavers, just a scourge to be stamped out.”
“Were you ever going to give her a chance?” Jade asks, her voice a croak in her throat as she fights down tears.
Scorpia’s face is a grim answer.
“I love her,” Jade says, a few tears escaping, trailing down to drip from her chin. “And anywhere she’s not welcome, neither am I.”
Scorpia wavers, shaken by the boundary Jade has drawn between them. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” Jade says, even as more tears fall.
Scorpia’s eyes are bright as well now, the first time Jade has ever seen her allow her emotions this close to the surface. “If I let her stay-”
Jade’s voice comes steady through wrenching effort. “If you let her stay, what? Nothing changes. She doesn’t want to be a princess. She just wants to be Kit. And she wants to be with me.”
Scorpia inhales, a deep but shaky breath. “How can you love her so much? When she stands for everything that hates us?”
Jade stands straight-backed, letting Scorpia see all her naked fear and confusion and longing. “I told you. She’s not anyone but Kit. I understand that we’ve had different lives. I can’t take mine back. It’s hard enough figuring out what it all means, knowing what Ballantine and Sorsha did to me. But please, if you ever want to understand me, if you ever want to know me, then you need to know me with Kit in my life.”
Scorpia’s jaw works side to side and her hands wring each other, searching for something to grasp and hold on to. Her daggers, probably. And she relents. “All right.”
Jade blinks through her tears, needing to hear it again. “All right?”
“She stays.” Scorpia sniffs, any suggestion of tears receding. “But she’s your responsibility. You’re to teach her our ways, keep her out of trouble.”
Jade nearly laughs out loud at the relief and the irony of it all. “I’ve spent my whole life keeping her out of trouble. What’s one lifetime more?”