title: "there is something dangerous to the boredom of teenage girls" characters: angel the siren, jade ellsworth notes: vague au where Jade is the only person Angel is allowed to see in her control core on Pandora. written too;
Jade laughed, head tilted back, the ginger strands of catching at the edge of her face. All golden as they catch the artificial light.
'Again - '
The walls shimmered, dancing intricate patterns, layers of hexagons, that ebbed like water. The flicker of unnatural purple light. They are in Angel's room. They are never in Angel's room. They are where Jade's imagination and Angel's horrifying, monstrous, and Jade insisted -- beautiful abilities can take them.
This time it's a beach. Today they have begun to truly apart reality now. They have stopped asking for only imitations of reality, today they break it utterly. The sand is a many toned purple, the sky is gradient green, the leaves are glossy veined vermillion. It is a vomitous riot of colour, technicolour puke like when Jade had smuggled them in a bottle of something green and sweet and burning. The world looked like that morning after, vibrantly jarring.
( Jade liked drinking more than she did, she'd found once the pair of them were flushed in the face. Not that it was bad - but what was drinking, smoking, to eridium? One was a muted buzz to the crackling raw power in her veins. But she liked seeing her happy, and the drinking made the laughter easier, more about what they weren't supposed to do, than what they were actually doing ).
The world they made, this time, would be hard on hung over eyes, the light so jarring as it washed over them. Things are wrong of course, she's desperately tweaking the littlest details. The flickers of quartz in the sand that turned it a softer shade, The way the light refracted over the broad shiny leaves and bounced to reflect on rocks. Each adjustment as tender as Rodin's thumb print on a sculpture. Jade would appreciate it, she knows, if she called attention to it. Jade never withdrew, was never terrified of her marks. Instead she snatched her faintly glowing hand and held it tight. Not scared of what lay under skin.
As the sunset floods light, never rising, never sinking, stay there in an eternity of twilight sprawling she lets Jade turn to watch it unfurl. The room they are is only this by this long, this by this wide. Finite. Small. But the beach spreads out in a sickle shape, curling to mimic the moon that would rise if she let it. It's all in her control, the only thing that is. She wonders at the sort of person she is, that she likes constructing this sort of trap for the happiness of another. This false world, all lies.
But Jade turns back to her, her finger's threaded through Angel's. Squeezing it tightly with a rushing excitement. She doesn't know the difference, she doesn't control it, she only sees an unreal world and a way to forget everything. That there are walls the other side of it doesn't stop them.
'C'mon, lets see what's in the ocean.'
Angel opens her mouth to correct her, whatever I want it to be. She's said it before, and Jade shakes her head quickly dismiss it before the words even surface.
'We've talked about this. You're not going to think about it, you're just going to do whatever comes to your mind as quickly as you think of it.' She hesitates, pausing. Nose scrunched up. 'But no giant spiderants this time, okay?'
She can't help it, she laughs, a guilty duck of her head. 'You asked to see what I saw on the echonet.'
'Okay, I heretofore ban anything about Pandora.' It's said with all the pomp of a royal decree. 'Why does Jack have you look at that place anyway?'
That, Angel knows, but that Angel will not say, instead she shrugs her shoulders, a soft rise and fall that means siren stuff, or Jack stuff. Both, in this case. Besides, there wasn't words for the pull she felt to the planet, how she kept going back to it, no matter how she tried to pull away, direct her gaze and her mind elsewhere. Nothing there but misery. Something must of crossed her face, because Jade hesitated before adding; 'You're really hung up on it, aren't you?'
Another shrug, clearing her throat. 'It doesn't matter. I look at a lot of planets.'
Jade swings their joined hands, back and forth. 'Yeah, you're a regular satellite.'
'When I tune in I get 415 channels, best coverage this this side of Eden-5.' It's not the best joke, but they both laugh for the sake of easing tension, and this time, Angel doesn't pull back. She does the one thing Jade allows her to do, she doesn't think any further. 'C'mon, I downloaded an entire study on Paleolithic creatures before Promethea's fourth flash freeze.'
angel & jade, "there's something dangerous to the boredom of teenage girls"