Word Count: 1032
In the aftermath of the thing with Sailor Sparks, Jade finds herself with a new roommate who is also her...charge.
She’s not entirely sure what to do with the girl, the very one who if she looks at her for too long she can see slivers and glimpses of the girl who assaulted her but when Delilah looks back, it’s mostly blank stares and tentative smiles and Jade can’t really place the girl with her righteousness with the girl who looks back at her now.
She’d known that corrupting Sparks would damage her psyche, but she hadn’t expected a complete loss.
Jade’s not even sure if that makes her feel better about things or worse because even if it felt like a victory at the time...Delilah is not the girl who attacked her and she still feels a little empty, a little...a little like everything is still unresolved.
She wonders if she made a mistake, not killing the girl who somehow managed to define her life for the past two years.
But then she looks at Delilah and her tentative smile and Jade has no idea what she feels anymore.
.
Adjusting is a struggle.
Chase provides her with a company card to use to make sure they get Delilah all of the necessities while he handles the paperwork and fine details that come with forging an identity.
Jade wonders how many times he’s had to do this and then she wonders how long he’s been doing things like this.
She decides it’s not her business and that she doesn’t want to know, there’s ignorance in bliss after all.
Besides, the important thing is that things are being handled.
Sometimes she thinks of asking Porsha for assistance, or even advice, but there’s something in her that twists and almost recoils at the thought. She doesn’t want to seem weak to the woman who recruited her and there’s a part of Jade that knows she’s being ridiculous, that Porsha wouldn’t fault her for her struggles and yet-- she simply cannot bring herself to text or call back.
The woman reasons with herself that some things need to be figured out alone and that this is one of them.
And, she’s not really alone, she’s got Delilah and that counts.
Right?
.
There’s shopping trips, working with Delilah to get her more settled, adjusting her routine to keep the younger woman close to her. Everything is extraordinary mundane, a feeling Jade is unaccustomed to and it almost feels normal, as if she doesn’t have a life outside of this resettling.
Sure, she works on videos here and there because she promised her followers a video a week, but in her latest one it’s a bit of a hey guys, there’s a lot going on right now and while I’ll do my best to still be around with weekly videos, there’s stuff going on at work that might tie me up.
For the most part the responses were positive and there were negative ones too, of course there were, but Jade let them roll off her shoulders easily. Mostly.
It’s easy to throw herself into work, into doing whatever it is she’s doing with Delilah. It keeps her distracted, it’s mundane, normal and she needs normal right now.
.
Work at Renegade Media is mostly a blurr.
Like always, she avoids the floor with Levi’s office even as she moves into the office on the top floor. It used to be Chase’s, but he took Renegade’s after his disappearance and the restructuring began to take place. It’s a bit strange, going from a desk she sometimes visited to a full blown office with a desk for a secretary, Delilah she thinks (or maybe it’s someone else, they’re still working on settling on where to put Dee).
She thinks it should make her feel powerful, but it doesn’t.
She’s still got that weird empty feeling in her chest, like there’s a vacancy left by her break up and the unsatisfactory ending she delivered to Sparks.
It was supposed to feel different than this, Jade thinks, then she wonders when that will change.
.
Change starts with a summons.
One minute she’s working on arranging her desk, making the office more homey since she’s learned she’ll be spending a fair amount of time in it with her new position but she feels the tug in her chest and it’s enough to make her pause.
She’s fortunate that the door is closed, locked even, because she barely had time to blink before she’s gone.
.
When she leaves the General-Sovereign’s office there’s a strange weight in her chest, something that almost keeps her from breathing. There’s a flutter of energy, power she doesn’t quite know what to do with that flits about and she thinks about the first time she felt this way.
It’d been a result of Spark’s assault and the pain mixed in with the rest of her aching body that she didn’t even notice.
Now? Now it feels like ice in her lungs whenever she breathes too sharply, like she was chewing on something too minty and washed it down with water that turned into frost on the way down.
There’s less white this time, in fact, it’s nearly non-existent and Marcasite wonders if it’s commentary on the staining of her soul, of the chaos that makes it home in her skin.
Maybe it’s an after effect of choosing corruption to death when it came to her assailant. Or maybe it’s not commentary at all and simply the natural evolution of things.
She doesn’t really know and she doesn’t really want to think too much about it either.
There are other things to worry about, like how she’s going to be run the company while also being the very public face. Or how she’s going to build Nembus into something that doesn’t resemble who she used to be at all.
But now, there’s a thrum of power in her veins that she has to worry about too.
A problem for later, maybe.
She’ll deal with it when she has to and compartmentalize until then, because it’s easier.
Besides, there’s too much other work to do.
