She whispers her secrets to it. Her deepest, most desperate thoughts, her hopes and her desires, her dreams and her regrets. It has listened, as much as it can, and she fancies it grows deeper in color with everything she tells it.
It wouldn't, if it was proper jade. It wouldn't remember, either, but it was a gift from her beloved uncle, and it is magicked, and so it changes, and so it can recall every word entrusted to its care.
In the earliest days, it heard about the monsters under the bed, the faeries in her lamps, the way there would be a soft rustling from outside her window and then the faintest sigh. Then there was gossip and jealousy, someone named Hannah Foley, and the oh-so-handsome Gary Price.
These days, there are the Remnants and Darquesse and a beautiful, beautiful blonde called Tanith.
At first, she's all afear, and she mutters worriedly about how maybe the man called Ghastly can cure Tanith, or how maybe Tanith can break away on her own, or how some other sort of miracle may happen.
She breathes of how she'll be strong for Tanith, and keep from becoming Darquesse.
She weeps of how she'll protect those who she loves - the ones that are left, in any event.
This gives way to a new hope.
It's a dark sort of hope, a trembling sort of one. It's a final hope. It's a swansong.
She stares at the jade globe, and speaks in a low, ragged growl. Ghastly will never succeed. He'll never manage to change Tanith, because it isn't her will. She doesn't want to change, and so she won't. Valkyrie knows that.
So she just won't bother. She'll become Darquesse, she'll kill the world, she'll destroy death, she'll do whatever the fuck it takes, just to be with Tanith again.
She does it.
The first kiss is sweet, gentle, soft. There's a moment of hesitation, of surprise on Tanith's part, but it gives way quickly to pure bliss. Tongues become involved, slowly. It is broken delicately, and breaths are sucked in, heavily. Their eyes meet.
It is followed by the second.
The second is passionate, forceful. Valkyrie's hands twine around Tanith's neck, forcing her closer, even as Tanith's own hands snake under Valkyrie's T-shirt, Valkyrie's protective outer clothing having been long abandoned. A gasp is breathed into Tanith's mouth, and the hands around Tanith's neck clench. A shudder is shuddered, and neither is quite sure to whom it belonged.
It is followed by the third (and, it must be said, the third is followed by the fourth, which is followed by the fifth, and so on and so forth until count is quite lost).
Their last kiss is warm, and quite like the first in that it is gentle and sweet and full of love. It is also regretful.
Valkyrie can see how her life could have panned out, if there were no Remnants, no Darquesse, no magic.
If Tanith had been her age. If Tanith had gone to school with her. If Tanith had been her girlfriend, had been her fucking wife, if they had grown old together in a beautiful house with the little round of jade there to listen to their joy.
The atmosphere of the classroom, with its harsh lighting and its uncouth inmates, becomes warmer as the young girl steps in, looking about herself with all the dignity only a six-year-old can muster. Her cool eyes soften as they rest upon Stephanie's…
"Leather? Really?" Stephanie's tone is incredulous, but her friend just shrugs, grinning widely. It's perfectly her style, of course, perfectly her fit, for even at thirteen, her figure is excellent…
The nooks and crannies of a school are perfect to hide in, as all the kissing couples prove. Stephanie and her best friend alone have yet to try them out, and so they do. Together, of course, and they prove perfectly satisfactory for the pair of fifteen-year-olds….
The ceremony is, naturally, somewhere 'far off and foreign', as it must be, for it to be legal. It's a day of perfect happiness.
It's a pity, she reflects, as she begins the spell that will draw the world to an end, that it couldn't happen that way…
And something in her lover's eyes, a butterfly glint, tells her that yes, it will.
In another life.
Stephanie Edgley is deliriously happy. Her life is perfect, and she is in the shops with her friend, with her lover, with the girl who has named herself Tanith Low, just as Stephanie calls herself Valkyrie Cain.
Her eyes rest upon a beautiful ball of what appears to be jade at the same moment Tanith's eyes do, and they look at each other, and they smile, nervously, all teenaged awkwardness.
It isn't their first kiss, and it certainly isn't their last, but it's memorable, and so the little piece of jade remembers it.
A/N: Jade is fabled to change color if you wear it often. It doesn't, but that doesn't make the myth any less lovely.
~Mademise Morte, January 2, 2011.