disclaimed: young justice is not mine
When Jade looks up to see Roy walk into their apartment, she knows something is wrong.
"Is it Speedy?" She asks, stretching her arms above her. Jade is only partly concerned as Roy comes home with minor disasters often. It's not that she doesn't care about him; she does, it's just that she doesn't feel the need to be overly expressive with him about the littler concerns. Roy shakes his head and sets down his things.
"I...Jade, it's Artemis, she-" Roy begins and that's the moment Jade knows. It's one of those instinctual things maybe, or maybe she's a good judge of people. Whatever it is, Jade feels her stomach drop and learns that her baby sister is dead.
The first time Jade couldn't protect Artemis was when Artemis was five. She had gone to kindergarten and someone had pulled her piggy-tail. Artemis had, obviously, beaten the offending kid's ass. When Jade got home, Artemis was biting back tears in the kitchen. Jade knew her father and their lives well enough to know that the younger girl had been berated. Jade didn't ask for an explanation (although later Artemis offered one), just glanced around for her father and took Artemis's hand. She led her sister to the fire escape where they sat on the steps, silent save for a solemn game of slug buggy (Jade figured their dad couldn't get to mad at them for a game that sharpened a person's observance skills)
"I don't do things right a lot." Artemis said after a while. Jade looked at her sister then, really looked at her. The kid was little, her clothes too long and gawky, her limbs too thin and her eyes too slanted. There was going to be a lot of shit for the girl to push through, Jade knew.
"No one does." Jade sighed and rested her chin against the railing of the fire escape. "Far as I can see it, you just gotta do the things you do right the most and the best."
Artemis nodded and Jade leaned over, tugged a piggy-tail.
"Another word of advice? You can't just always beat up people when they do something stupid."
Jade goes to her sister's funeral. Not just the civilian one, but the hero one. Somehow Roy convinces them she'll be okay. Their mother talks and it's an entirely different speech than the civilian funeral and something in that hurts Jade. What kind of fucked up world forces a mother to give multiple eulogies for one child? Then the boyfriend talks and the mood lightens. It's still sad, but there are a few chuckles. He talks about the pair adopting a dog (named Nelson and he jumps from there into some idiotic story about Artemis being a spitfire, which elicits a grin from her former original teammates) and her helping him make traditional pho. Jade bites the inside of her cheek, near tears with an ache to turn back time that burns deep. She shouldn't have left all those years ago.
After the funeral, the boyfriend finds her. He's lanky and talks in circles sometimes, but she can see him with Artemis. She can picture them, Artemis forcing the boy to study, the boy forcing her to sneak into bars and sing along to radios in the middle of the night. The very thought nearly makes her want to thank him, for giving Artemis any semblance of that even for a short while.
"I hope it's okay that I got you the clearance to come. It isn't permanent but I thought...It seemed like both of you would want you to be here." He stumbles over the words.
"You got me invited? Not Roy, er, Red Arrow?"
The boyfriend shrugs. "I'm sure he helped but I mean, I think I was the first one to bring it up to the League."
Jade stands for a moment, shocked, before thanking him. They maintain an awkward conversation for a few moments longer before he asks her, politely, if she wouldn't mind leaving. She's both hurt and flattered at the idea that she could cause mayhem at her sister's funeral but obliges him nonetheless.
When she gets back to the apartment, Jade has the start of a plan building in her.
Because, Jade realized that she was sort of a crap sister. But maybe she wasn't even a sister anymore, she wasn't sure. But she was a very good killer. Jade peeled off her mask and made a decision. She was going to play to her strengths.
Two weeks later, she finds out who did it. The boy who killed her was a traitor from her old team, apparently he had hidden daddy issues as well. She tracks him down with ease, because he's young and sloppy and she's Jade fucking Nguyen and determined. She leaves the baby with Roy and doesn't explain herself. When she finds him, he's in some old warehouse with some girl. From her spot in the rafters, she centers the sights of Roy's bow on him. She looses an arrow and watches as it lodges in the boy's shoulder, pinning him to the ground. The girl with him drops into a fighting stance. After dropping down, Jade saunters over to them.
"My fight isn't with you, so I suggest you leave." Jade doesn't spare the girl so much as a glance. She drops to straddle the boy, pulling an arrow from the quiver. The boy is unmasked, his face contorted with fear. The girl tries to help him and Jade kicks her, sends her flying.
"I want you to know that I'm not doing this for the Light or for myself. I want you to see this arrow. You know who it's for." The girl is shouting, but Jade ignores her. "Artemis was good. People like you and I ruined her."
She jabs the arrow deep into his heart, pushing it up under his ribs and feeling blood trickle onto her fingers. The girl reaches her and is shaking her.
"How could you, Jade? He wasn't bad!" Jade looks at the girl, really looked at her. The costume was obviously a knock-off of Jade's mothers, her hair was too short and she acted entirely too familiar with Jade. Jade had been through a lot of shit recently, but somehow this last thing was the topper. She sighed before lunging at the girl.
They fought, seemingly evenly matched. But Jade's angry and half convinced she was built for this. (She remembers how Artemis had to be prodded to hurt people - whereas she had taken to it naturally) With a final push, Jade has the girl held against the wall, her sai at the girl's neck.
"I didn't want to do this." Jade says. The other girl doesn't realize it, but Jade means more than just this night. She means from the day she walked out of their apartment when she was a teen to fighting alongside her father to (at first) being a mother. The girl on the other side is just a kid and there's something about her that makes Jade thinks she picked this, chose to take up Huntress's identity. With that unfairness in mind, she draws the sai against the girl's throat. Slashes it. She thinks about stealing the girl's necklace, keeping a token like she always wanted to with the Light (her father had veto'd that quickly), but decides against it.
Jade doesn't go back to Roy's apartment that night. She runs on rooftops, shooting arrows at muggers and rapists and all the people she likes to pretend to be better than. When dawn comes, she's in Gotham, outside her mother's apartment. Somehow this is where she feels like she needs to be.
When Paula Crock looks up to see her daughter walk into her apartment, she knows that something is wrong.