Disclaimer: Victorious is my defeat.
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"I like you better when you're sad."
Jade looks up, eyes rimmed red. She's on her bed, combat boots streaking the dark purple blanket with mud. I want to tell her that she's getting her bed dirty, that you're supposed to take your shoes off before you get on, but she already knows that. She just doesn't care.
"What?"
Her voice is hoarse, like she kept it too long in her throat and it's gone rusty. She's been crying. Softly and quietly. Not at first, not when I got here. She was all arrowed eyebrows and sighs, like usual. She told me to leave, but she didn't want me to, so I stayed. You can't always listen to what Jade says. She lies all the time.
After a while, she stopped talking.
"I like you better when you're sad."
I say it again, voice soft. I'm standing beside her bed, arms tucked around myself. It always feels cold in Jade's house. Jade says it's because the walls are stuffed with asbestos, but I don't think that's it. I think it's because all the colours are so dark and lonely. There's nothing to warm your eyes up.
"You… you 'like me better'? What does that even mean, Cat?" Jade swipes at her eyes, studded brow dragging down. She's scraped some of the rust off her voice now. It's getting sharp again.
I don't know how to explain it. How to tell her that she's like Shakespeare when she's sad. How she's beautiful and tragic and majestic, in a quiet, quiet way. She's like a silent film, flickering and solemn, and the parts where she talks are the least important. It isn't what she says, it's how she says it. How her lips move and how her tongue touches her teeth and how the muscles in her cheeks slip underneath her skin. How she goes from something angry and loud with claws and teeth and blood, to something mute and fragile. A butterfly's wingbeat.
"You make it simple." I frown, because that's not the way to put it either. I want to say what I mean, but the words haven't been invented yet. All the other ones don't fit right.
Jade buries her face in her hands for a moment, taking a deep, audible breath before sighing. "Cat, you're making even less sense than usual. How is it simple? I thought you hated sad people?"
It's true, I do. They make me twist and turn inside, because I don't quite know what to do. They get messy, and they get loud, and they slough and fall apart, and I don't know how to smush them together again. There's too many things to do at once. There's tears and sobs and moving hands and shaking lungs and I can't keep track of them all. They get all complicated, and I can't solve them anymore. I can't find the solution to the problem they've become.
It's different with Jade. She's so complicated when she's happy. She swerves all over the place, like my brother did in his driving test, and she leaves just as many casualties. But Jade sad? She's one note. She's not a crashing cacophony like all the others. She draws herself in where everyone else spills out. I know what to do with her, but I can't find the words.
I sit on her bed, mattress creaking, and I try to find something to say. To put it into concentrated words. But how do you define a feeling? "You get quiet when you're sad." I look down at my hands, linking them in my lap. "You stop talking, but I still listen."
Jade's jaw tightens. "So what? You like me better because I shutup?"
I shake my head desperately. "No! That's not it at all." For once, I wish I wasn't me. Anyone else could say the right thing, could say everything they need to in a hug, in a hand on the shoulder. "You tell me to leave you alone, all the time."
"Yeah, and I'm about to tell you again."
"You say it, but… it's only words. You don't mean them…" I run my tongue out over my lips, risking a glance at her. "Do you?"
Jade looks away, voice lower, that annoyance whetting it gone. "I guess not."
"When you're sad, you don't say those things. You're honest. You don't… you don't lie so much."
"So you like me better because I don't make you feel like crap then."
I huff, hands tangling. Jade takes my ill-fitting words and makes them mean all the wrong things. "That's not it either."
Jade's hand finds her forehead, eyes closing, still rimmed red. "Then what is it, Cat? Why do you get off from seeing me cry?" Her voice lacks its usual venom, washed away by her tears, by the quiet exhaustion that comes with them. The too tired, too tired that seems so gentle in her, so defeated.
"Because-" Because it's quiet. "Because-" Because it's simple. "Because-" Because it's honest. "Because I know how to make you happy again."
The words spill out, quick and breathless, and if I couldn't find the right words before, then these ones found themselves.
Jade's hand leaves her face, lowering to her lap. Her face is growing complexities I don't like, her shoulders drawing in under her thin black shirt.
"I know what you need." I lick my lips. Every time I presume to 'know' Jade, she ends up kicking me out. She tells me I know nothing about her, and if I believed all the lies her mouth told, I wouldn't. But I do know her. I think she just wishes I didn't. I know how much she fills herself with others. How empty she feels when no one else is there inside her. She echoes with every breath. She thinks I don't see how hollow she is.
"What do I need, Cat?" Her voice is flat, steady. Almost dreamy. She's cried so long so hard, not now, not today. But every day. I can see it in the way she never tried to hide them from me, by the tissues by her bed, by the way she just ignored them, like they were something ordinary. "Go on. Tell me. Tell me what I need." Jade's voice urges me on, a smile that doesn't match her eyes creeping onto her lips.
"You need someone to love you."
Her face freezes. "Cat-" Her lower lip trembles. "No." Another lie. She's becoming all complicated. If she tangles her lies into her sadness, if she becomes a cacophony, that one note I recognise will be lost. She'll be sad, and everything I do will be the wrong thing.
"I can do that. I can make you happy." I can. I'm pretty sure I can. Maybe I can't say the right thing, maybe I can't find the words because they're too big or too small or the wrong shade, but I can fix her. She fills herself with poison and pain, but I can love her in the way she can't. I can love her, because I do, and maybe it's not the way Beck did, but I can twist it and shape it until it looks just the same. Until it fills her just like Beck's love did.
She's a tragedy I can change the ending to.
People do their best talking in touch, and I've spent my whole life being a listener. Maybe I can speak what I mean then, without my tongue tripping over itself. Love is such an easy word to say. People don't even listen to it. You can lie about it. But you can't lie with touches. Jade doesn't want to listen to my love, and I don't have the words to make it real.
So instead of words, I use touch.
I sit beside her on the bed. She doesn't move when I take her hand, when I wriggle my fingers between it. She doesn't move when I lean closer, fingertips of my other hand skimming her cheek. The skin is flushed and hot. I can feel her heart in it. She doesn't move when my lips brush her other cheek, soft and brief.
"I can make you happy." I murmur, and the words jump from my mouth into her skin, wrapped in a hot breath.
She moves then.
She shivers.
Her hand slips from mine, but it doesn't stay away for long. She grips my shoulder and she's like the tide, pushing me away only to pull me back in, and we come crashing together. She doesn't want me, but she does.
It's not my lips she wants, but she finds them all the same. It's not my love she wants, but it's love that she needs. She tastes like salt and she hurts my mouth like metal and I know she can't be happy be with me. I know that. Happy Jade isn't something I need. She's sharp and she's angry and she's kind and whirling and confusing. She can't be happy, but she won't be sad. I can make her into something waiting, something quiet and soft and grey, and when what she needs comes along, she'll burst into colour again. And, like any crutch, I'll be discarded.
I fix her with touch, with taste. I find the sharp spurs of her spine, the tines of her ribs, the peaks of her hipbones, and I smooth them over with my fingers until they don't pierce her skin, until they don't hurt her anymore. I kiss away the paths her tears took, dam them up behind her eyes. I take the soft sobs from her lips and twist them into whimpers, into moans and sighs and gasps. I mould the soft clay of her body into a smile.
I can make her happy. For just a moment. For just a sentence. But it's better than being sad all the time. A thread of light in a dark room is better than no light at all, right? It's something to hold onto, something to climb and cling to, and who'd choose hopelessness over happiness? I'd pick a little bit of happy over a lot of sad anytime. Everytime.
It hurts too much to be sad, to feel claws scratching at your heart like it's a cat toy. It hurts too much to have that hollow ringing in your stomach, a church without parishioners. It hurts to have nothing inside you, nothing warm and soft and purring. It hurts too much to feel everything. Better to feel someone else instead.
I know what makes her sad. I know what she needs. I need it too.
I like her better when she's sad.
Because she's simple, because she's quiet, because she's honest. Because she's just like me, then.
Mostly I like her because I can make her happy, and making her happy makes me a little less sad. It makes me a little more complex, a little louder, a little more dishonest. It makes me a ray of light, and I prefer that to being darkness any day.
Jade likes me better when I'm sad too.
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A/N: Reviews are lovely things. Like diamonds rings, or the promises of kings.
Or like a double cheeseburger with a side of fries and omg is that a chocolate sundae too good lord who put these here was it an angel they're mine now NO MOM IT'S MINE GET AWAY.
So please review. It'll take my mind off my starving family.