Before we begin the Showdown, please let me express my love for Jamiko, and Jack Spicer, in general. These short-stories are open for adoption and expansion, and can be taken multiple times by different people, or even the same person, just ask me permission, link me, and credit me in the resulting fic. I want to see what you've written, it always makes me feel great to see that I've inspired someone. I always have the right to say no for whatever reason.
Most, if not all, of these are connected, and dwell in the same 'universe,' together, unless stated otherwise. Sometimes I just write things for fun.
Jiùxù, qù!
RED.
Gardening. To Tohomiko Kimiko, it was for a long period far too feminine a hobby to take on, it didn't come into the picture. No one suggested it to her, who would, the girl who kicked and lifted chairs when she acted out? When she was chosen to become the Dragoness Element of Fire, she found herself torn between two convincing arguments: avoiding it out of fear of burning the pure-looking, harmless colorful plants to a crisp if she dared touch them, and desiring, deeply, to defy Omi and his blatant, ignorant—if the rare childishly honest sort—sexism. She is twenty-two. Omi, wherever he is, whatever is he up to, now, he is twenty-one. Raimundo Pedrosa is also twenty-two, and, according to her calender, Clay Bailey's birthday has recently passed, making him as always the eldest of their quartet at twenty-four. He was sixteen, and she fifteen when they first met. Doesn't he attend a rodeo without fail every time an important date comes up back home? Texans and their traditions.
She must call him. Send him a letter. A good, long, detailed letter, and try not to smudge the words with her foolish nostalgic tears. No, more than that. She should go visit him, face-to-face, in-person, and maybe cry on his shoulder a bit, he'd let her, probably wouldn't even ask any questions until she was done, because she misses it all, why did it have to end, she regrets so much—
Throat closing, Kimiko forces herself to return her attention to the unexpectedly discolored piece of work sitting before her on an outdoor side-table. The flowerpot is hand-crafted and distinctly Oriental in design, a cute little addition to her bright, spotless Japanese home. Outside, in the sun, the one source of firelight she can't dream of controlling. Tulips. She wanted red ones. She must have created a mistake in breeding them somewhere, these flowers she's doted upon for some months, primarily out of sheer boredom, and mild, morbid curiosity. A girlish pastime. A foreign concept. These are clearly more orangey than what she pictured originally. There's a gash-like lack of redness in her life.
Several years prior, she would have positively raged at this aberration, might have thrown it straight off her balcony onto whoever poor sap of a stranger strolled haplessly in the streets below. She was a touchy...she was short-fused. A bomb. Fung's guidance was a godsend. She was born into the affinity of fire not without cause, but fire can be reigned-in with effort. Well, not all. There exist many kinds, the lowest being charcoal, the hottest is oxyacetylene. Fortunately, she's never been a pillar of blue-fire—yīgè qiángdà de zhīzhù, lán sè de huǒyàn—the most powerful level that a lóng huǒ can reach. She screwed up a lot, like any other teenage girl. Not on that scale.
How'd she manage to bounce back from each incident which afflicted her? How did she manage to keep her friends, her three, stupid boys, whom these days aren't infected with that pesky, annoying idiot-teenage-boy syndrome (mostly) any longer? Somehow, against all assurances by adults growing up, "Childhood friendships don't last, don't expect them to, you'll end up disappointed," she's still in contact with Rai, Omi, and Clay, and fully intends to maintain that contact until the very day that she dies. Another surprising thing: she didn't irreparably offend the Master to the point of no mending. That one still impresses her; communication with older, graying people wasn't a forte of hers...ever, actually. That personality trait did not mix well in the Japanese culture, and getting older before the introduction to the Xiaolin-Heylin war was hell.
Not anymore. Not anymore...
She screaming matches she could entangle herself in...shinseina tawagoto!
She is thousands of times an improved person for it. They all are, how much can change in less than however-many years? Evidently, one's entire heart and soul.
She sounds like a poet. She ought to write a book.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket. A text. She checks it. It says a single word. KiMmy?
It's not Raimundo's number. Or Clay's. Omi doesn't own a cellular phone despite protestation. He relies on handwritten scrolls, and she doesn't mind that one bit. His handwriting is always unique, Japanese wasn't exactly an item on his list of things to learn. He does really have a list like that! Nobody is shocked. Who is ever shocked with that kid? She smiles fondly.
Have Rai or Clay bought a new cell?
She doubts it. For what reason? Why message her like that? May be a typo. Simple as that. Clay's spelling, punctuation, and grammar is flawless (his relatives would never allow for otherwise, they're a classy Southern family), and it takes him ages and ages to reply without fail. She waits patiently when that happens. Raimundo speaks in endless streams of infuriating chatspeak, randomly-inserted Brazilian Portuguese phrases tossed about therein, frankly making Kimiko feel like vomiting the remaining half of the day afterward. Fung is adamant about sophisticated phone-calls on her home-phone, which can be a chore occasionally, but someone close to her is never troubling. Fung only suffers the horror of cell-phones when he absolutely cannot help it.
Dojo babbles on and on like a maniac, a part of why she prefers to just request he fly on over to her place to talk—why not? He's a supernatural being, he can be anywhere in a heartbeat—instead of having to pay more and more qián by the minute for a long-distance phone-call. There are a lot of minutes when Dojo the wu-sensor lóng is involved.
This is different.
Hello. Who is this? She texts.
Wow, yoU're being so cIVIL! I am shell-shocked!
That...what?
Mind blanking at the strangeness, her fingers move over the keypad. Rude. Excuse me? Is this an old flame or an ex-friend from god-knows-when (she tries not to dwell on Keiko...that was an emotionally-tasking evening...) coming back from the dead to haunt her? Coming back from the...why bother going through the trouble? She can't recall her last date. She was fourteen, then the Xiaolin monk lifestyle swept her up. That's not to say she didn't try again, coming back to Japan, but she is so much more aged and experienced mentally than others in her age-group...it...isn't funny. It's markedly depressing some nights.
Aww, don't you recogniZe me, KimmY-ko?
For a moment she simply does nothing in response.
I CHALLENGE YOU...to a Xiaolin showdown, Kimmykims
She stares at the screen and her heart somersaults. What is this? What is this?
Hellooooo
JACK?
IS THAT REALLY YOU?
The answer is immediate: You better bElieve it, bAbY!
'Baby.' Iesu· Kirisuto. Stupid. An endearment. The last time she heard it—
Where have you been?! Where are you?! We all thought you were dead!
You wanna see me THAT badly babe?
No. She wants to punch him. In the gut. Ōmaigoddo. She can hear his voice, it's so easy, like it's right there, in her ear.
hA, NO ANSWER, DIDN'T EXPECT ONE
Goddamn it.
oK HOW DO I FIX MY SCREWED UP KEYS? THE SHIFT KEY IS ALL BACKWARDS AND SHIT IDKWTFFTD
IDKWTFFTD?
i DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FLYING FUCK TO DO
That's nothing new!
Oh hey thanks. Thanks a LOT
Ok now its fixd
Jack you asshole! Tell me where you are!
Whoa, woaoh! Don't like HAVE A COW! I'M RIGHT HEREEE
What?
Look up
She doesn't hesitate, and he's there, when did he get there? On her awning, feet swinging to and fro without a care in the world, the son-of-a-bitch. "I'm Jack Spicer, not just Iceland, not just Fiji..." His ridiculous outfit hasn't changed at all, and she just needs—to—hold him—forever—
His steel-toed boots land next to her open sandals with a thump.
"For some reason, it just never really ocurred to me how Japanese you are." He looks her over quizzically, like he's seeing her for the first time in a new light, a far cry from the searing glare of sadness and something else he departed her with last. He's forgiven her, she's forgiven him, it's been too long and too much has happened in that span of time to hold onto those grudges. It's in his eyes—maroon, not that flaring blood anger—in the lines of his face (faded cuts from not being careful enough with tool machinery), he looks older. How much older? He must be nineteen. Her age before. He was sixteen back then. "It's totally crazy."
Nope, no changes at all. Fuck all.
"Lookit this place. Everything's so...squished together."
Is he trying to set her off?
Of course he is, what a pointless question. She huffs. This is Japan. It's an island the size of California with a bunch of smaller, connected islands, and it's called home by a lot of residents. He wants to garner a reaction, like old times. He's gonna get one. Just not that.
"How can you stand it here?" Teasing suits him well, more than in the past. Was it really not even a decade ago that his voice held a whiny edge to it? He was thirteen, and then fourteen...he slipped from the radar during his fifteenth year, she can't remember much of him then...'sweet sixteen,' hit him like an anvil, puberty drop-kicks everyone, eventually, and suddenly he became more shoulders, pointier chin, less complaint (that's a lie, but he learned how to express it more cleverly) and a dollop of...leer, jeer, and the fall-on-his-ass and find his footing, usually in his mouth. Wuya left him for Chase Young, and she supposes that's the main reason he disappeared a year. He was lost. He came back, with something akin to a vengeance, he didn't need someone with him every second, anymore. It didn't sweep her off of her feet, that was a difficult feat to accomplish for literally anyone, but she did notice.
Flawless flashy re-entrance, he said.
Her, Kimiko, a nineteen-year-old young woman by then, beyond the legal adult age minimum in most countries, driven batsy by a snot-nosed little jerk, who by all means was a brat, and certainly she told him to screw off. She hadn't acted as enforcer of her own warnings well enough, she tolerated him, a minor, and wasn't snapped out of it until the others reminded her of the fact with great, great scorn (at him, not her, God, he was such a bullying magnet). The spiel ended abruptly, and he might have terrified her a little, it was a busy time, and he was yet another new thing galumphing along into her life to relearn. It took her a bit to recognize him, she remembers.
Jack liked her confusion. He told her so. He also informed her that he really liked her.
"It's where I grew up, jackass..." Her chest burns, her least favorite burning.
He grows visibly alarmed, because deep down, he in fact was a nice person, caught in the middle of something bigger than himself, chucking him around like a ragdoll on worse nights, and he can feel concern for another human being, not like the other ones he associated with (who manipulated him, took advantage of how effortless it was to make him blink, "Uh...wha'?"). His eyes grow wide, he looks younger, "Hey, hey, what's wrong? The waterworks—they're freakin' me."
She hugs herself, and why isn't he hugging her?
"It's all over, Kimmy," he says, "Don't worry about it."
Kimiko's fingers tremble, clutching his useless ornamental collar, "Jack—"
"Move on."
She accepts it a beat, then shakes her head rapidly, "What?" Ethereal, everything seems blurry. His stare bores into her, "You gotta move on."
Move...? On?
"You did nothing wrong. Stop blaming yourself, I made a mess outta something I couldn't handle in the first place."
She realizes that they were texting in Japanese the whole time. Jack didn't write or understand a lick of Japanese...when he was alive.
"I love you, I just want you to know that. It doesn't matter now, but you, and the others, you losers—you guys were the closest thing."
"God damn it! I love you too!"
This is a dream.
She wakes up. Jack Spicer is dead. He's staying that way. She goes to her balcony, and the tulips are still not red enough.