The Trickster: Part One
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Time was a foreign concept to him, though he had long been acquainted with the passage of days and years in the most basic of senses, and he was yet the smallest, the youngest of his demonic clan. He was the child still and would undoubtedly always be, as she had been once, and he watched her through the shadowed holes he could just barely scratch through the veined exorcism. If he truly was a child, he reasoned he was only doing what any child would, watching over his favored toy when it was taken from him and loathing those who would take it from the delicate glass cabinet sheltering it out of his reach. She was not theirs to play with; she was his alone, for that was how these things were done.
Once they were done in such a manner, but now, when he was chained with shackles unseen to the smoggy realm of amber tones and floating mountains, he had no ability to punish those breaking the ancient rules. He waited in bondage and watched her as she lived, breathing, moving, aging, as she was not unsusceptible to time like him, and it was fascinating in the beginning. She was a lean child, small and graceful as the tiger's slinking cub, and had a masculine strength in her features most Oriental women did not, something that continued to live within her with each passing year alien to his existence. Though she grew taller and fuller, youthful fat shedding at the onslaught of a woman's sinew, and her face became less round and sharper in its angles, that sturdy smirk remained on her face and in her blood.
It was the want for her that pained him as few things else had done so.
He was the trickster, the demon king of those who sought to deceive and shroud their motives until such a time that deception was no longer necessary, the plundering finally laid free, and he had planned to use her to steal from that disgusting uncle of hers. How could he have foreseen she, too, was a trickster? Easy enough it had been, taking the guise of a pitiful mortal and befriending her in a perfect moment of her weakness, and she had amused him with her antics, until he realized she was tricking him with her words just as he was her with his actions.
She did something no mortal had tried before in the thousands of meaningless years of his unending lifespan, deceived the demon Hsi Wu into chains unlike those he suffered under now; she smiled and teased and argued him through cajoling loops he had not spied before he approached her on that glorious sunshine day, and this angered him. She, the human child Jade, had used pranks and deceptions that were not the sort meant to be used: she gave petty truths and shaded honesty in a genuine bid for someone's trust, wily in her nearly always successful efforts to gain the pure friendship she could use for her own ends, but also to protect the one she had fooled.
He hated her with an intensity that burned over any other animosity he had ever before sheltered in grim mockery, left to rot in ceaseless unchanging life amidst the memory of sarcastic quips he had ridiculed her with the last he had seen her and the fading chunk of technology forever blinking her child's face. It was not her place as a human to challenge his superiority over lies, nor was it her right to even consider the possibility of friendship, and he wished her damnation for giving him the want, the need, and the affection.
It was easy watching the veins of her softly growing childhood, screeching through the infinite skies of this empty hell to crevices and caves hidden in the largest rocks where he could peer at her without his siblings knowing his treacherous movements. He still tasted the hatred of seeing the boy birthed of Spanish lineage when it dawned upon his human mind that there were indeed things about Jade that were mysterious and undeniably marvelous, and he had raged, throwing a mindless tantrum of childish proportions. For years of the outside time he had played tricks on his family to whittle away time as he ignored her existence, seething inside where he knew she was growing and discovering there were things about the boy she did not find annoying or foolish.
Hsi Wu had been a fool.
His standard was patience, the slippery kind that worked best in cover of dark, blanketing night as he pried through the inky skies on tendril wings he had given to the bat, his multitude of children. She had destroyed his patience when she was but a girl, irritating him with her sincerity and sneaky jests, pushing him into an aggravated need to steal what he had come for. There was no time, no chance, he could never afford to think on her inexplicable fondness for the human he had pretended to be, whatever name he had used. So he had tripped and fallen down the laughing slope of folly, revealing too much and sliding too quickly into his search for whatever it was he had searched for.
He could not even remember his attempted conquest. How had she managed to trick him so easily in so painfully breezy a manner? Her vile treachery of honest welcome remained in his mind still, haunting his thoughts with thick, tangible disgust.
He could have taken her, had he been patient, made her a captive toy and kept her from ever escaping his clawed grip had he so desired, but she had deceived him with nary a speck of knowledge over his true being. This made him want her even more when finally he returned to watching her, seeing with startled crimson eyes that the child was no longer small and round, but petite and curved in a way that spoke of both threat and grace. She was a trickster in the body of a female, fifteen years in age making her something between girl and woman in the society, though he was an ancient being and thusly knew she was a woman. Remembrance of how he might have possessed her had he not been an impatient sop struck again, and he had snarled, returning for a few days to teasing and mocking his brothers into a furious frenzy before leaving them to deal with their own heightened anger.
She was confident and practiced, innocent where he was dark, though both he and she were deceivers of different order. Heads turned in the school in place of rude gestures, young men suddenly made self-conscious of this woman who could literally rip them apart, one they had mocked as children in disdain and childish idiocy. It pleased him with an infantile sense of satisfaction when they received naught from her but cool smiles and ignoring ears, recognizing she did not think them worth her time.
At night it was worse, as she knelt beside her small cot in the house her parents still lived in, reciting prayers to the gods after she had clicked off the phone from her evening chat with the other Chan family, from her great-grandfather to the bald man from the American government. She prayed for things that were wise, asking for protection from her honored ancestors to guard her family and those she loved, and she prayed for him.
He had thought her to be damning him in her nightly ritual, a thought that never failed to bring him peals of amusement; he was a demon and was thusly damned by right. He saw her lips move, saw them form the familiar characters of his name, and it had disturbed a part of him deep inside, even as he laughed in cruel humor at her condemning, until he heard what it was she was truly praying for. She prayed salvation for him, chanted words of foolish ideals that he might be reformed in the endless plane of hellish loneliness, in hopes of something unsaid.
Why would she pray for him?
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Notes: I do apologize if this does not fit neatly into the Jackie Chan Adventures continuity, as my family has moved to Mississippi (and, annoyingly, the county I live in does not have WB!) and I must rely on the reruns Cartoon Network has recently begun airing. Please forgive me! ;]
Feedback: Highly appreciated. I haven't visited the JCA section of fanfiction.net in quite a while, so I'm not sure if any Hsi Wu/Jade people are still around. In any case, I would be very grateful for any words you would be willing to share.
Disclaimer: Nope. Don't own 'em. I'm sad about that, too.
Status: To be continued, natch.