A/N: This is so meandering I'm really kind of leery about it. We'll see. I really like Karla and Jaenelle working in tandem, since they work off each other so well (this piece is really the slashfic that wasn't). It was an experiment in first person, so I'll see if it's worked. Feedback is appreciated. The syntactical errors are all on purpose. It's stylistic. Characters don't (or shouldn't) speak written English.
Disclaimer: all characters and situations herein are copyright Anne Bishop. I claim no ownership of them and gain no monetary benefit from this work.

This is the memory I'm putting away here. I don't know why, really. I guess I just think, I've figured out that people don't see me the way I am at all, and I don't want everyone to remember me as Karla, That Sassy Bitch, and I'll never have anything to say otherwise.

Hello, you dear snoopy historian. Welcome to my web. I'm Karla.

Summer, sometime; it's actually the end of spring, but it feels a lot later. Jaenelle and I are sitting out back of her cottage in Scelt. We met there this morning, because I wanted to get away and talk and she's finally done her spring touring.

My hair's gotten long, so she's volunteered to cut it. The only scissors on hand are her sewing scissors, so I'm getting my hair cut with a combination of garden shears and Craft.

"I don't get why you leave your hair so short," she says, standing behind me while I'm sitting on a cider-cask.

"So people can tell us apart in a crowd. I'd hate to have anyone think I'm an authority figure or anything."

"That's right. You're only the Queen of Glacia."

Funny how I keep forgetting that. It's kind of bad of me, really. I shouldn't. I don't think of myself as the Queen of Glacia. I'm just used to being in charge of any room Jaenelle isn't in, and I like being able to boss other people around. I haven't asked Saetan about it, but I'm pretty sure that's a don't for Queens. Even when she's doing something like standing barefoot in her back garden, cutting her best friend's hair with garden shears, I'll bet Jaenelle always remembers she's the Queen of Ebon Askavi.

She covers my pause. "You didn't bring Morton with you."

Not that she doesn't like my Master of the Guard. He can almost beat us at poker. Not that I don't like him, either. But this is an informal weekend, and she hasn't seen Morton in a really long time.

"He's still back home. He found a girl."

The traitor.

She runs her fingers through my hair to shake out the loose bits and give my scalp a bit of a massage. "That's something new."

I laugh, because it's easy to say things like this as if you don't care. "He came and asked me permission. It was so awkward. Danelis was away this week."

And then I add, "He looked so happy."

Jaenelle puts down the shears and rests her hands on my shoulders, and I can drop my head and breathe. This was actually our rule from when we were, maybe, seven. It's hard to remember ages back then. But the rule is, you never watch anybody cry. You look away, or close your eyes, or maybe just stand so you can't see them, and I think part of our rationale is that, if you're hugging somebody you can't see their face, but we don't just sit there. We don't just watch.

Because even then we knew the world was too full of people who just watched other people cry.

I don't know why I'm crying. I guess I'm kind of jealous of him, if that makes any sense.

"It's kind of funny," Jaenelle says. "We're the only girls in the Coven left who don't have lovers."

I'm still kind of crying, but I can say half-hysterically, "But we're the prettiest."

It's not really true. At least, I'm not. But that's not the important part of it. At least we can wail about it, and even it it's joking, it's kind of true. We stick together at dances when we're not dancing, because everybody else pairs off. Anyway, it's our own faults anyway. Sometimes we get together and laugh at the poetry that different would-be Consorts write to us. Some of it's pretty bad, and when it's good we say, "It makes me feel bad about turning him down."

"It isn't fair," I say. "He's my Morton. He isn't allowed to... grow up. He's supposed to be like me, all the time."

"No, he isn't," she says, really quietly, her fingers still wrapped in the longer hair at the base of my neck.

"But I want him to be."

She takes a comb and starts using it. "Saetan said something to me, last year when Lucivar and Marian... happened. Because I was feeling kind of badly about it. He said, we can't be everything to them. They need lives of their own."

"I'm a life of his own, just the same that she is."

"He said, that's why we have Consorts. And it's why they don't have any other job. Partly because we can't expect to be everything, except to them."

"I want to be everything to somebody."

She takes my hand and squeezes it. That's kind of ground you don't get into a pissing contest with with Jaenelle. She was so everything to somebody he went crazy because of it and she doesn't know where he is, even.

At the same time, I feel like we're little girls again, playing dolls and inventing love lives for them. We were both kind of odd as children, so their lives were always these far-fetched, operatic affairs, and their troubles were always exquisitely gory (I pulled out my mother's anatomy books a few times). Here we are again. He loves her but he's in the Twisted Kingdom, and she wishes she had somebody, but her uncle scared her so much she's too afraid to love anybody...

I mean, this is ridiculous. Somebody and Anybody aren't going to keep me warm at night. I can't even think about theoretical sex with a real, live person. I can't. Not that I'm not always making dirty jokes, but that's because somebody has to, and anyway, the Coven all know I don't really mean it. I'm always embarassed when somebody takes me seriously, and a little scared, too. I've cut a man's arm off with Craft and swung it around (long story) but I've never even kissed one and really meant it. My Virgin Night was more like a really weird fighting lesson with a brother than anything else.

At least with Jaenelle I can admit that it would be nice to do something I'm afraid of.

She ruffles my hair again, and my haircut is done.

People can tell us apart in crowds again. That, and she's a lot prettier than I am.

I got a haircut, spilled my guts, and cried. Par for the course, I'm told.

Let it be left to posterity that I did something girly for once.

I think that's it.

Goodnight.