A/N: This is just a basic beginning, it actually really frustrated me because I'm in a shitty mood and just wanted to write about the mermaid stuff already. I rewrote it a few times, and even though it's less than 1k I'm finally satisfied with this.
The sound of the TV is annoying. Jessie doesn't understand how Rikki can enjoy the shows about monster trucks, the revving of their engines doesn't make her giddy like her sister. Rikki is as close to the TV as she can get, since their mom and dad are in the kitchen and can't stop her. Jessie halfheartedly wonders about telling her she's going to ruin her eyes sitting so close to the TV, but she'd honestly rather color. Dad had picked her up a new coloring book on the way home from work, which he'd left by his work boots against the wall.
When she picks it up, admiring the bright pinks and yellows on the cover, she sees with delight that it's a fantasy coloring book. Lord of the Rings-themed, it seems; she flips the pages open to a landscape page, a hilly scene with a round door set into the hill.
The sound of the kitchen faucet being turned on distracted her for a moment, but a moment spent watching the door to the kitchen saw no movement; Jessie went to where her coloring supplies were in the living room, near the bookshelf. Crayons, colored pencils, markers, and glitter pens of various colors and sizes all stuffed into a shoebox.
"-believe you!" her mom is saying, furious. Jessie glances towards the kitchen door, which is to the left of the bookshelf. "You went gambling?! Again?!"
The door wasn't as thick as they thought it was, Jessie thought wryly. And she had an ear for things she wasn't supposed to be hearing, and so Jessie slowly picked up a crayon and distractedly started coloring the grassy scene in her book. Her head was turned, though, towards the door.
"I hardly call going to Ron's for a poker game gambling, Amy!" her dad argued.
"You lost three hundred dollars," her mom spat back, "but if you don't want to call that gambling, fine! We'll call it idiocy!"
"You know Ron's going to end up giving it back to me," dad said nonchalantly. "It's only three hundred, babe. I'll have it back by the end of the week."
Her dad had lost three hundred dollars in a poker game? Jessie was confused, her dad hadn't been playing poker since she was a kid. But three hundred was a lot to lose, that was more than half her monthly rent –
Jessie's head hurt. It was a sudden, sharp and shooting pain that started behind her eyes and spread through her skull. She hadn't noticed the sounds drowning out, but suddenly her ears were ringing and her vision blurred and then. Something. Clicked.
It was like doing a line, she thought. A drip, but not in the back of her throat; instead, it was like it was behind her eyes, between her ears. It leaves a sickly sweet taste in the back of her throat regardless, and an itch in her nose from the sheer like-ness of it. A memory, half faded from the drugs she'd been on.
A car's backseat. Reminding her friends to buckle up, and hearing laughter. Music pounding from the speakers. Tires screeching, glass and metal crunching – and then pain. Cold, numb pain.
Jessie feels something drip onto her hands, and blinks. She's crying?
She's dead. Of course she's crying, she's dead. That's… No, she can't be crying if she's dead. The dead don't do anything. Except, apparently, not be dead .
"Jess?" her dad's gruff voice asks.
He picks her up, which is normal. She's four, of course it's normal for her dad to pick her up. But Jess starts to cry harder anyways, because she's not supposed to be four. She's twenty-three! No one picks up a twenty-three-year-old like this!
But twenty-three-year-olds don't have tiny hands. Or tiny bodies, where they'd once had tall, adult bodies.
It's too much; she shuts down.
A/N: so yeah. Meet Jessie Chadwick, Rikki Chadwick's fraternal twin sister. We don't know a lot about Rikki's family, so I'm interested in exploring their family dynamics. As can be read here, Jessie hasn't led the most moral life, and the warning mentioned in the summary comes up immediately. I'm not telling y'all to do drugs, please don't do drugs. Unless it's weed; in which case, blaze it.