Rose and Jamal

Rose found Jamal in the ruins of his house, the pieces of his old life reduced to dust and kindling. He was picking through the rubble, quiet and focused enough that he didn’t hear her walking close.

Or maybe Rip’s stealth skills were still with her. 

Earth was healing, and while the barrier between it and the other worlds in its constellation would never be impassable again, the ability to access abilities from those other worlds was fading quickly. That Rip was still as close to Rose as she was spoke to how thin the wall between the two facets of her self was, but even so Rip’s magic and exceptional talents stood on the bedrock of the Risen Kingdoms and weren’t going to last more than another hour on Earth, at best.

“It doesn’t look like they were here,” she said, stopping a short distance away from Jamal. 

Normally she wouldn’t have knelt beside him and offered him a hug if that was what he needed. This time though, she waited. Sometimes he needed support, and something he needed to work things out on his own before he could let people in again, even her. Neither Rose nor Rip had magical insight enough to tell the two states apart, and so she let him decide, content to simply be there when and if he needed her.  She couldn’t claim any special wisdom in that though given that she’d learned the strategy from him.

“They weren’t,” Jamal said. “I talked to Mrs. Leibowitz.”

Gazing over to the right, Rip saw Mrs. Leibowitz’s house had suffered just a bare fraction of damage Jamal’s had. It was like a tornado had reached down to specifically smite his home alone. That seemed fair somehow. Mrs. Leibowitz had helped them out a bunch of times, giving them a place to ‘help out with chores’ when they were little and needed an excuse to not be at either of their homes.

“That’s…is that good?” she asked. Neither of them had a great relationship with their parents. Having just come from what was probably the last shouting match with her mother that she would ever have, Rose felt lighter and freer than she thought she ever had.

But that didn’t mean Jamal would necessarily feel the same.

“It is,” Jamal said, turning to face her and showing her a smile that was far warmer and more genuine than she’d thought she’d find on him. At least in regards to his family.

“Have you talked to them?” she asked, trying to understand this new place where she found her best friend.

“Yeah. I talked to my Mom,” he said, pushing a section of fallen wall over to clear a space for them to sit down. “She’s…someone new?”

“What like she got replaced with someone like Rip or Matt?”

“No. She’s just different. It’s like, almost dying, and losing me, and just everything that happened? I think it all forced her to look at what she’d been doing. She seems, calmer I guess?”

“Did she ask you to stay with her?’ Rose asked, dreading the answer, but knowing she had to be brave enough to ask.

“Stay? No. She said…,” he paused at the leading edge of a lump in his throat, right before it could put a catch in his voice, “…she said that she knew she’d messed up, a lot, and that all she wanted now was for me to follow my dreams and do what I thought mattered. She said she trusted me, and that once she got out of the hospital, she was going to find a new home and that she hoped someday I’d feel safe enough to come back and visit her there.”

Not a single one of those words sounds like something Jamal’s Mom would ever have said, but listening to him, Rose knew that she had.

Jamal wasn’t magically healed by his mother’s change of heart and sudden maturity. He was touched by it, and maybe set free too, but he’d been hurt enough that his joy was tempered into quiet and plain words rather than any surging exaltations of happiness.

“What about…?” Rose stopped, unsure if she even wanted to say the name of his mother’s boyfriend.

“Still alive too, believe it or not,” Jamal said. “Jumped in front of a Demon Centipede Bus and got stabbed like fifty times, but he managed to both save my step-sister and survive thanks to someone killing the Centipede thing and exploding it into a cloud of healing potions.”

“Huh. That’s not how I would have expected that to go.”

“That’s what my mother said. Didn’t stop her from kicking him to the curb though and from the sounds of it, he agreed. Apparently he’s off to join a monastery or something. Had a near death experience and discovered he had a lot of thing to work on before he was going to be ready to be a fit for human company.”

“Wish I’d known all it would have taken was pushing him in front of a bus. Could have tried that a long time ago,” Rose said. Or Rip. Or both really. Neither one liked The BoyFriend.

Jamal chuffed out a little laugh.

“Glad you didn’t. I’d hate to have to commit grand theft or something so we could thrown in the same prison together.”

“Like they’d have ever caught me,” Rose said.

“Hey, you can’t run like lightning over here,” Jamal said, standing up and offering her his hand.

She took it and brushed herself off. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Nah, but it was a dumb idea,” Jamal said.

“Shut up, you’ve never had a dumb idea in your life. Spit it out, what were you looking for?”

Jamal put a hand on the back of his neck, and made a quick study of his own feet.

“Well, you know how Tessa figured out how we can split apart?” he said.

Rose did, and she was reasonably certain she never wanted to try it. Ever. Every moment she stood on the Earth, she felt the maddening itch to get back in Rip’s skin.

Being a human girl was fine. Great even. Being a Tabbywile though? Fast and strong and free as the wind? She liked being Rose, but she loved being Rip Shot. Asking if she wanted to split the two apart felt similar to asking if she wanted to remove the left half of her torso from the right.

No thank you.

“You’re thinking of taking her up on that?” Rose asked, not startled but puzzled.

“Not permanently,” Jamal said. “I’d just like to know how, and I had this stupid idea to go with it.”

“I will Lightning Bop you,” Rose warned him.

“Okay, not stupid, just, you know, stupid,” he said, though the last was more teasing than serious.

Rose responded properly by glowering and raising her hand in a claw-like fashion.

“I thought if I could find one of my Dad’s old books on engineering, Matt and I could split apart when he was damaged and I could repair him. Or maybe invent new gadgets and upgrade him.”

“You were going to put an Arc Reactor into him weren’t you?”

“Well, he is a ‘Man’, and he is made of ‘Iron’, sorta.”

“And you think that’s a stupid idea?” Rose accused him.

“Well…” Jamal began to say.

“Why on Earth would you NOT do that?” Rose asked. “That’s sounds freaking awesome!”

“I know, but it’s not like I can actually build an Arc Reactor.”

“Well sure, not here. But in the Risen Kingdoms? Come on you know there’s like ten thousand people working on that already!”

“Yeah, but they probably know what they’re doing,” Jamal said.

“Dude, when was the last time you saw an Adventurer that knew what they were doing?”

“Okay, that’s a fair point. But still, I wouldn’t even know where to start. Not really I mean.”

“Geez if only you knew someone with a direct like to one of the literal gods who created the Risen Kingdoms.”

Jamal stared at her as though waiting for a punchline that was never going to come.

“Me!” she said. “I’m still the High Priestess of the Lord of Storms you know.”

“Uh, no. No I did not know that,” Jamal said, raising his forefinger in protest.

“I told you! Or, hmm, I think I told you?” Rose said, trying to remember if there’d been a time after she’d called the Lord of Storms back to life and after they’d met her deity in Heaven and she’d had a chance to confirm that her, largely ceremonial, status was intact.

“That you have a god on speed dial? No, I think I’d remember that.”

“It’s not exactly speed dial and, to be fair, the reborn gods are kinda up to their eyeballs in requests so I’m not supposed to call more than once a week or so.”

“Oh yeah, weren’t they saying something about coding a healthy work/life balance into the fabric of the world?”

“I think that was a joke. From what Storms said, they’re being very careful with any changes they make. Nobody want to let in any new Oblivion Remnants, even if the Risen Kingdoms and Gaia mostly have that sorted out.”

“I can see that. We just got done saving the place. It’d be nice if it stayed saved for a while.”

“Yeah. That said though, I’m pretty sure I can get you hooked up with someone who knows what they’re doing and is capable of teaching what they know too,” Rose paused, a terrible thought turning in her belly. “Umm, if you’re still thinking you’ll come back. That’s what your Mom was suggesting so it’s okay right?”

Jamal shook his head and for a moment Rose’s heart sank into her socks.

“I’m not going back there because my Mom said it was okay.” He offered her a smile. “I went into her room to tell her I wasn’t coming back here. Ever. I don’t know if I would have stuck to that, but it was how I’d felt for so long.”

Rose breathed a sigh of relief, and nodded her understanding.

“Now though? Now I think I will be back. Not soon, probably. Maybe for the holidays? Or maybe just on a random weekend. I don’t know. I just…I just want to see her now. It’s…it’s the strangest thing.”

Rose did step forward then and, as she embraced Jamal, felt his tears fall onto her shoulder.

It was a good while before they parted, even though Rose felt more confident than ever that they wouldn’t have to really part.

“We should get going,” Jamal said. “Matt’s sounding kind of distant and the others will be expecting us.”

“You think they know we’re coming back?” Rose asked. “We didn’t promise anything. They wouldn’t let us.”

“Yeah, well they know we’re kids. I don’t think they wanted to be guilty of kidnapping, even under weird circumstances like this. Getting things squared away with our families was on us.”

Rose spend half a moment reflecting on how poorly her own reunion had gone. Not everyone passed through periods of crisis and upheaval to become better people. Seeing that, and hearing how much Jamal’s Mom had changed somehow made things easier for Rose. She’d never been interested in going back to her Earthly life, and knowing it didn’t want her back made that easier, even if it probably shouldn’t have.

She searched for the feelings of abandonment, or loss, or rejection and came up empty. In dead soil in her heart, new things had taken root. They weren’t the relationships other people had, but they were beautiful nonetheless, and most importantly they were hers.

She wasn’t Jamal or anyone else’s girlfriend, but she still had someone she trusted with all her heart.

She wasn’t anyone’s daughter, not anymore, but she had older people who she could turn to. People who cared about her not because they legally had to, not because society expected them to, but because they’d chosen her as one of their own.

Most of all though, she wasn’t alone. There was a whole world of people and monsters and weirder things out there, and they saw her not as a burden, or a nuisance, but as a person.

As who she really was.

As an Adventurer.