Death #6
“It’s my job.” The air around her brightens for a moment, then darkens as the light pouring from her skin fades away and it’s just Judy standing in front of him, Judy looking at him with her usual expression of mild disappointment, like she knows he’s capable of so much more than he’s been showing her.
“I am going to kick your ass,” she says, and her tone is pure New Jersey, an accent that only comes forth when she’s genuinely angry or annoyed.
Most of the time she speaks with the bland non-accent of a Hollywood star, the received pronunciation of America.
“You get that, right? I am going to kick your ass so hard you’ll hit pelvis when you try to pick your nose. ”
“I don’t … I don’t think that works, anatomically speaking.”
“Ever taken a human physiology course? Because I don’t believe you have. If I say I can kick your ass all the way up into your sinuses, it’s in your best interests to believe me. Out of self-preservation if nothing else.”
Judy’s more than a foot shorter than he is, and built like an out-of-shape linguist, not a walking wall. The odds of her successfully kicking his ass are incredibly slim. He still takes a step back, putting his hands up defensively.
“Hey, now, I’m sorry I interrupted your date! But I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and as soon as my suspicions hit near-certainty, I was pretty sure I was required to tell you!”
“You were right about that part,” snaps Judy. She sighs then, shaking her head. “You really don’t know what you did, do you?”
“No,” says David.
“I suppose that’s fair, since you didn’t do it, Máni did. Did he have to start asking Chang’e about my relationship with Roger? Was it absolutely necessary for him to push her into a position where she felt like she needed to tell Roger I was in love with him?”
“What do you— Oh, fuck.” David winces. “I should have picked up on that faster. I’m sorry.
Chang’e was stepped way, way up for most of that conversation, so I was sunk way, way down to keep from getting scalded by someone else’s divinity.
Yeah, fuck. If you hadn’t told him yet, you must have had a reason, and it was uncool as hell for Máni to get you outed like that. ”
“Guys don’t like it when you seem to get serious faster than they do.” Judy shakes her head. “I’ve been dumped for that before. I really don’t want Roger to dump me. I’m really into him.”
“His whole weird deal doesn’t bother you?”
“We have our own weird deals, David, or did you forget about the part where we’re composite entities who timeshare with ancient personifications of the literal moon?”
Stung, he shakes his head. “I didn’t forget. That’s not the sort of thing you just forget.” And his timeshare was the one to drag him here, interrupting Judy during her day off, forcing this whole situation to unfurl.
“Good.” She shakes her head again. “No, Roger’s weird deal doesn’t bother me.
If anything, it’s part of the appeal. He’s like a language in the process of learning itself.
The Doctrine isn’t like the Moon. It’s never been human before, and until it finishes figuring out all its tenses and grammatical rules, it’s going to be a little soft in the middle.
A little squishy. I’m helping him find his limits—and he does have limits.
He and Dodger only look like literal gods from the outside. ”
“I have seen her turn off the gravity in a room because she was trying to make a point,” says David, torn between patience and laughing hysterically.
“The point was ‘When I call you for dinner, you come to dinner.’ She turned off gravity because Kim and Tim were late to dinner. If that’s not the behavior of a literal god, I don’t know what is. ”
“Okay, yeah, she can get a little show-off-y sometimes. It’s mostly an insecurity response.
Roger’s abilities are a lot more consistent and difficult to turn off.
I can promise you that right now he’s downstairs having a little panic attack at her, and going back over every conversation we’ve ever had, looking for a moment where he said something like ‘and that’s why you love me.
’ Because if he said that, I would love him, whether I wanted to or not.
I wouldn’t have a choice. That’s how it works for Roger.
He speaks truth into the universe. Not all truths—he can’t say ‘All quartz is actually ice cream’ and totally rework the Earth’s crust on a whim or anything.
But if he said ‘This specific piece of quartz is actually cake,’ he might be able to eat it after.
Reality wants to listen to him, on a molecular level.
It makes relationships with people who aren’t his sister really, really hard for him. ”
“He can’t influence her like that?”
“He can. He just knows that if he does, she’ll turn off the gravity to make him regret it. They have their own system for keeping things on an even keel. I sort of screwed all that up.”
“How?”
Judy shrugs. “I showed up. I was human enough to be interesting, and divine enough to be semi-safe when that wasn’t something he’d been able to say about anyone other than his sister in a very long time. His last real relationship before me was with Erin.”
David jerks like he’s been stabbed with a needle. “Erin? Creepy-blonde-lady-who-lives-downstairs Erin? The incarnate force of order?”
“That’s the one.”
David’s face contorts as he tries to picture this, working his way mentally through several possible configurations before finally landing on a desperate “How?”
“He didn’t know what she was at the time.
He didn’t know what he was at the time. Something about the way her incarnation works makes her more resistant to the Wonder Twins than the rest of us tend to be—she can actually resist him, at least enough that she was able to sleep with him in order to keep an eye on him for a lot longer than any normal person would be able to manage.
But finding out that she’d been pretending to be in love with him so she could spy on him for the alchemists kind of did a number on his heart.
He’s terrified of hurting me. I’ve tried and tried to make him understand that Chang’e would tell me if he was manipulating us, but he just says no one stopped the alchemists from hurting Artemis like that’s some sort of gotcha.
Like one of the most powerful Lunars in our pantheon dealing with a man who’s actively trying not to hurt her is the same thing as a terrified teenager and a human monster.
” Judy pauses. “Are we sure James Reed was human?”
“No?” says David. “I don’t actually know who that is.”
Judy blinks. “Sometimes I forget how recently you manifested. I’ll do the ‘famous alchemists and why we hate them’ slideshow next time we have a get-together that’s not in my boyfriend’s library, okay?”
“Okay,” says David. “I really am sorry.”
“No, you’re not,” says Judy. She smiles, thin as a razor. “But you will be.” She walks past him to the door, clearly heading downstairs.
After a momentary hesitation, he follows.