Sticky ficky 9
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That’s right hoes, I’m back and bringing you more sticky ficky content. I really set this chapter up expecting to introduce work on a string but it didn’t happen I PROMISE I SET IT UP FOR NEXT CHAPTER THO
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Silence greeted Jude as she stepped, shaking and weak, out of the shower. She could still see bits and pieces of her dream in her mind’s eye, could still feel the sharpness of Cardan’s nails digging into her neck and smell Balekin’s rotting flesh.
She tried to take deep breaths, to swallow around the painful lump in her throat, but she couldn’t find the strength to.
Just as she was about to start hyperventilating again, she heard a knock at the door. It started soft, just three delicate raps. But when nobody answered, the knocking became louder.
Funny, Vivienne and Oak should still be home. Why weren’t they opening the door?
Jude kept her plush blue towel wrapped tightly around her and walked through the apartment, her wet feet threatening to slip on the linoleum floors.
“Fucking calm down, I’m here,” she griped as the person on the other side continued to beat at the door. Still, nothing couldn’t prepared her for what she saw on the other side.
There, out in the hallway, was Heather.
She opened the door, crossing her arms over her chest. “Vivienne isn’t here.”
Heather brightened upon seeing her, only dulling slightly at the mention of her ex before smiling once more and pushing into the apartment.
“I’m not here for Vivi,” she stated. “I’m here for you.”
Jude, who couldn’t stop the puzzlement from showing on her face, merely watched as Heather continued through the apartment she’d once shared. She was carrying a long sleeve of fabric, longer even than her leg, tucked up under her arm.
Heather stopped in front of Jude’s door and motioned for her to enter. Jude raised a brow in response.
“Get dressed,” she ordered. “We’re going out.”
She said it with enough confidence that Jude didn’t even question it. She moved robotically, going to her room and dressing in comfortable leggings and an old concert hoodie. As she laced up her boots, she studied her sister’s ex lover.
“Why are you here?” Jude finally asked.
“I told you, I’m here for you,” she answered, then her face faltered a bit. “I need someone to talk to about,” she sighed, “everything. It’s messing with my head and I can’t figure it all out”
Reasonable enough, Faerie can unhinge even the most sane of people.
Jude, dressed and ready, nodded for Heather to lead the way. It didn’t even occur to her as she walked out the door that it was the first time in weeks she’d left her self-determined prison. After the dream, she was tired, too bone tired to think about her own sorrow.
She was tired enough to try something new.
Neither woman spoke as they hopped on the bus. Being late morning, most people in the city were already at work. It was just them and the bus driver, sitting in a comfortable silence that was broken only by the humming of passing cars.
As they got off the bus and the smell of salt hit Jude, she finally asked what they were doing.
“I always used to go kite flying when I needed to think,” Heather explained. “ I’d go with my dad when I was younger and Vivi when we were together. It helped me talk things out.”
Jude blinked against the sunlight, her body still used to the Faerie timeline.
“I can’t exactly talk this out with dear old dad,” she reasoned. Jude snorted.
It was the first sound that resembled a laugh she’d made in weeks.
When she was a little girl and her parents still lived, they always used to go to the beach during the summer. She can remember days spent building castles out of sand and doing cartwheels down the coastline, searching the water with her twin for any sign of mermaids.
The mermaids she’d imagined were far sweeter than the ones who really lived.
“C’mon, kick your shoes off!”
So Jude did. She tucked her socks into her boots and tied the laces so she could hang them round her shoulders while they walked. Together, Jude and Heather stepped off the boardwalk and into the sand, the warmth of the sun-baked earth seeping into the bottoms of their feet.
They walked in silence and Jude thanked whatever gods existed for the fact that the surf was calm that day. They could barely hear the ocean and hardly anyone was in the water.
“Here looks like a good spot,” Heather decided aloud, dropping her shoes and the sleeve she carried.
“What’s that?”
“My dual-line,” she answered, pulling fabric and strings and handles and sticks out of the sleeve. “I figured I’d bring the easy one, in case you wanted to try.”
“I’ve never seen a kite that looked like that,” Jude observed the mess of black and purple and green nylon as Heather began to unravel the strings from around the handle.
Heather grinned at her, laying out some forty feet of line. “It was handmade by a guy down in Georgia. My dad bought it from the artist. It was my first stunt kite, I never liked mono-lines.”
Jude watched quietly as the other girl set up the vaguely triangular kite, testing the tension on the carbon fiber rods that held the fabric open before using a lark’s head knot to tie either of the handle’s strings to separate sides of the kite.
“Watch this,” Heather grinned, setting the kite down so it was being pushed back by the wind.
So Jude crosses her arms and watched Heather walk her way back to the handles, keeping the kite’s lines taught so it didn’t go over into the sand. Then, when she’d gotten the handles firmly grasped, she took a step back.
And the kite launched into the sky.
For all the beauty Jude had witnessed in Faerie, nothing was quite like this. It flew, nothing like a bird and everything like a leaf gliding through the wind. Though the colors were glaringly unnatural, it still gave off a calming sense of beauty.
Jude had become so used to the terrifying version of pretty that she’d forgotten what mundane beauty could look like. She’d forgotten how much she’d loved it.
Heather whooped as she caught the wind, pulling the line in her right hand towards her so the kite did a spin in the air and laughing at how it oversteered. They squinted together, watching the kite fall and then rise as it lost and caught gusts of air.
Jude smiled. It was small, and it was gone quickly, but she’d smiled all the same.
“Would you like to try?” Heather asked and she nodded, letting her friend hand her the handles and then stand behind her to help her get the hang of things.
“If you want it to turn left, pull the left handle towards you. For right, pull the right. Don’t move the handles side to side. Lift them up for the kite to go higher and pull them down for it to go lower,” she explained, laughing loudly as Jude promptly did exactly the wrong thing and sent the kite smashing into the ground.
“Oh shit—“
“Don’t worry!” Heather exclaimed, running over to the downed kite. “They’re tough!”
She picked up the kite and set the tip back towards the sky, holding it aloft and telling Jude to step back. When she did, Heather launched the kite once more.
What must’ve been an hour passed as she taught Jude the ins and outs of stunt flying. She got talking about her foils and her quad-lines and how her mother knew how to spin a mono-line and keep it in the air. She told Jude stories of competitions she’d watched and festivals she’d been to. She even mentioned how she’d started a kite flying club in her highschool.
“It’s just something about the way the wind whispers through the trees on a good day,” she grinned. “Sets my soul at ease. Nothing quite clears the mind like a kite in the sky.”
“We don’t have kites in Faerie,” Jude whispered, almost reverent in her tone. “I suppose it loses its appeal when so many people can fly themselves.”
She passed the handles back to Heather, who began doing tricks like a seasoned professional.
“Faerie loses its appeal when the people have no appreciation for simple things,” Heather whispered back, sounding perturbed. “Like trust, for that matter.”
Jude snorted as Heather made the kite fly in a square. “Trust? In Faerieland? Vivi didn’t prepare you at all.”
Heather shot her a look and the two stared at each other for a long time until the kite crashed down again.
She walked to grab the kite and launch it for Heather.
“How’d you survive? Back when you were a child, I mean.”
Jude crosses her arms, moving back to her previous spot, keeping her eyes on the kite the whole time.
“Madoc viewed us as his responsibility after he killed Mom and Dad,” she shrugged. “And we were children. The fae are usually very careful with children, even human ones. Babies are so unbelievably rare that to harm a child would be unthinkable for most.”
She allowed herself to look back over and catch Heather watching her.
“I suppose we just got lucky that we had enough time to learn the ways of Elfhame.”
Heather turned back to the kite.
“And we used a lot of Rowan berries and salt.”
The other girl pursed her lips and sent the kite careening towards the sand, saving it at the last possible moment. “I just don’t understand how an entire people can be so unbearably cruel. So evil and manipulative, especially when they can’t lie.”
“They’re self-satisfying,” she offered like it wasn’t a bad thing. “A way of life that you either get used to or get crushed by.”
“Don’t they ever get tired of being selfish?”
“Why would they?” Jude half laughed. “It gets them what they want.”
She let the kite fall and neither woman went to retrieve it.
“Do you ever get tired of playing their game?” Heather asked.
Jude blinked, her fingers tapping a soundless rhythm on the elbow of her crossed arm as she stared out into the calm, glassy sea.
“I get tired of losing it,” she finally answered. “And I tire of the fact that I only lose when my selfishness isn’t driven by destruction.”
Together they sat down and Heather, sensing Jude wasn’t done, waited for the younger woman to continue.
“I’ve killed more people than I care to count, bathed in blood and dug secret graves in the dead of night. I’ve engineered the fall of the eldest Greenbriar child and, unknowingly, helped set the stage for the fall of the others.”
“I’ve dominated meetings and outsmarted countless people I shouldn’t have been able to outsmart.” She finally turned to look at Heather. “I’ve done all this and more. So why is it that it only works when I’m hurting someone? Why is it that, on the briefest occasion I do something out of love—be it crowning Cardan to protect my brother or taking a lover for myself for once or giving myself to a man in marriage because I genuinely thought he cared—why is it that love breeds failure for me?”
Heather blinked calmly, weighing the question in her mind, rolling her thoughts around on her tongue and playing with the handles of her kite as it fluttered oh-so-slightly on the sand.
“I don’t think love breeds failure for you,” she finally started, “merely success that you aren’t comfortable with.”
Jude raised a brow at her before leaning back in the sand, throwing her arms across her face to block her eyes from the sun.
“Jude, I’m serious!” Heather insisted. “I get that ruling through Cardan didn’t go as smoothly as you liked, but Oak got to be safe here. He gets to be a normal kid for awhile, learn some basic kindness.”
She went to respond, but Heather cut her off.
“And yeah that Locke guy was a complete and total tool, but plenty of men are. It wasn’t your insistence on loving him that made him a two-timing whore and your sister a back-stabbing bitch.”
Jude couldn’t help but smirk at that.
“And, while I’ll admit I don’t really know what’s going on with you and Cardan right now, the fact remains that you’re still married. He could’ve tried to divorce you instead of sending you away. That has to count for something, right?”
“He banished me for murdering his brother,” she felt her face sour at the very idea of Balekin. “Never mind that he challenged me to a duel and, per the rules of courtesy and the fae’s slavish insistence on obeying it, I couldn’t turn him down.”
Heather opened her mouth.
“And never mind that he forced me to kiss him in the Undersea—“
“WOAH!” Heather exclaimed and Jude went quiet. “He did what?”
She uncovered her face and opened an eye, squinting up at her friend and raising her brows at the shocked expression that she wore.
“When I was trapped in the Undersea he made me come to him,” she explained, covering her face once more. “I guess he had an idea that I might feel something for his brother so he forced me to kiss him the same way I’d kiss Cardan. He thought me glamoured, I had no choice.”
“Jude that’s assault.”
“Add it to the thousand other things that’ve been done to me. You get used to it after awhile.”
She felt Heather’s hand on her shoulder and started, uncovering her face in shock and finding the older girl staring at her in horror.
“Jude that’s not right. Just because it happens a lot doesn’t mean it’s okay.”
She chewed the inside of her lip as Heather’s face scrunched up in determination. “You should use some of your murdery badassery next time someone tries that shit on you. I’ll help, I’ve got a taser that looks like lipstick.”
Jude wanted to laugh, but the completely serious look that Heather wore stopped her.
How long it had been since someone was willing to go to war for her and her alone. Well, if you ignore what Cardan did to get her freed from the Undersea. But was that really the same? He’d not lifted a finger, and he’d had the power of half an army and magic that could boil the sea.
Heather has nothing, likely not even basic fight training, and she was still ready to back Jude up.
“How are you handling things since,” Jude changed the subject, “y’know, with Vivi?”
Heather’s face soured and she huffed, staring out at the sea.
“I’m so angry,” she admitted. “I could get over her not preparing me, I could get over the whole cat thing. But taking my memories? Deciding that I’m not adult enough or strong enough to remember what’s been done to me? I don’t know if that’s forgivable.”
The way her voice broke at the end told Jude everything she needed to know and she wrapped her arm around Heather.
“But you want to forgive her.”
“You know I do,” she sounded so forlorn. “I love her so much Jude, but I don’t know how we cone back from something this devastating.”
“If you figure it out, I wanna be the first to know,” Jude snorted and Heather cracked a smile once again. “What a pair we make.”
“I’ve never been friends with a murderer before. Or a queen, for that matter,” Heather observed. “Do you get used to it?”
“The murder part? Absolutely.”
Heather shot her a rueful grin. “I have much less of a problem with you getting used to that then the assault thing.”
“What a coincidence,” Jude laughed. “Me too.”
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The Jude and Heather friendship I always needed in my life. Next chapter will be Jude and Heather go to/have gone to a kite shop and seen the worms on a string. Some WILL be purchased I promise.
I know it’s no Cardan and no sticky hands but I needed some Jude healing. I think we can all agree she needed to talk through her feelings with someone who was close enough to care but far enough away to point out when she wasn’t being treated right.
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