Jade and Emerald

"You know, you'll have to apologize to her eventually." murmured Mia. "You can't postpone everything."

"No I won't and yes I can."

Mia smirked.

"What was with Tiffany there, anyway?" said Serena. "Asking about you?"

Mia sighed. "Serena, I don't understand her. Ever since she broke up with Rochelle, she's been very bitchy towards me. She started dating some fourth-year, and because Rochelle and I are in the same year, I'll sometimes leave class and see them out there waiting for her, slobbering all over each other."

"Doesn't Tiffany still have her *Rochelle* tattoo? Who would want to date her?"

"I don't know." Mia shrugged. "I suppose there's some women desperate enough to not be alone, even if it means their partner will use them to score in some game only they're keeping track of. I always felt bad for Rochelle: she can do much better. But, er, Tiffany is in your class, Serena."

"Yeah, but I never go to class."

"You should."

"Why?"

Mia frowned, paused, nodded. "Because I said so."

"You're not my mentor anymore!"

"I'll always be your mentor."

"Besides, I still train. I just, um… y'know, with Naomi getting harassed, and... it just makes me feel like shit the way some lesbians stare at me. Like they're saying 'we know you're not a real woman'. I can take it from guys, but from women, it just fucks me up."

"You mean other women?"

"What did I-- oh. Yeah." mumbled Serena. "Iunno. It's even worse when they treat me like I'm female, and I can tell they don't really think I am. Just makes me think everyone but you, Yuruko, Naomi, and... Kate probably knows?- is faking it."

"…well, I'm… I know this isn't exactly similar, but I've been called a fake lesbian before. And you're right that it's worse when they conceal what they really think."

"A fake lesbian? Like gold star?"

"No, it was because I defended students online. Some people have this ridiculous view, where they won't accept killing, under any circumstances. They would argue that students were evil for not arresting criminals non-lethally, or that all crime was caused by poverty, and students were rich oppressors."

"That's bullshit. What students are rich?"

"Aimee's the only one I know, but her family disowned her." Mia shrugged. "Maybe Kirihara, she's so fucking entitled. But what they really meant by it was that students weren't real lesbians. It's the same type of people who call us cops -- they're just reusing the same arguments against civilian police, who, by the way, actually are as monstrous as they think we are. I know the way cops talked about murders in my neighborhood growing up. They were always glad another lowlife was dead, like they thought all of us were."

"Yeah, fuck cops." Serena scratched her head. "I got that crap from trans people, too. I knew this one trans guy, Jordan, for a few years. He stopped talking to me once I said I was going to Urasaria. Same stuff, he said he couldn't respect me anymore for becoming a cop, saying I must've supported police brutality and stuff. Ugh."

"God, I hate it." muttered Mia. "I feel like with civilians, it's either that or the... really odd ones, the ones obsessed with students."

"Like you were?"

"I-I was nothing like that." said Mia defensively. "…I-I just felt like they were adults, and being around them made me not feel like a child."

"Okay, sure." Serena grinned. "I guess I never saw it like that, though. It's just a job, I guess. Like, I didn't really get good grades in highschool -- 'cuz of, um, my teachers sucked -- so maybe I would've gone to community college, but I don't know what I'd major in. Or I'd just end up in some office or call center, you know? But that's what I noticed -- everybody was friendly with me when I was just some fuck-up, but as soon as I was gonna be a student, something important, they all got pissed at me."

"…you know, I feel like sometimes that -- I know I hear other lesbians talk about how much they love women. Well, those types of memes, you know. I do like those. But I just see so much pettiness and abuse around campus sometimes, and I can't help but feel like, subtly, we replicate the way straight people treat us in to our own lives."

"Yeah, that happens with cis and trans people, too. Man, I dunno, 'cause I thought about that, too, but I wasn't able to put it smart like that. Like, some of these people knew me, too, you know? It feels like they're so used to being miserable they just start expecting it." said Serena. "Hey, that reminds me. You remember that contract you let me and Yuruko go on last summer?"

"Yes, with the bulldozer Revenant."

"Yep. So while we're there, I get a message on FB. It's Jordan's girlfriend. She said this guy had been harassing them lately, setting up outside of their house, they were thinking about buying a gun and stuff. Um, she said she knew I was a trans student, 'cuz Jordan knew I was in town and was avoiding me because he thought I was 'full Urasaria'."

"That you were what?"

"Yeah, I dunno. Anyway, she asks me if I can go talk to the guy. Not kill him, just get him to stop. Cops won't listen to a trans couple."

"I- I'm surprised you never told me about this."

"…I kinda thought you'd be disappointed in me." mumbled Serena. "Is it bad that I did it?"

"I- no, not at all. I'm not disappointed, not if you knew he was..."

"I told Yuruko about it, but she wanted me to tell them to fuck off. She says Jordan abandoned me, so what does he get off asking for help now? She's like that. Somebody will upset her, but instead of showing she's bothered, she'll just file it away in her head and reference it later. It's not her fault, though. She can't help the way life conditioned her.

But I visited the guy. Just me. I thought it'd be creepier pretending I wasn't a student, just some rogue host, so I showed him what I could do and told him to stay away. I felt pretty cool. After that, she thanked me, but told me not to talk to Jordan. One, 'cause of Urasaria, and two, cuz if he knew I was the one who helped them, he'd feel bad. Like, because I have power and he doesn't."

"They could have at least paid you." Mia smirked. "But no, that's good. I would've felt a little squeamish, just because of how it is with hosts and civilians, but..."

"Yeah, it was weird knowing I could snap the guy in half."

"But was this near your hometown?"

"Uhh… sorta, but not really? I dunno, since I..."

Most of Serena's formative experiences were through the internet and had disconnected the woman from a sense of homeward place. She was one of the few students to never become homesick in their first year, for there was little difference between her mother's house and her home at Urasaria; both had videogames and the internet.

Her mother had never cajoled her to do much else, and she was grateful that Serena was a stable child in the home. She had gained a sense of objectivity as a mother by watching her own sisters raise their children, and inevitably the mediocrity with which their own parents hd raised them replicated itself, subtly, in their lives as it often does. Serena was able to benefit from their mistakes and from the full investment of her mother's love after her father's death.

Based on the need for familial stability Serena reciprocated it, and had delayed coming out to her mother several times on such a logic. Her mother would impart certain facts of her father like his favorite holidays, or how he had dodged service in the Vietnam War before they met; it was assumed Serena had been strongly affected by the lack of male role model her father's death left, yet it was obvious to Serena that the opposite was true: whatever his power that lingered over the family was due to the energy her mother granted such a notion.

And notion & idea he was to Serena, for any of his physical existence had long been crushed into whatever part of her brain must have also confirmed her dreams of him as an infant. Still, her mother evoked his name like a myth around the house to get Serena to do or delay her life in certain ways, and she naturally resented such a notion. In her early years of coming out the name had been fashioned to a cudgel for Serena's mother; she would subtly ask that Serena change her first name to be like her male name (that her father had chosen), and to not mention her transgenderism around his side of the family who they were still in contact with.

And whenever his name was invoked, it was obviously unimpeachable.

She loved her mother too much to accuse her of what she was obviously offloading. It was part of the idiotic, outdated impulse of some straight parents who think that having a gay or transgender child is indicative of parental failure. She would rather look normal to her sisters and her late husband's family than side with her own offspring, and Serena felt harshly towards this, even hateful at times, yet she couldn't be certain at what it was directed. Her father for dying? His murderer? Her mother's inanity? These thoughts were not uncommon to Serena, but they continued to crawl through her mind.

While it would be disrespectful here to reproduce Serena's former name, naturally degrading this work to mere tabloid and not art, "Serena" is indeed closer to her father's choice of former name. She just remained unable to understand the effect he had on her mother years after his death, especially given the abruptness of it. Like a feline, Serena was planted in the ever-moving present, to where past experiences from yesterdays would carry over yet not inform her to the extent they did Yuruko or Matoi. The nearest obsession she carried was of the $50,000 Revenant-aided sex change she would soon, very soon, undergo in Thailand.

So she did love her mother, especially given the donations she made to Serena's account. A novel naturally biases in that there is little reason to tell you of all the mundane, normal days between the two, and how her mother would talk to her about growing up in the 70s. With so little technology, she said life then seemed more human than it did now. She saw the current decades as inferior to her own, yet she was ignorant to how humans only see their personal pasts, sometimes their presents, and project idealized versions of either into the future. They see themselves as the fulminations of their respective streams and privilege their own times as more representative of humanity, somehow more strongly linked to the hand that holds the club and fashions the tool.

That isn't to say the supercession of time periods does not happen, must and will happen, but the next stage of human development might well be one of machine-aided consciousness, and will mold a species as unfathomable to us as we are a Neanderthal. Time weathers us as it flows around us, through us, yet we see ourselves as somehow resistant to it. There is no perfect image of life, yet if we are to find it has changed, we deny it at first, then retreat back into our own mist of history that we say is realer than all after it; ignorant to that our own current existence rests on a pile of dead generations.

It was this that made Serena think: Why did forums, which were so much cooler, get replaced by all these shitty social media sites?

"What's the difference with forums?" said Mia.

Serena scratched her neck. "Iunno. It feels like you never get to know anyone that well on other sites. Like, it's all just posts that disappear after a day, so who cares? It's like how everything went from private servers to matchmaking, so instead of getting to know anyone, it's just four random assholes you're never gonna see again."

Mia had absolutely no fucking clue what Serena was talking about. "...well, the only site I use is Twitter. And I don't know why I use it, it just makes me angry." Mia hid her student status on social media, though was generally assumed to be one anyhow given the vitriol she had towards anyone criticizing Urasaria. "I hope you're not showing anyone your Revenant."

"No." mumbled Serena. "I don't really use it that much. Anyway, um, with my mom..."

"Yes. go ahead."

"I've never mentioned it to her, but, y'know, I kept myself from coming out a few times 'cuz... I dunno, I was a kid, but I guess I already knew it'd kinda unstabilize stuff around the house. But we eventually went to see my therapist, who I still see when I can. This was the first time we met. I had just finished talking with her, my mom went in, and then I was called in for both of us to talk. Right?"

"Yes."

"And my mom said: 'I think he's- sorry, she's- like this because he never had a strong male role model.'" Serena teared up. "It didn't hurt because of her misgendering me, but because she was using her hurt to shame me. She was using her husband to hold my life back. I'm sure there's other times she did that, but it was the first one I recognized. Is that weird I-I still think about that?"

Mia shook her head no. She explained, perhaps not in these words, that there were moments in life that went unnoticed by others, and we sometimes become so muted to life that only in times of self-excavation do we find these again, as curious a fossil as a giraffe skeleton in a layer of permafrost.

Whatever it was Mia had said, Serena assented and wiped her nose. "Yuruko doesn't like her, 'cuz of comments like that. My mom'll say I look really feminine in a certain haircut or outfit, and Yuruko gets offended for me, since she thinks my mom's misgendering me again. I've told you about the time I was trying dresses on in highschool with my friends, and they told me I looked like a girl, but later I realized they probably saw me as... at least that'll be fixed next month. But I was just a kid back then, both of those times, so."

"You couldn't have realized why it was wrong."

"Yeah."

"…you know, this is a little odd, but that reminded me of... I think I was 6 or 7 when I saw my first corpse."

Serena yawned. "Sorry, yeah."

"My father quickly pulled me over so I wouldn't see more of it, but I didn't understand why. It was from a student, I assume. It smelled like burnt chicken, and it made me very hungry. I wonder if it was... well, I suppose there are other fire Revenants. God, I'm glad we were eventually able to move, even if it was still near Urasaria."

"But not until your dad got arrested, right?"

"...well, and admittedly it took a year after that. I think I've told you before my mother still uses the money: it's never been confiscated, and even I don't know where she finds it. But, she was worried that if we moved to a new apartment, it would be too suspicious. I wouldn't have put it past our old landlord to report us."

"Why?"

Mia explained to her that their first landlord had been a typically cruel man, and one she thought a Dickensonian villain from what she had read at school, and her own frequent trips to the library, with little internet to stimulate her. He reviled them for their poverty and often spouted apothegms relating to the unfairness of life. What passed for deep philosophy from him was: "Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and you'll see which one fills up first." Once he had, after Mia's *crooked father* was arrested, charged the family for the door the police had broken, and he made numerous passes at Mia when she was first growing breasts.

She thought it ironic that his hatred of the Schultz family had led him to mirror what he believed her father was: a degenerate crook who hurled invective at others for his own myriad & self-created failings (for no successful landlord would be renting near Urasaria), much like Kirihara Kishor, a student whose hypocrisy has been so limned to further propound upon it would bore you.

Throughout the arrest and trial he showed no sympathy towards them and continued to demand rent. The Schultz's family predicament to him was no more than a strand of blood stretched across their harpooned hole, by no means which marked the whale as not his own. Most of the families in that apartment complex had been born into it, and few would ever manage to spout their own unensanguined billow. So it was with the grip Serena's father held over the Kunsts, and Yuruko's mother herself.

"Man. There's someone to visit." said Serena.

"I've thought about it, but it would be too suspicious."

"Yeah." Serena nodded. "…you know, people ask me if my dad being dead bothers me. I mean, not really, I guess, even before Blackburn. He's basically just these pictures my mom puts up around the house. He's not really, um, real, you know?"

"Of course."

"I do kinda wish that… Iunno, my mom wishes she had a recording of what he sounded like, 'cause she says my voice sounds like him." Serena switched to her 'male voice' for this: "This one, not my female voice. I trained for years to get that one." She switched back. "But she said he wrote these letters to me before he died. My mom said he was going to read them to me when I was older, but I didn't really get the point of it. What was so interesting in them that he needed to write them down?"

"Well, it might not have necessarily been a time capsule for you, but of himself."

"Huh?"

"I'm saying that it might not have been meant to be interesting to you, but it was something he would have been able to measure up how he felt about you, at the time he would read them, versus the time he wrote them."

"Oh, I guess. Damn, you're smart."

Mia smiled.

"And growing up, too, people were always calling our house. She had to disconnect our landline sometimes, because it was really constant, asking about my dad or subscriptions he forgot to cancel. And I, um, told you before that I was the one to handle all of that stuff, so whenever I picked up and answered *like this*, they would think it was my dad. My mom called me the little man of the house, so I'd be the one to sign packages and all that. Mr. Kunst.

And I mean, they were really insistent that I was my dad. Like I said, we don't have any recordings of him, but... one time, I... checked one of the letters out. My mom wasn't home, and I started reading it out loud. And I pretended like it was my dad reading it, instead of me, right? It sucked when it used my deadname or talked about how I was gonna be a great son and all, but it helped. It wasn't really complicated, either, which I liked, um. It just didn't seem like something to overanalyze."

"Do you still keep the letters?"

"No, my mom has them. I read one out loud every now and then, and last time we were there, I did it with Yuruko... but, you know, I've been using this voice a lot, and it feels like it's pushing the other voice out. And I've got my sex change next month, too, which'll... it just feels like that as I'm getting older, that part of my voice is going to grow dimmer." Serena wiped her face. "Um, hey, can I ask you for some advice with Naomi? Speaking of."

As Mia listened to Serena and advised her, she felt that she had done this before, like a carousel or the gearshift of a vehicle, so both knew their roles. There was Matoi with Moriko, and there was Julia with Naomi, who although Mia did not remember, in the soon months would become as much a mentor to Naomi as Serena, and there were other pairs Mia had known and not known in only snippets of her since-breathed life. She understood this at an instinctual level, and had always been adept at pattern recognition. Serena was essentially an every-kid to her who she might have recognized on either of her home streets, or someone everyone knew growing up, but she did not pretend to be more for a deluded happiness or the approval of others'.

For this reason she was Mia's favorite friend, who she advised as the evening grew step, as if the coda to grinning song that would eventually see them both out.