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Jade Harley had always been good at divination. The future was never far from her fingertips, never hard to pull from the vague cloudiness of possibility and into the tangible realm of the present. But the problem with divination was that it was not a science, no matter how hard Jade tried to make it into one. It wasn’t empirical. It wasn’t exact. It sure as hell wasn’t reliable enough to count on in matters involving more than just herself.
So, regardless, in all the tea grounds she had ever had in the bottoms of beakers and test tubes trying to work out the forces at play, she had never seen this coming.
Jade had graduated with honors from the Peixes Institute of Magical Arts, a rather prestigious school housed inside of an active volcano in Hawaii that drew in students from all over the globe. Her professors and fellow graduates and many others said that she was going places, but instead of becoming an incredible prodigy of a witch, she took a less conventional path. She went to a muggle university. For a degree in the sciences, no less. A Masters of Science in Nuclear Physics from the California Institute of Technology joined her GED and the sob-story about how being an orphan had interfered with her regular high school education on her muggle resume, and she was ready for the muggle job market. She was ready to take the scientific world by storm, and a very different yet so very familiar set of voices rose up to say that she was going places.
But then she finally got a job in a lab; the thing she’d forsaken the wizarding world for. She came into work day after day at the same time doing the same slow work on the same dull projects. She didn’t fit here either.
Two years she shuffled around the company a bit and talked to all kinds of scientists to try and find a place where she could fit, but this wasn’t the science she’d fallen in a forbidden love with in her early days of schooling. This wasn’t discovering an unanswered question and working through it in a frenzy from six different angles at once, experiments sprawling out across the lounge or the kitchen of her dorm hall in the strange hours of the night. This wasn’t explosions or unbounded curiosity or making the universe give up its secrets. This wasn’t even grad school all-nighters, learning new things about the interactions of particles and wondering idly if this was where magic operated or if the laws of magic diverged from the already explainable at some even more basic level of the system.
This was just going through the motions, some cold and calloused approximation of the thing she loved divorced from the spirit of the thing.
So, twenty-six years old and suddenly lacking the sense of purpose she’d had all her life, she said her goodbyes to the nuclear reactors she’d worked with oh-so-fleetingly and she left, feeling very much like the rug had been pulled out from under her. It was probably actually a flying carpet, with her luck.
***
“Nothing worth having comes easily, Jade. You’ve wanted to foray into the world of muggles crudely attempting to manipulate the universe with large, offensive machines for years. Are you really telling me that all of a sudden you’ve just given up?”
“I didn’t ‘just give up’, Rose, I… I just don’t know anymore! I thought the people in the wizarding world were all stupid and backwards and inefficient and that scientists are all these forward-thinking people trying to change things, but… it still just moves too slowly! The people who want to move forward as quickly as possible don’t have the magic to make it happen and those that do couldn’t give less of a damn about the future!”
“I shall try my hardest not to take that personally.” Rose’s face was its usual mask of calm with her vaguely cryptic smirk as she set her cup down on the table.
“Oh, you know what I mean!” Jade was sitting cross-legged on the couch across from Rose’s seat, her posture aggressively casual in comparison to Rose’s carefully calculated composure.
“I do indeed.” Rose sighed. “It is never easy work, getting the stilted, traditionalist old men of the old magic world to concede that things have changed a bit and they will not do to romanticize the past forever. But then, that seems to be the state of the non-magical congress as well. I don’t think you’ll find much future-seeking refuge in either world if you leave behind the muggle innovators.”
“All the textbooks we used in school, though, someone had to write them originally. Someone had to have written them all. Someone had to have learned all that for the first time, not from a teacher, but just them and a wand or a weird magical creature. Someone had to have been an innovator somewhere in the world of magic. When did everyone just collectively decide to abandon that in favor of kissing the asses of some old dead scholars until their heads got stuck there?”
“I suppose that when a group of people are threatened, when they are labeled as dangerous and have to go into hiding, they develop a bit of an aversion to anything that might create any more of a stir. The old way is safe, and anything new is, to those already old and comfortable and raised to be very, very scared, an unrivaled danger. Or perhaps it’s simply that the farther back the recorded past goes, the less it seems like one could possibly add anything of significance to tradition.”
“But that’s just stupid!”
“And just what do you plan to do about it?”
“I… I really don’t know. It all just seems so stupid now, the way I thought I had everything figured out. The way I thought I was going to prove everyone wrong. I don’t know anything right now. I don’t even know what I want to do.” Jade sighed and drained the rest of her tea. When she looked back up at Rose, the expression on her face resembled a lost puppy, sad and nearly whimpering. Rose hesitated momentarily before she replied.
“Well… I do happen to know of a current job opening that would certainly accept a witch of your caliber. It’s certainly more fast-paced than lab work, but I’m not sure how much you’d like it.”
It just so happened that Jade had absolutely no idea where her life was going anymore and, at this point, she was a bit desperate for something new.
There was no other reason she’d take a job as a wizard cop, of all things.
***
Things got worse once she actually came into her first day of work.
Much worse.
Jade was welcomed to the force and given her standard issue uniforms (one set of street-appropriate clothes that were probably designed to blend into muggle crowds and could maybe accomplish that--if a potential crowd full of eccentrics in exactly the same colored button-down and pants wouldn’t be just the right amount of strange to pique curiosities--and a couple sets of the impossibly impractical robes that were apparently what wizard cops were expected to wear during daily goings-on) by a very strange woman who wore bright red glasses and claimed proudly that when she lost her sight she had magically enhanced her sense of smell instead. Apparently she had had the epiphany when in the hospital that smell was actually a much more versatile sense and that without the needless distraction of vision she could better focus on the completely panoramic view of the world she got from her nose. Jade wasn’t sure if she was a visionary or just completely insane. It was a feeling she’d had about every single one of her professors while attending Peixes, and with the emotional throwback to her school days, she was reminded very harshly that she was back in the world that she’d left behind, a frozen world where she’d never comfortably fit.
Lieutenant Pyrope was explaining various procedure as they walked down the halls, very loudly lecturing about the importance of JUSTICE and upholding the law and about stopping criminals and keeping the streets clean of their filth. Jade had already read the handbook and there had been quite a lot of training and testing leading up to this, so she was largely tuning the Lieutenant out, weighing the advantages of going back to working in the muggle sciences or possibly running off and doing research her own way to write a new textbook about the laws of magic. She wasn’t sure how she’d make the money to support herself through that, though. She’d always been a scholarship student, all through college, but here at the end of it all, there wasn’t anyone who was going to give her a grant to do research on magic. She hadn’t taken this stupid job for fun; she’d taken it because she needed it.
Working as a part of the stuck-in-its-ways magical government, for its famously corrupt law enforcement, no less, was not something she was doing lightly. She just couldn’t sit in a lab for another day doing something that was supposed to be what she loved.
When Jade found herself confronted with a completely different woman, hand thrust in front of her like she was god offering her healing touch to her creation, she shook her hand with a slight hesitation. “Hi… I’m Jade Harley.”
“Well, duh, I already know that! I’m Vriska, dummy. Have you not been paying any attention or am I just that much more stunning in person? I know, it’s hard to believe, but I am in fact real. It’s me. Welcome to the force, partner!”
***
In many ways, their ‘partnership’ was supposed to be more of a teaching operation. Lieutenant Pyrope had been Vriska’s partner for years, but she was promoted, and that left Vriska partnerless. Jade, being new to the force and still wet-behind-the-ears, was supposed to be getting practical training from Vriska, but, as the Lieutenant said, “I still like to think of it as a partnership. You both have a lot to learn from each other, after all. I’m seeing a future full of buddy-buddy witchcops and righteous justice all around.”
Vriska had gotten pretty riled about that, and Jade couldn’t help but wonder how exactly their partnership had worked out.
It wasn’t really working out for Jade. The lessons she was supposed to be learning from Vriska in practice were, well… Vriska had once cast an immobilizing spell on a wizard for “looking at me veery suspiciously”, and one day when they were supposed to be on a stakeout she had just breezed up to the front door and gone in wands blazing. Vriska was the type to ask questions later, and to think later, and… well, honestly, Jade thought she knew more about the rules they were supposed to be following and enforcing than Vriska did.
“What the actual fuck are you doing, Vriska?!” Jade had to bodily hold her back from casting some spell or other on the wizard they’d apprehended for flying in a no-flying zone. She wasn’t sure what it would have been, and she really didn’t want to find out. She was still waiting for the day Vriska would go too far and cast cruciatus, actually. She didn’t need divination to see it coming; it was a fairly obvious conclusion to jump to if one had spent more than five seconds with the crazy witch.
“I’m an officer of the law and I’m apprehending this cretin, who poses an enormous threat to the wizardly way of life!”
“Vriska, he was flying on a broom over some farmland. You’re overreacting.”
Vriska tore herself free of Jade and, just like that, the game of chasing down the great criminal who dared to cross into forbidden airspace on her watch was immaterial and Jade’s utter lack of amusement was her focus instead. “I’m not going to be undermined by a rookie! I’m a seasoned veteran in the high art of chasing down criminals, and this man has broken the law so I’m dealing out due punishment.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Vriska, will you just write the kid a ticket and confiscate his broom already?”
Vriska made a face at Jade and turned back to the incredibly young offender. He probably still couldn’t apparate, maybe he’d just gotten his first broom, and he was off on some silly errand or another without thinking about the fact that people on brooms were visible to anyone who happened to look up, be that muggles or cops. Vriska scrawled him a ticket and shoved it at him, then turned back and huffed away. Jade had to take the kid’s broom herself and apparate him back where he was supposed to be.
When she and Vriska were reunited and waiting for the next notice to come in about a breach of the law, Jade finally stopped her and asked, “Hey, why do you always do this? These people aren’t seasoned criminals. There aren’t any Voldemorts or Grindelwalds or murderers. I mean, most of the time they’re just kids going a bit crazy with their magic. So why do you treat every last little offense like it’s worth life in prison?”
For the first time Jade had ever seen except for possibly glimpses in her interactions with the Lieutenant, Vriska was… deflated. She wasn’t a manic ball of energy making fun of anyone who gave her half a chance, she wasn’t cold smiles and unbounded hysteria. She was just grumpy. “It’s stupid. This job is stupid. We never catch any real criminals, there’s never any challenge. I was just trying to make things a little less boring, that’s all. Just forget it. It’s stupid.”
***
For a while after that, Vriska wasn’t focused as much on berating everyone for how terribly they were breaking the law. Instead, there was a strange paradigm shift. Vriska couldn’t really stand for there to be any silence even on slow nights, so instead of excitedly recounting stories of the glory-days with Terezi (Jade still couldn’t tell whether they liked each other or not, even a little) and postulating about the sorts of adventures they were going to get wrapped up in that night, which had been the case in the beginning, Vriska just talked. A lot of it consisted of clumsy attempts to teach Jade… something. Sometimes she talked about how GREAT Jade was going to be under her tutelage (there was something strange about the way she said the word great, and Jade couldn’t quite put her finger on it).
Jade would often say things like “Really? Eight-balls are the secret to telling the future? All my years in divination, and you’re trying to tell me that all the universe’s actual future-telling power is concentrated in a muggle novelty toy?”
“Duh, of course not, silly! That was a joke. God, learn to have a sense of humor.”
Jade did not have a lot of patience with Vriska. At least now she wasn’t harassing everyone they ran into on the job, but she would still get incredibly aggressive with anyone who made the mistake of insulting or ignoring her. She was completely unbearable.
The day after that exchange, Jade bought an entire box of magic eight balls and spent hours trying to figure out if there really was anything to them.
***
Two months in, Jade experienced her first real excitement on the job. She and Vriska had been called out on a noise complaint; this particular wizard abode was in a mixed neighborhood, and apparently whatever magic was going on inside was loud enough to endanger its secrecy. When they arrived, they discovered that not only was the magic going on inside loud, it was dangerous. The house had been filled with something like fireworks, which specifically didn’t singe the house itself but were destroying everything within, including the occupants.
Jade did damage control while Vriska chased down the perpetrator (Jade didn’t understand how she managed to find the woman so easily, and when she asked, Vriska made a big show of how she was the very best and that maybe eventually Jade would be good enough to learn her secrets, eventually), and though they sent in for backup they didn’t wind up needing it.
On the way back, Vriska slipped back into a few dramatic retellings of the glory days, and Jade didn’t mind as much this time. It felt just a little like she was in some special club, like she was doing some good.
It had been a long time since she’d felt that way.
And it didn’t last very long.
***
“What do you mean you let her free? She was trying to kill people! She was attacking a family inside their house, and jeopardizing the safety of all the wizards in the whole neighborhood! And you just let her walk away?”
“Justice is blind,” Lieutenant Pyrope replied, having the nerve to be smiling. It was small, but it was there.
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“It means that you can’t see the whole picture, and that justice doesn’t have to. Justice can smell.”
“Oh my god! It’s like you’re not even taking this seriously.”
Jade stormed out, and when she plopped down next to Vriska in the lobby she was surprised to find that her partner seemed surprisingly muted. In fact, Vriska was looking directly at her, expectant, not making any move to get the first word in.
“I can’t believe they just… let a criminal walk away like that. After all she did… she just. Goes free.”
Vriska sighed. “I know. It’s so frustrating! After all our hard work, your first real arrest and they don’t even seem to care!”
Vriska was clearly trying to be sympathetic. Trying. “Is that what you’re getting all sulky about? You’re upset because you aren’t getting any recognition?”
“Hey, this isn’t about me. This is about you! This was supposed to be a big day for you, and they just ruined it. Your first real cop day and they just spat in your face!”
“Ugh, I am so sick of everyone here. You’re just awful, Pyrope is useless, everyone’s corrupt, and I have no idea what I’m even doing here!”
“I’m just trying to help!”
Jade stood up, fists clenched. “I don’t need your help!”
“Fine. You weren’t really headed anywhere special anyways.”
“Yeah, I know.”
With that, Jade walked out, and Vriska wasn’t sure if she was ever coming back or not. If you’d asked her, she would’ve very loudly insisted that she didn’t care and that Jade had never been a very good cop anyways.
***
“Holy shit, you came back?”
Jade sighed as she adjusted her robes (she could never get them to sit right). “I don’t exactly fit here, but I haven’t found anywhere else that I do. And at least here I’m not alone.”
Vriska made a puzzled face at her partner. “What…”
“I don’t get the feeling that you’re really as gung-ho about being a cop as you pretend to be.” Vriska said nothing in response, which was as much of a confirmation as Jade needed. “So… what did you want to do?”
“I’ve always had a lot of irons in the fire. A girl like me can’t just pick one thing. I’m meant for a life of adventure!”
“Yeah, I know the feeling.”
“What about you? What did you want to do?”
“Science,” Jade said, much more readily than she usually would. The possibility of Vriska judging her for it was basically a certainty, but it didn’t seem that daunting. “I went to a muggle university to study nuclear physics.”
“Nuclear physics? What the hell is that?”
“You remember that big bomb that the American muggles dropped on the Japanese muggles during World War II?”
“Yeah.”
“That was nuclear physics.”
It wasn’t how she would usually explain it, but…
“Woah! Cool!!!!!!!!”
***
Time passed. Jade learned about Vriska’s history with Terezi beyond just the legends of their conquest, in bits and pieces. Vriska saw Jade open up a little and decided that she maybe wasn’t really so bad sometimes. They weren’t exactly happy, but they found a strange sort of rhythm.
And then there was another hitch in their regularly scheduled programming.
It wasn’t that every night was routine AUIs and tracking down magical contraband. There were nights where they saw real action, where Vriska learned that Jade wasn’t actually averse to throwing around some serious spells when the time called for it (Jade didn’t think the time called for it nearly as much as Vriska did, of course), where they did things that were maybe sort of worth doing for a while.
It was that this night was different.
For one thing, everything was going down near a nuclear reactor. Dangerously close to a nuclear reactor. For another thing, many of the higher-ups didn’t seem to understand the gravitas of the situation in the same way Jade did. A crazed wizard terrorist targeting a full-equipped nuclear laboratory because he hated science was not likely to end well.
And so maybe they weren’t assigned to the response team, as such, but Jade felt that in this particular case the rules needed breaking. Vriska needed no convincing.
***
Things were already pretty chaotic by the time they got there. There was a fairly well-trained muggle guard, of course, and there were scientists even late at night. Everyone else was trying to avoid their notice, but with some rather over-the-top spell-casting, that didn’t lead to an underground stealth investigation so much as it led to a bunch of magical cops in stupid-looking robes running around the facility in plain sight with a few strange quirks of movement.
There were, of course, also a number of hitches in the lab’s operation on behalf of the terrorist--exploding equipment, experiments being visibly completely ruined, small fires, and a number of less obvious hexes--that about half of the force was working to cover up and contain while the others were tracking the sly maniac down. Vriska immediately joined the latter, but Jade had a sinking feeling.
Jade ran straight for the reactor.
She cast a spell to detect any magic interfering with the workings, and sure enough, she found a hex, just like she’d been afraid of. She couldn’t tell what it was or how quickly it was working or just how badly everything would fail when all was said and done, but she knew that it was in place and likely already doing damage and that she’d have to stop it.
A few more spells told her that several crucial components were already starting to overheat, so she got to work. It was really just a lot of moving matter around, and those spells weren’t too hard. Maybe she was working with much more precise units of matter than she ever had before, but she knew how this worked. She’d written a thesis about the applications of a reactor much like this one. She knew how it was built. She knew its parts, inside and out.
So, very carefully, she put it back together.
***
Vriska wasn’t the one who found the lunatic that night. In fact, once she accidentally caught a glimpse of Jade at work, she didn’t manage to tear herself away long enough to accomplish much else that night.
Jade was a vision. Her wand arm was constantly moving, as well as her lips, presumably casting a flurry of different spells in ways that they had never been intended to be used. She couldn’t make out any individually because it all blurred together into a sort of chant, a sort of dance. The air was abuzz with magic already, but Jade’s alone would have been enough to saturate it. The strange and distant building which occupied Jade's attention was aglow with spectral trails, and with her vision eightfold, Vriska could see a wonderful dance of incredibly subtle changes going on inside of it.
Jade was truly incredible.
***
“What the hell was that?” Vriska asked after the night was over.
“Something new, I think. It was science, with magic… or maybe magic as science. I dunno. But there is something I do know.” Her eyes were shining with a determination that Vriska had never in all their time together seen before.
“What?”
“We have much bigger irons in the fire than being stupid wizard cops.”
“But I can’t do… whatever the hell all that was. I don’t even know what it was.”
“No, I don’t need someone else just like me. I can handle all the magic science. What I do need is someone who’s got my back. Someone who’s got way more skills than the force can handle.”
Slowly, Vriska smiled a true shit-eating grin. “Alright, Harley. You've got yourself a deal.”