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The first person to call her Jess was her father, when he knelt down to kiss her cheek and his long golden curls whispered against her skin. He smelled like cigars and cologne and fine silk, and every twinkle of his eye made it seem as if he swelled with pride at her very existence.
“There’s my Jess,” he’d proclaim, proud as if seeing her for the first time, and he’d pull his daughter up into his arms with hands stronger than anyone else’s. She was his swan, his love, his littlest Kaldwin, too, but she was always Jess in the end, when he left her with either goodnights or goodbyes.
“It’s not forever,” he’d say from the deck of a ship bound to Morley, to Tyvia, to Serkonos, when she’d weep with quiet dignity and sniffle as he left her. “I’d never leave forever. Give me a kiss, Jess, and keep your mother safe.” But in the end, of course, he did leave forever, not in a ship but in a white shroud and a black casket kissed with gold the color of his curls.
Her mother never called her Jess, save for once. She was always Jessamine, always the young empress and heir, even in their tenderest moments together. They were too similar, and both of them knew it; beyond the tumbling black curls and the stormy eyes, they were as unyielding and as strong as one another, and both of them burned far too bright. But it was Jess that she called out for in the end, when there was a bed full of blood and two corpses to bury in two white shrouds and two black coffins.
Anton Sokolov was the next to call her by that old name, and he did so without noticing the shivers that chased the utterance across her skin. She took to him when there were few others willing to be more than a servant or a subject to her. What she never knew was if he was drawn to the power in her, as she brushed up close against the brightness of the knowledge in him.
It was the first time they had dinner together, as their first shared bottle of Tyvian red was chased by glass after glass of whiskey that bit with the bitterness of the Wrenhaven, that she laughed aloud and he told her, “You’re something, Jess,” and smiled a smile that already knew too much.
From then on, he knew things that she wouldn’t dare to tell anyone else. She pressed the rune into his hand and asked him questions in hushed tones, pressed his hand to her stomach and asked him if her body had betrayed her, but never once did she speak to him of Corvo. But he knew, and she knew he did, and she allowed it, because she trusted the Void in his mind as she had admired it in Delilah.
But was Corvo that uttered that name the most. Corvo, whose inky eyes met hers with fear, as if she was the one who could fight a hundred men in hand-to-hand combat and had left her home to become the knife in the hand of a ruler. Corvo, who knelt before her to swear fealty and become both her protector and her dearest advisor. Corvo, who loved her from the moment they met, even though it took his Jess ten years to notice.
When she thought of him, it wasn’t bathed in the artificial light of a banquet or an audience. It was the Corvo with shadows changing with every moment through thick cigar smoke and the haze of Serkonan brandy that she called to mind, with the smallest smile curling at his lips as their voices turned husky with the evening.
Coincidentally, that was also the Corvo that she fell in love with, when she finally met his eyes with a steady gaze and commanded him to tell her the truth, but kissed him before he could apologize. Jess was a protest, then a plea, then a promise, and she loved him for it. It was the name he murmured into her neck, and the name he woke her with in the morning, when she watched him dress in the last embers of the dying fire with his guardsman’s coat around her shoulders and rain pouring down outside, blurring the sound of the early morning.
Even when he didn’t speak, which was often, there was a difference in his eyes when he thought “Empress” and when he thought “Jess.” When he held the child he could never call his in his arms, it was Jess that he met eyes with and shared a sad smile with. It was Jess that he kissed goodbye as she sent him off into the world to save the city that was sinking underfoot. And, in those last moments, when the blade had left her feeling emptier than ever before, the panic in his eyes screamed the name he had worn threadbare with use.
The one with dark eyes called her Jess in the end, when he stood above her in the gazebo with crossed arms and a smirk upon his face. He touched her, and it was as if all her missing pieces were filled with Void, and there was nothing else but him and her, forever and never.
“Your life has taken a turn,” he murmured, pulling the pins from her hair. “Has it not, Jess?”