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When you call her name she is immediately by your side in a flash and crackle of nuclear green, and if she ever needs you to be where she is at just that moment, you find yourself there without a second passing, her power a fuzzy prickle on your skin. It’s a convenient and reasonable use of her powers, and she will never force your movement but for a true emergency. Still that crackling sound in your ears is a drumming of fists in your gut.
You would never tell her such. Your distaste is an ugly feeling.
She’s reckless and there’s no reason for her not to be. It isn’t as if she can martyr herself falling out of a tree, and you can’t think of a thing she’s done that would justify her death. She can do so many things you can’t for the simple reason that there is no risk posed to her. You worry, but you also envy. Her potential is nigh limitless, and you are stuck far, far behind her.
So you watch her back and bite back your cries for her to slow. You won’t hold her back.
She’s strong-- Powerful. She doesn’t need your help, your protection . . . After all, what is there for you to contribute that she cannot provide herself? She’s extremely independent of you and you wonder if she might someday realize how little she needs you.
You would probably let her go if she did. She would be better off with someone like him anyway.
She is a goddess in the flesh. Space itself bends to her will and shifts at her order. There is nothing so large that she cannot shrink it, nothing so small she cannot enlarge it to titanic proportions. She can and has carried planets in her pockets—and you? You. . .
You’re a failure of a leader where she, who never even held the title, sails by you with flying colors. You are weak and mortal where she is a powerful god. You are lead where she is gold, coal where she is diamond and a pawn where she is a queen.
You remind yourself that she chose you. Out of everyone she could have chosen it was you she wanted. Yet the voice at the back of your mind hisses that minds change, and it wouldn’t be surprising if she realized she wanted someone more equal to her—someone who could stand at her level, not sit as far beneath it as you do.
Your tendency toward self-sabotage rears its ugly head, telling you that it will happen sooner or later; that she will become bored of you, or realize how weak and useless you are, and it will all end. Shouldn’t you end it first? The longer you wait for it to happen, the more it will hurt when it does, and so shouldn’t you end it before she can discard you?
You sometimes wish you could, but you know you can’t. As confident as you are that she can live quite happily and well-better, even-without you at her side, you know you need her. You love her and need her and you just have to deal with these feelings of jealousy and uncertainty, because whose fault is it that you never reached her level?
Yours, and yours alone.
Years in the future, but not too many, you will learn that she has never considered you to be beneath her—that there are things you can do that she envies and, though they’re hardly comparable to her powers, considers valid talents and strengths. You will discover that she too has feelings of insecurity in your relationship, though for differing reasons. You will discuss, and argue, break apart and reunite, cry together and scream together and come out of everything that much stronger-- Together.
You don’t know this now, though, so you stew in your negativity as the air crackles to your left and she presses her grinning lips to your cheek.