I told you things that I never said to anybody else, I regret them!

𝖄ou were in my hands, but you're good at leaving.

𝕾he does not believe in fate. Not because it's too starry-eyed or poetic or laced with the saccharine scent of hallmark sentimentality, but because it is stupid. Utterly, irredeemably stupid. People make choices, sometimes terrible ones, sometimes the kind of choices that make you want to crawl out of your own skin and live in a cave and eat moss for the rest of your days, but choices nonetheless. No invisible hands pulling the strings. No cosmic foreshadowing. No grand design. Just dumb, messy people making dumb, messy decisions and living with the consequences.

Jade Hollis gets this better than anyone. She has built a career out of mimicking people so precisely it borders on witchcraft. Their voices, their posture, the exact way they pause before they lie, like the air is thick with hesitation and maybe even a little regret. She's a perfect mirror, a shapeshifter in ripped jeans and an ever-present sneer. A human copy machine with chronic identity issues. If you cracked open her skull, you'd probably just find a collection of other people's mannerisms stuffed inside like an overpacked suitcase.

It's useful when she wants to make a point (or verbally decimate someone so badly they consider taking a vow of silence), but less useful when she's stuck in a house full of actual geniuses and has no idea who she even is anymore.

So, no. She does not believe in fate. Which makes it infinitely more insufferable when Michael Townsend, FBI golden boy and self-proclaimed human emotion scanner, starts acting like their meeting was scripted by the universe.

First of all, he is annoying. Obnoxious. The kind of irritating that burrows under your skin and festers like an infection. Too smooth, too smug, too armed with the kind of lazy, knowing grin that makes her want to put her fist through drywall. She tells him this frequently, aggressively, and with great enthusiasm.

He just laughs. Like her animosity is hilarious. Like it's his new favorite sport.

And Michael Townsend is not unshakable, for all his efforts to pretend otherwise. His self-assurance is too rehearsed, his mask too polished, too carefully designed. That makes him dangerous. Because if there is one thing Jade Hollis knows, it is performance. She knows what to look for, the tiny hesitations, the microexpressions, the tells people don't even know they have.

Michael Townsend has tells.

They were thrown together because the FBI, in their infinite government-funded wisdom, decided to test a theory: could Jade mimic someone so perfectly that even Michael—human polygraph, lie detector extraordinaire, walking condescension—wouldn't be able to tell?

It was a stupid experiment. A pointless exercise in futility. And yet there she was, sitting across from Michael Townsend, forced to participate in the bureaucratic equivalent of a middle school trust fall.

She expected to hate it.

She didn't expect Michael looking at her like he sees her. Like he isn't watching a performance. Like there's something underneath it worth knowing.

It's unbearable. Horrible. It makes her want to dissolve into mist and haunt a lighthouse somewhere, wailing into the night.

She hates it. She hates him.

(She doesn't. And that is the problem.)

Because somewhere between the biting remarks and the uncomfortably sincere eye contact, the sharp edges and the long silences that stretch too far and mean too much, she starts to wonder if maybe Michael isn't entirely wrong about fate.

And that is terrifying.

Because it means letting her guard down. And she has spent her entire life making sure that never happens.

But then again—she has also spent her entire life playing roles, slipping into other people's skins, parroting back their reflections like a funhouse mirror.

Maybe it's time to figure out what it means to just be her own person, to just be Jade Hollis.

If only Michael Townsend would stop looking at her like he already knows exactly who that is.

✷ JADE HOLLIS.
🥂 ━━━ The Bolter by Taylor Swift

Eighteen. Natural Mimic. Gemini.
Thankful you don't send someone to kill me.

✷ MICHAEL TOWSEND.
☕️ ━━━ Free Now by Gracie Abrams

Seventeen. Emotion Reader. Aries.
And when you say I seem angry, I get more angry.

✷ ALSO WITH.

Cassie Hobbes ━━━ Profiler.
Sloane Tavish ━━━ Statistician.
Dean Redding ━━━ Profiler.
Lia Zhang ━━━ Lie-Detector.

( from lyn! )

—i. hii! imm so excited to (re)write i told you things!
i didn't rly fw the old version, so welcome to the rewrite!!

some of jade's story has had a little "restructuring" for clarity (and more trauma because why tf not?)

—ii. all the praise to jlb for creating the naturals saga and being the absolute genius she is. everyone else—original characters, their questionable decisions, and any plot twists—are my own doing.

if you steal from me, i will find you. trust.

—iii. tw: this work includes mature themes and topics—such as violence, threats, cannibalism, vivid descriptions of blood, offensive language, graphic content, depictions of abuse, and other potentially triggering material (bc would it really be a naturals fanfic without any of the above?)

viewers' discretion is advised!

—iv. thank you so, so much for reading and supporting this mess of a writer. you guys r the best—literally the best—and i love you to the moon and saturn (and probably pluto, too idk)! mwwah x