here's the countdown

JACK

Cool peppermint melts into warm cinnamon, Flora's hands all but forcing Jack's muscles into submission beneath her fingertips, and the captain words die on his tongue at the sharp pop! of a particularly hard knot releasing in his back. "Fuck." It's not a complaint, though it doesn't stop him from raising an eyebrow over his shoulder at her reproachfully. "His reputation didn't mean shit," he continues after rolling the same shoulder a few times. "He was just some dock worker. They were just dirt poor in a slum with nowhere to turn. Torchline wasn't like how it is now."

Back when healers had been for the privileged and where poverty had been as much the norm as anything else. "Oh, I don't think - I know." He scoffs out a laugh, though the sound doesn't hold much mirth. "Loved her more'n he loved anythin' else." More than himself and certainly more than Jack. "Loved her when she was alive and after she was gone, 'til it turned to fuckin' poison in him. Didn't need my my magic to know it either - he'd tell me all the time how he wished it had been me instead." To say his father had never gotten over his mother's death is the understatement of the century, Jack pausing to straighten up and stretch out his back and shoulders.

"Gods, I hated her growin' up, for not bein' there."

when I look at something, I see it for what it could be
when I look at something, I see how it ends

Code stolen from Queen Sky