your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand
She sees him before she hears him, her eyes immediately locking onto a silhouette absent from Halauni for weeks now. It's the shadow first, cutting sharply against the sun, long and familiar. The kind that used to fall across her pillow when he stood in the doorway of her room. The kind that used to mean safety, trouble, desire. Now it just means her heart is going to try and crawl out of her ribs again.
Inside her mind, a thousand broken things glitter like glass underfoot. A thousand Jack-shaped memories she thought she’d swept away. Only, that’s the thing about glitter, isn’t it? You never really get rid of it. It clings to the edges of things, it hides in corners. It sparkles the most when you shine a light on it.
And Jack—Jack is all fucking floodlights.
She doesn’t flinch—not outwardly—not in the market with her cart and her cargo and the merchant still stumbling over her sketches. She lets her spine steel instead. Lifts her chin. Puts her weight into the hand on her hip and lets her other one rest on the cart’s edge. But gods, inside? Inside, it's she's a wreck: a storm-wracked shoreline where the tide keeps dragging her back into the memory of his hands. A house she built out of kisses and unspoken promises, now gutted and unrecognizable. A voice—his—still echoing through every haunted hallway calling her love. A chorus of every friend she has whispering you did the right thing in one ear while the empty weight of her bed whispers then why does it still feel like this? in the other.
Her mind—the garden he once strolled through like it was his—has weeds now. Overgrown and tangled, grief curled up in the flowerbeds where joy used to bloom. There’s a faint smell of saltwater and burnt sugar. Glitter on the floorboards, a teacup cracked down the middle. The kind of ache you don’t write poems about, because there aren’t words; just bruises where love used to be.
So when his voice cuts in—cool, direct, as if none of it had ever happened—Flora doesn’t even look at him. Her lips curve, soft and venomous, as she addresses the merchant. "I don’t want anything like the Ark’s sails," she says, her voice deceptively smooth. "Mine should be beautiful." A flick of her eyes to the man, not Jack. "Stained glass, like I said. Not those brooding, stormy nightmares you dye for him."
Inside her mind, a thousand broken things glitter like glass underfoot. A thousand Jack-shaped memories she thought she’d swept away. Only, that’s the thing about glitter, isn’t it? You never really get rid of it. It clings to the edges of things, it hides in corners. It sparkles the most when you shine a light on it.
And Jack—Jack is all fucking floodlights.
She doesn’t flinch—not outwardly—not in the market with her cart and her cargo and the merchant still stumbling over her sketches. She lets her spine steel instead. Lifts her chin. Puts her weight into the hand on her hip and lets her other one rest on the cart’s edge. But gods, inside? Inside, it's she's a wreck: a storm-wracked shoreline where the tide keeps dragging her back into the memory of his hands. A house she built out of kisses and unspoken promises, now gutted and unrecognizable. A voice—his—still echoing through every haunted hallway calling her love. A chorus of every friend she has whispering you did the right thing in one ear while the empty weight of her bed whispers then why does it still feel like this? in the other.
Her mind—the garden he once strolled through like it was his—has weeds now. Overgrown and tangled, grief curled up in the flowerbeds where joy used to bloom. There’s a faint smell of saltwater and burnt sugar. Glitter on the floorboards, a teacup cracked down the middle. The kind of ache you don’t write poems about, because there aren’t words; just bruises where love used to be.
So when his voice cuts in—cool, direct, as if none of it had ever happened—Flora doesn’t even look at him. Her lips curve, soft and venomous, as she addresses the merchant. "I don’t want anything like the Ark’s sails," she says, her voice deceptively smooth. "Mine should be beautiful." A flick of her eyes to the man, not Jack. "Stained glass, like I said. Not those brooding, stormy nightmares you dye for him."
