bottom line, we made it out the first time still in love and half alive
Inside, the Ark is weather. Not the polite drift of tide through hull-shadowed docks, but a sudden, turning swell that knocks crates loose and sends canvas snapping wild. Racks of garments shiver beneath her fingers as though she were testing planks for rot. Silk, leather, satin, she drags them over her skin the way she once let foam drag over deckboards, gauging slickness, resistance, how they answer heat. Linen wilts beneath her touch, cotton sags, dull and shorebound and wrong. She abandons them like dead wind.
The tailor tries to speak, he attempts measurements, he attempts discretion, and mostly fails in each endeavour as the Ark slips from one thing into nothing at all without pause between, fabric pooling at her feet like cast-off sails while she tilts her head, assessing shine, stretch, the way a seam might pull when she twists. Buttons scatter, hooks give way, and a tape measure dangles uselessly from the tailor's shaking hand.
Leather she likes, the creak of it, the way it yields but does not surrender. Satin she strokes with slow approval, the glide of it like moonlight along a calm wake. Lace earns a hum low in her throat when it clings and reveals at once, all suggestion and structure, like rigging silhouetted against horizon light. She gathers pieces with glittering beadwork, scaled embellishments that catch the sun in sharp flashes. Everything must move, must split and flex and breathe with her. If she cannot arch in it, cannot turn in it, cannot feel the drag of air across skin between its lines, she discards it without mercy.
By the time the tailor bolts for the door, he looks like a man who has weathered a hurricane and found himself inexplicably alive, if not uncomfortably aroused. He rushes toward Jack, voice strangled. "Captain, you’re needed."
Inside, the Ark stands half-clothed in a corset of black leather stitched with silver thread that gleams like foam caught in night tide. It laces high at her ribs and low at her hips, leaving long stretches of bare skin between panels. One arm is crossed beneath her breasts, the other braced at her hip, posture impatient as a ship listing while dockhands fumble knots. "He's rigging me wrong," she says, chin lifting toward Jack, eyes bright as sun off open water before she turns slightly, offering him her back, the laces loose, waiting.
The tailor tries to speak, he attempts measurements, he attempts discretion, and mostly fails in each endeavour as the Ark slips from one thing into nothing at all without pause between, fabric pooling at her feet like cast-off sails while she tilts her head, assessing shine, stretch, the way a seam might pull when she twists. Buttons scatter, hooks give way, and a tape measure dangles uselessly from the tailor's shaking hand.
Leather she likes, the creak of it, the way it yields but does not surrender. Satin she strokes with slow approval, the glide of it like moonlight along a calm wake. Lace earns a hum low in her throat when it clings and reveals at once, all suggestion and structure, like rigging silhouetted against horizon light. She gathers pieces with glittering beadwork, scaled embellishments that catch the sun in sharp flashes. Everything must move, must split and flex and breathe with her. If she cannot arch in it, cannot turn in it, cannot feel the drag of air across skin between its lines, she discards it without mercy.
By the time the tailor bolts for the door, he looks like a man who has weathered a hurricane and found himself inexplicably alive, if not uncomfortably aroused. He rushes toward Jack, voice strangled. "Captain, you’re needed."
Inside, the Ark stands half-clothed in a corset of black leather stitched with silver thread that gleams like foam caught in night tide. It laces high at her ribs and low at her hips, leaving long stretches of bare skin between panels. One arm is crossed beneath her breasts, the other braced at her hip, posture impatient as a ship listing while dockhands fumble knots. "He's rigging me wrong," she says, chin lifting toward Jack, eyes bright as sun off open water before she turns slightly, offering him her back, the laces loose, waiting.
we didn't die, but no guarantees this time, but fuck it lets do it again
Siren's Wake | After she leaves a space, traces of her presence linger briefly: a faint scent of salt, the sound of distant water, a restless feeling in the chest. People rarely notice it consciously.
