bottom line, we made it out the first time still in love and half alive
The Ark feels the dark curl of it in him—the violent thoughts, sharp and immediate—but she doesn’t flinch from it, not when it was that dark ambition that had raised her up and moulded her into this. It rolls off him like heat off sun-warmed boards, and she basks in it, but tutting softly under her breath. "If you killed every vendor you went to to outfit me, there’d be no one left to shop from."
The shack ahead of them is painted in peeling colours, a hand-lettered sign reading TREATS FROM TORCHLINE swinging lazily overhead. The scents are familiar—citrus, sugar, salt—but not exact. She doesn’t know what the originals were meant to taste like, only the names, the echoes of memory from decades west of here. She orders a hollowed iced lemon filled with sorbet, watching the vendor carve the top clean and scoop the bright, frozen sweetness into its shell.
While she waits, she takes Jack’s free hand, the one not looped around her waist, and inspects it. Her gaze lifts toward him, though his eyes are hidden again behind the dark lenses, as her thumb brushes slowly over his knuckles, over the cool metal of the rings there, tracing their edges. "I want rings like yours." She lifts his hand toward her face and inhales, slow and deliberate, the smell striking something deep and primal inside of her. "They smell like the sea," she murmurs, voice lowering. "And like lightning."
It is likely the silver, the metal and the stones, but there’s more to it than that. There’s wood, and work, and smoke, and him. Even she knows whatever she bought wouldn't start out that way, over time she could make them that way. Her fingertips glide over the various shapes of them having only ever felt the cool metal against her railings or rigging, not realizing there was ever more to it than that. "I like how they feel against my skin, too," she softly, eyes flicking up to his sunglasses and then back down as her fingers continue their slow cartography.
The shack ahead of them is painted in peeling colours, a hand-lettered sign reading TREATS FROM TORCHLINE swinging lazily overhead. The scents are familiar—citrus, sugar, salt—but not exact. She doesn’t know what the originals were meant to taste like, only the names, the echoes of memory from decades west of here. She orders a hollowed iced lemon filled with sorbet, watching the vendor carve the top clean and scoop the bright, frozen sweetness into its shell.
While she waits, she takes Jack’s free hand, the one not looped around her waist, and inspects it. Her gaze lifts toward him, though his eyes are hidden again behind the dark lenses, as her thumb brushes slowly over his knuckles, over the cool metal of the rings there, tracing their edges. "I want rings like yours." She lifts his hand toward her face and inhales, slow and deliberate, the smell striking something deep and primal inside of her. "They smell like the sea," she murmurs, voice lowering. "And like lightning."
It is likely the silver, the metal and the stones, but there’s more to it than that. There’s wood, and work, and smoke, and him. Even she knows whatever she bought wouldn't start out that way, over time she could make them that way. Her fingertips glide over the various shapes of them having only ever felt the cool metal against her railings or rigging, not realizing there was ever more to it than that. "I like how they feel against my skin, too," she softly, eyes flicking up to his sunglasses and then back down as her fingers continue their slow cartography.
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.
