I've been trying out the high road, and I hate it
Initially, the Ark had stiffened at the outpouring of flame brought to bear across her deck. That it was Jack who set each brazier—far from rope and sail and anything hungry enough to catch—the precision of which smooths down the worst of her unease down before it can splinter. He’s made heat without carelessness, warmth without threat, and because it’s his magic licking life into the coals and his will keeping the whole bright danger on its leash, The Ark lets herself bear it. Gratitude moves through her like warmer water beneath a cold current, because he’s thought of her first in all the places someone else would have thought only of spectacle: the ice kept from her sails, the snow held off her deck by the press of his air, the gangplank freed from frost with a pulse of water that runs harmlessly back into the waves below. He’s made a party out of Deepfrost without letting Deepfrost make a corpse of her, and if the sight of flame still sends something old and splintered tightening beneath her ribs, it’s Jack’s hand she trusts around the tinderbox of it all, Jack’s magic that keeps the teeth of the thing from closing.
The dreamdust he'd given her sits sweet and strange in the back of her thoughts, softening the edges where noise would otherwise come pouring through too brightly, where every stomp, shout, laugh, glass-clink, song, scrape of boots, and shifting weight might have become weather too violent to carry. He’d given her a healthy dose before the crew and guests began to fill her, and there’d been rum as well, a large shot knocked back with him before the night could begin in earnest, its fire sinking into her belly and spreading outward until the great, raw net of her senses lay smoother against itself. It doesn’t make her dull—nothing could make her dull—but it lets the clamour blur into something she can bear.
It isn’t the party that had her winedark lips pulled down in a frown. The Ark has known worse noise than this, but the cold feels like an ugly stowaway, a thin-fingered thing prying at her seams and trying to make brittle what ought to bend. Even with Jack’s work holding back the worst of it, Deepfrost presses itself against her in pale, needling insistence, slipping wherever it can find room, frosting the edges of breath and glass and thought. So she keeps herself away from the braziers despite the heat they offer, because trust doesn’t make fire less fire, and instead draws the black-dyed ursur fur coat tighter around herself until it swallows the lines of her body in thick, dark warmth. In one hand, she holds a glass of strong whiskey, the kind that burns pleasantly down her throat with every sip and leaves heat pooled behind her belly like a lantern guarded from the wind.
The Ark's standing by herself!
The dreamdust he'd given her sits sweet and strange in the back of her thoughts, softening the edges where noise would otherwise come pouring through too brightly, where every stomp, shout, laugh, glass-clink, song, scrape of boots, and shifting weight might have become weather too violent to carry. He’d given her a healthy dose before the crew and guests began to fill her, and there’d been rum as well, a large shot knocked back with him before the night could begin in earnest, its fire sinking into her belly and spreading outward until the great, raw net of her senses lay smoother against itself. It doesn’t make her dull—nothing could make her dull—but it lets the clamour blur into something she can bear.
It isn’t the party that had her winedark lips pulled down in a frown. The Ark has known worse noise than this, but the cold feels like an ugly stowaway, a thin-fingered thing prying at her seams and trying to make brittle what ought to bend. Even with Jack’s work holding back the worst of it, Deepfrost presses itself against her in pale, needling insistence, slipping wherever it can find room, frosting the edges of breath and glass and thought. So she keeps herself away from the braziers despite the heat they offer, because trust doesn’t make fire less fire, and instead draws the black-dyed ursur fur coat tighter around herself until it swallows the lines of her body in thick, dark warmth. In one hand, she holds a glass of strong whiskey, the kind that burns pleasantly down her throat with every sip and leaves heat pooled behind her belly like a lantern guarded from the wind.
The Ark's standing by herself!
I've got a lot of sins, but you're my favourite
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.
