[se] disclosure

flora

"Yeah well, just makes it easier to sell the idea to Hadama." The queen says with a shrug. Not that she'd expected any difficulty in doing just that, but even the Tidebreaker would have to admit that losing the Ark's captain would have more of an impact on Torchline's affairs than the presence of a giant ball of void muck.

Biting at the inside of her lip hard enough to have copper beading onto her tongue, Flora tried to douse her rising panic with literally anything thought aside from the one she wanted to think. Sun. Cloud! So many shades of blue. New shoes maybe? She should visit Mateo. And so on.

"Nothing, it can wait." She called out, continuing to force her mind to tether itself to the things she was seeing and nothing else. Carefully she approached the captain, kneeling down at his side and trying to judge the situation for herself. Clearly he wasn't rowing them anywhere with his wrist the way it was and given how shit he looked, he probably didn't have the energy yet to propel them to the Ark as he'd done before.

"Aside from blushberries I don't know what's good around here to eat." Noticing the way he was trying to press his wrist straight, Flora heard herself huffing as she reached out to still his fingers. "Stop that, you're only going to make it worse." Standing, she glanced at Jack over her shoulder. Stay there. She thought, adding, "I'm going to go look for a straight chunk of driftwood to make a splint from."

My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

JACK

"Be quiet," Jack mutters in response to the barrage of nothing thoughts, his own voice soft enough that it's entirely possible that Flora won't even hear it. As the Doubletake approaches and reaches out for his broken wrist, it's with a sudden curse that sounds loud even to his own ears that Jack grabs for (with his good hand, of course) a conch shell sitting in the sand, only to launch it angrily out into the waves as if the Ark will just see it and magically be there for them to climb aboard.

"This is fuckin' bullshit," he hisses, the words spat between clenched teeth, and whether or not he has the energy to propel them back out to the ship is suddenly irrelevant. The crew aren't privy to any loss of control by the captain, unless it's well-placed fury or sharp vengeance. This, though? They don't get to see this, and so he might as well get comfortable on the beach until he recovers enough to think straight.

That leaves Flora, though. "Didn't take you for a medic," he rumbles to her as she goes to fashion a driftwood splint, Jack wiping the cold sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

you wanted perfect, you got your perfect
but now I'm too perfect for someone like you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

flora

Flinching, for a moment expecting the conch shell to be slammed against her head for accidentally twanging the captain's wrist, Flora exhales as Jack instead launches it out toward the Ark. "Good one." She mutters under her breath with a little grin. Jack was in a bad way to be sure, but it was still a bit funny to see someone like Jack acting out like a toddler.

"Oh you're going to be fine." Flora replies, misinterpreting his meaning entirely. Scanning for driftwood—it was the sort of thing you saw a hundred times when you walked along the beach, but now that she was actively looking, couldn't find a single scrap to save her life—the queen just rolls her eyes. "If I was a medic I'd have brought fucking bandages." She called back.

Deciding fuck it, the queen opted to turn invisible once again to lessen her chances of being assaulted by vines as she jogged back toward the tree line. Stripping some vines and leaves for padding, Flora broke off a few branches she thought would work well enough for their purposes before trotting back.

Luckily this took up a good deal of space in her thoughts making it easier not to think the thing, but of course the best way to get someone to think about something was to tell them not to think about it, and...fuck. There was obviously a reason Jack hadn't said anything about what Flora thought she knew, and while she'd much rather have just let him keep the secret, there was no way she was going to make it through the next five minutes without thinking about it much less the next few years.

Jack? If and when he turned to look at her, he'd find Flora holding the vines and branches in one hand, and her dagger in the other. What the fuck.

My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

JACK

"Yeah, I'm fuckin' sure," Jack grates in response to Flora's assessment of is current condition. Physically, sure, he probably is going to be alright, but that's nothing in the face of the swarm of bees currently nesting in his mind. And even if he wasn't who he was and he didn't have the magic that he does, trying to parse through this new and unhappy near death experience isn't an easy thing by any stretch of the imagination.

Anything he wants to snap back at the Doubletake ends up dying on his tongue with the tantalising image of her in a nurse's outfit, and so as she wombles off to get her vines and branches and leaves and to sneak up behind him with a knife drawn, Jack concentrates hard on absolutely nothing at all.

What the fuck indeed, though. Given the nature of her thoughts, Jack doesn't have to look over his shoulder at her - and given the pain that lances through his neck with every movement, he doesn't bother, either. "You know exactly what," he mutters. "I'm a fuckin' mind reader, Flora. Now put the knife away and come sit the fuck down." His grip on his mental barriers are flimsy at best right now, and so it's on Flora to master her confusion as best she can.

you wanted perfect, you got your perfect
but now I'm too perfect for someone like you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

flora

The dagger trembles in her fingers and for just a brief moment she wonders if the smartest course of action isn't just plunging it into the back of Jack's skull while he was as incapacitated as Flora had ever seen him. On the heels of it, though, she realizes how ludicrous such an idea would be. There was no sneaking up on Jack, short of lobotomizing herself. No even thinking about it, which she currently was. With an unhappy laugh the queen could do little more than sneer at the back of the captain's head before doing precisely as he'd instructed.

"That's why you knew where I was in the jungle." Warily, she moves to stand before the captain. "Why you asked about Koa, why..." Though she can't say why it's more insulting, the fact that he'd just read her thoughts as a means of being good in bed was somehow more horrifying to her. "..so that's why you were also such a good fuck." Flora finishes, not that she needed to.

"So that's you, then." Still not sure if it was wise to be within his reach, Flora bit at the inside of her cheek as she glared down at him. "The great and powerful Jack is nothing more than a fucking party trick."

My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

JACK

Waiting patiently for Flora to walk herself through the steps of do I kill him, oh wait no I'm thinking about it, Jack is as calm as he's ever been given the fact that his greatest secret has been revealed - willingly, no less, because he's not far gone enough not to know that he might have clawed this back to coincidence if he'd wanted to - to the young Queen of Torchline. And of course she's got to have her little putting-the-clues-together moment, and it's with tired blue eyes (one of them, anyway) that he tracks her sneering movements around towards him.

And it's true - whilst Flora has no idea the fate that has befallen all but one of the people to know about him (hey how's it going Jata) - even Jack knows he's almost frighteningly detached from the current situation. Indeed, at her final sharp insult, he does little more than gesture with his good hand as if he's going to give her a jaunty bow from his place sitting on the beach.

"A party trick with a broken wrist," he slurs, gesturing to his bad side. "So, y'know, if you're not busy..." Could you make with the being a medic? "Unless you really do wanna try that knife on me. Which'd be a shame."

you wanted perfect, you got your perfect
but now I'm too perfect for someone like you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

flora

"Yeah well, you would say that."

Flora wants to scream. Then she wants to cry, and if there's time, she wants to put on the biggest pair of heels she has and grind Jack's ballsack into the sand. Feeling all the more humiliated and betrayed than ever she had with Koa—and fuck you twice for knowing about it, Jack—the Doubletake comes to realize something that perhaps none of her other counterparts could have.

Whatever the captain is capable of feeling from her just then, no doubt the sudden change from hissy fit to smug would no doubt catch his attention just as sharply as if she really had tipped her head back and started screaming. Laughing under her breath, and then properly, Flora grins down at Jack before sinking onto her knees. "You can't do a damn thing about me knowing, can you?" The queen's smile grows, all bitter triumph and sharp edges. "Because if you tried to handle me, my dad could reach right into Mort's realm and pluck me out to hear what happened." Even without his telepathy, Jack wouldn't need Flora to spell out the lengths that all of her family would go to to find the Captain if that happened.

"And if you tried to keep me out of the way, but not let me actually die, I'd have every fucking demigod on the Ark's doorstep before you finished tying a single knot."

My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

JACK

Tilting his head - and then wincing, both because of the pain in his neck and the lightswitch that goes off in Flora's thoughts - Jack blinks idly up at the Doubletake as she starts speaking, and gods if he wishes he was firing on all cylinders right now. At least then perhaps he could make a show at being threatening, at being angry, at properly understanding the implications of everything currently happening and what it will mean, for now and forever more.

"I know," he says simply, his brows furrowing as if she might have forgotten their conversation only a couple of hours before. You know, the one about all of her demigodly family members and the implications. "I think... I think I wanted you to know." Nothing like mortal peril to make a snap decision, right?

"Everyone else who found out is dead. Been that way since I was a kid. Except... except Sunjata." He scrunches his nose. "We made an agreement, back when he was Governor." Now he's started talking, the words just keep slipping out. What's that phrase about it feeling good to confess your sins? Hilarious.

"And for the record, I don't want to handle you, Flora. I want to work with you."

you wanted perfect, you got your perfect
but now I'm too perfect for someone like you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

flora

"Wh—" It felt like a trick or a trap, something to cause her to let her guard down, but to what end? They'd just agreed that Jack couldn't do shit to her without there being repercussions, so why did it still feel so wrong? So slimy?

Rubbing one of her cheeks against her shoulder like she might somehow douse the heat she knew had spread across her face, Flora snapped her fingers for his broken wrist. The urge to shake it was strong, but gods, what was the fucking use? Instead, she placed a few of the leaves against his palm to act as padding before placing the sticks vertically against his arm and fingers. "This is going to hurt." She murmured as she reached for the vines.

"So what was the arrangement?" Flora asked, her voice dull as she started to wind the vines softly around Jack's arm beneath the break.

My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

JACK

"It's not slimy," Jack protests, scowling at her. But then of course he'd think that, never having let anyone get close enough to him to ask personal questions, let alone to read his thoughts. That personal intrusion is the captain's bread and butter, though; it always has been and it always will be. Lifting his chin suspiciously as he catches the urge that shoots though her mind, it's with understandable wariness that Jack surrenders his broken wrist, but he does eventually do so.

"Always does," he mutters as to it hurting, though the comment does seem remarkably without context. Nevertheless as she starts to work the captain grits his teeth, glaring out into the sparkling water and imagining that he might just submerge himself beneath them forever, somewhere cold and dark and deep.

"It was back when he was with Nate," he grates out. "I told them both, so Nate could use... could take the ability." Blah blah Ascended bites blah. "He owed me a favour. Owed me a lot of favours by the end, after that shit with his dad."

Hissing out a shaky breath, he returns his gaze to her work on his arm. "I didn't ask to be like this, y'know."

you wanted perfect, you got your perfect
but now I'm too perfect for someone like you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

flora

"And what the fuck would you call it?" Flora spits, her anger finding any opportunity it was given to be a good one.

If only Flora could read his thoughts in return, she'd have offered to send him off into whatever dark and frigid depths he wanted. Alas, their one sided relationship continued and as Flora did her best to secure his wrist, it was all she could do to keep her thoughts

Flora, who was nothing more than an actual child back then, could only shrug. "A mind reader who helped the ascended." Again, her ire took its shot where it could, and though Flora didn't actually have much to say about the war—her twin had died, but that was because of some monster from the fucking ocean and not because of the ascended—it still felt good even if Jack would be able to see right through it.

"Oh boohoo." Lifting her eyes and tightening one of the bandages, Flora just rolls her eyes. "You might not have asked for it, but you've built quite the empire on it." She pointed out. "Besides, as if you couldn't have just asked Safrin for some way of shutting it out instead of a flying ship with her tits on the front."

With the splint as sturdy as it was ever going to be, Flora shuffled away from the captain, before rising and dusting off her pants. "How far?" She demanded, glancing over her shoulder and up the beach. "How far does it go?"

My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

JACK

"The way things fuckin' are," Jack snaps back, feeding off her anger all too easily in his current state. "How'd you think most of Torchline feels about you bein' able to dangle your demigod parents over them if they piss you off? Think it feels slimy?" He raises his eyebrows.

But then she's shooting her shots elsewhere, and he scoffs to her. "You asked," he points out with a scowl. Besides, the war was long ago enough now for Jack to have honestly forgotten the specifics, especially with Nate being dead and all. He's pretty sure the Ranger had used his magic for personal reasons anyway.

Grunting a note of pain at the bandages that tighten around his arm, the captain can only let out a shaky laugh of agreement. "Built an empire on it, an' helped to make you queen," he agrees with a sunny smile that looks entirely off given the pallid tone of his skin. "For the record, she just made the ship fly. The tits were all me. Bein' in a goddess's mind, though..." He lets out a low whistle and resists the urge to flop back into the sand.

"Mm?" Following her gaze up the beach, Jack shrugs his shoulders. "Miles," he says. "Oerwoud is a weird, skinny sort of region."

you wanted perfect, you got your perfect
but now I'm too perfect for someone like you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

flora

"At least they know about it." Flora snaps in return. For all their talk of silken daggers and keeping one's cards close to their chest, this wasn't some ace in the hole for Jack. This was a rigged fucking game. At least when someone sat down at Flora's table, they knew what the odds were ahead of time.

That Jack's gifts had potentially gotten Flora the crown was not a thought the Doubletake wanted to think about with the captain in her mind, and so with a shake of her head—and a scowl for his commentary about Safrin—Flora began stomping down the beach.

"No dummy, for your mind reading to turn off." However far it was, that's how far away from Jack she wanted to be and if that meant screaming at him to be heard, so be it. Her throat hadn't been rubbed raw.

My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

JACK

"An' now you do too," he points out, rubbing at his bloody eye as if it will make it easier to see. (Newsflash, it does not). He frowns after her as she goes marching off down the beach, and the words don't go are locked and loaded on his tongue before she speaks again, and the captain furrows his brow. "How'd you know I won't lie about it?" he mutters, before realising that helps precisely no one in this situation.

"'Bout 30ft, give or take," he supplies instead. "Just... I dunno, think shitty thoughts about me an' I'll tell you when it gets quiet." Waving her off, Jack shuffles in the sand to reach out for his coat slung over the side of the boat, feeling suddenly very cold and drawing it clumsily around his shoulders. (It's not like he could cram his splint through the sleeve, after all).

"Thanks, by the way. For..." He gestures at his neck and the whole nether-vine-choking-me-out situation. "That."

you wanted perfect, you got your perfect
but now I'm too perfect for someone like you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!