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Character of the Season
Frail in body but dangerously quick of mind, Nikandr is the sort of character who proves that curiosity can be just as perilous as any weapon. A necromancer, inventor, and problem-solver with more ambition than self-preservation, Niki approaches the world like a puzzle box begging to be opened, even when what’s inside has teeth. Blunt, dry-witted, fiercely independent, and carrying a history best left partially buried, he has a knack for making even failure feel fascinating. Whether he’s raising the dead, moving across Caido to King's End, or experiencing a hangover for the first time, Nikandr brings a wonderfully strange spark to Caido, and we can’t wait to see what trouble his brilliant mind wanders into next.
Congratulations, Niki!
Credits
Court of the Fallen was created in October of 2018 by Odd, Honey, and Crooked.
OG Skinning provided by Kaons, with functionality and many custom plugins made by Neowulf!
Jack's mind might be his own again, but there's nothing in it but yawning darkness and the sort of pain that fractures through bones and teeth, aching deep and hard in a way that makes one want to scratch it out with their fingernails. He's left, as he began, on his knees before the shrine, though by now he's hunched forward, his forehead pressed against the soft grass, his arms gripped around himself as if it might hold the threads of him together.
To say there's blood everywhere is an understatement; Safrin's presence has seared through his mind and left it vacant and electric, and red streams from his nose, his ears, between his lips. Jack would be sobbing if he had the sense or the breath to try. Instead it's barely enough to anchor himself to the here and the now; the ground beneath his knees, the air caressing his shoulders and across the back of his neck, the smell of distant flowers and the tang of iron.
Whatever it might have been like for Jack, it was both an eternity and the split second before the sting of a slap for Flora. Exhaling a breath she'd likely been holding the entire time, the queen drops sharply to Jack's side the second Safrin disappears, her entire body shaking with nervous energy that likely had her thoughts buzzing like a field of fireflies. "Jack—" Her fingers reach for his face before the memory of Safrin's hands doing precisely the same thing has her flinching. "Hey, look at me." She whispers softly.
The conversation had been so one-sided the queen couldn't really make out what had happened, thinking only that Safrin really had blown Jack's mind as he'd warned her about. Only as she reaches to push his hair away from his face that she might see him better, is she aware of the blood dripping from his ears, mistaking it at first for dark tendrils of shadow. "Wh—" Twisting away, the queen reaches for her bag and the blanket inside. Tugging at it she turns back, wishing she'd brought fucking water instead of a bottle of wine.
Jack thinks he sees them in his vision, each one a whirling, flickering thing that sounds like his name. His fingers try to curl around them - in reality, they merely clutch at the dark shirt he wears.
Look at me, they say, and he blinks tears from his eyes and sees only the curve of his knees, the flickers of candlelight in the grass. Flinching more out of instinct than pain as Flora reaches for him - hilarious, really, to think that physical pain could touch him right now - the captain unleashes a shuddering sigh, chasing it on an inhale that feels cold and heavy and squirming, like a serpent nestled around his lungs.
"Where--" Are we? Did Safrin go? It could be that or any other number of questions. Either way, Jack slowly tries to uncurl from himself, hands gripping the soft earth and trying, unwisely, to push himself to his feet.
"No, no." Reaching out for him and nearly expecting her fingers to slide right through him given how much he looks like a shadow, Flora grabs at his shirt and tugs until she's sure he isn't going to try and float away like a lost balloon. Ignoring the way her belly clenches, the queen reaches out to try and slide her palm across his cheek to draw his gaze to her. "You're okay, everything's fine. You did it, and she's gone, and now you can just...breathe."
Realizing that the rising tide of her thoughts likely wasn't helping, difficult as it was to put aside the looming questions of DID YOU JUST FUCKING TELL HER YOU LOVED HER and WHAT DID YOU AGREE TO?, Flora did her best to concentrate on the flicker of candlelight, the sparkle of flame on the pearls she'd brought, the stillness of the remaining wine in the shell.
"Gods, Jack." Knowing her mother wouldn't care at all, Flora reached out to softly wipe away the blood on his cheeks and mouth with the sleeve of her sweater, the creamy material instantly growing hazy with red and pink.
Guided wherever she wants him with only the softest of touches, to say that Jack is untethered to the world wouldn't be far wrong. The only anchor he can find in the dark is Flora, in her thoughts as much as her gentle hands, and he glances up towards her face through eyes that are glazed and red-rimmed. "No, I don't..." I don't think I did do it. He doesn't believe, either, that Safrin is ever gone even for a second, though as the moments stretch out where he isn't forced to make room for the cosmos in his mind, it gets a fraction easier.
Soft fabric wipes at his face, the captain closing his eyes and leaning into it; he leans, too, into the wine, the candlelight, the pearls glimmering in the dark, drawn inexorably to the images in her mind.
Like fireflies.
Gritting his teeth and groaning out a curse or two as the world tries to crowd in, empty as the night as it might be, Jack shifts as if to press his head against Flora's shoulder, an action that will undoubtedly leave more smudges of red and pink on her sweater. "She knew what I really wanted."
It isn't the sleepy softness Flora had seen from Jack the morning he'd awoken in her bed, much as the way he leans against her suggests the same sort of easy intimacy. Instead this—whatever it was—had the queen on pins and needles and while she wanted to wrap her arms around him, it was only so that her sweater might keep him from slicing himself apart with the sharp edges Safrin had left behind. Her concern outweighs her jealousy, for the time being anyway, and though she hadn't thought to take Jack's words literally when he'd said she'd need to scrape him off the ground, she's more than happy to do so.
Shifting, Flora reaches with one hand for the blanket as the other falls from his cheek, opting to wrap it around his shoulder instead. Roughly shaking the blanket out before tossing it over him, the bright tang of copper has her tilting her chin up and away from him in order to breathe the cool air above.
Caring little for her clothing and trying not to care at all about the partial conversation she'd heard, Flora lowers her eyes. "And that was...?" There's hardly any sound, but still as the air was around them it didn't take much for her voice to carry given how close they were.
Never had Jack considered that he might owe the queen for her kindness tonight on this star-spangled hillside, but the realisation sinks deeply into the places where Safrin had left a void on her departure. Shivering at the blanket that glides over his shoulders and simultaneously trying to focus on the sensation but also to ignore it entirely, the captain settles on counting the seconds between his breaths.
Flora's presence is a warmth that feels like fire, if only because everything else is suddenly so cold, and whilst his ears are still ringing, the blood starting to dry against his neck and in his hair, Jack can hear her words clearly enough. And the thoughts trickling behind them. "Same as everyone," he mumbles, before his voice drops to a whisper, an admission breathed out into the space between them.
08-20-2024, 04:13 PM (This post was last modified: 08-20-2024, 04:13 PM by Flora.)
i could be the reason you can't sleep at night
Flora's fingers suddenly still from where they'd been absently running up and down his arm, her breath halting at the back of her throat. The whisper of his voice sent a shiver down her spine and had his mouth not been coated with blood still, the softness might have had her thoughts growing scarlet. Instead, the shiver had goosebumps trickling down her arms and upper back; no one wanted to die.
Had he asked Safrin for a feather? Something to keep handy in case anything happened?
I...yours
I love you.
Those were the things she'd made Ronin say, the things she'd made Sunjata say. The things she'd warned Koa against saying. The things that led to immortality and more often than not, to damnation. "You didn't." Flora whispers, her fingertips trembling against his arm. "Tell me you didn't do it." The roar of the stillness has her ears ringing, because while she certainly didn't think Jack was stupid enough to become a demigod, she did think he was selfish enough, and—
You didn't, Flora whispers, and they both already know the response to that remark.
"I can do it, Flora," Jack says, sounding a touch more confident, a little more like himself, if not a more manic version of it.
"She didn't ask for much." Life. Death. Bits and pieces. Jack has done worse in his life than the things Safrin demands of him. And in return? Everything.
Sitting back a fraction, blood smudging his face and drying on his clothes, the captain's blue eyes are wilder than they've ever been, and they only half realise Flora is there.
"Who would say no?" To an offer like that, to the possibility of being everything he is and ever could be, forever? "Who could?" With a goddess in his mind whose presence could blot out the sun, the stars, all but the present moment and the brush of her lips like static on the wind?
"That doesn't mean anything." Flora argues, of Safrin not asking for much. "And you know that." She adds with a huff, wanting to shake some sense in him even if it all was too late. She doesn't, of course, not with how his psyche seemed to be just as thin and flaky as the blood drying on his skin.
Having never felt less seen than she does just then, with Jack's blue eyes looking right through her, Flora shifts to lean back even further from him if only to try and force some perspective. Releasing her hold of the blanket so that it flutters against his arm, the queen licks her bottom lip, dropping her eyes and shaking her head. "I would." Her honesty was bald and bright in her mind for him to see, if he could peel his thoughts away from whatever stardust Safrin had left in him to see it, that was.
"Immortality." She murmurs, tasting the word. Immediately her stomach clenches as a wave of something cold rises up from her belly, sloshing against the back of her throat. "And...your hers." It wasn't a question. Looking down at her hands, Flora rubs at her fingers. "For ever."
"How's it any different from any other quest?" Jack asks with a shake of his head he immediately regrets. Slumping a little as she leans back from him, the blanket flutters around his shoulders with the breeze. "Everythin' anyone asks from Safrin makes you hers." The words aren't eloquent, but they ring with the truth he'd seen as expanding starlight from the supernova of the goddess's core. "Every regional ask, every item, every bit of power." A trembling hand raises towards his face - there's already a tattoo there of a star, inked by the lady herself. Was he any less hers coming into this as he is leaving now?
Feeling Flora's honesty like the bare scratch of fingernails against his skin, Jack doesn't flinch away from it, though his eyebrows do raise a fraction in surprise. "Then she'd just offer you somethin' you couldn't say no to," he says simply.
Perhaps a love that couldn't wither, in the form of a man or woman who would never look twice at anyone but the Doubletake. Perhaps that.
"Forever," the captain's ambition repeats. It doesn't matter whose he is. He's there forever.
Closing her eyes against the harsh reality of his words, Flora nods her head in a vague oval as if still unwilling to admit he was right. He was, though, and they both knew it despite how the queen was still trying to raise icy walls against his words.
Now obviously for as delusional as Flora could be, not even the queen thinks she can hold a candle to Safrin such that it isn't so much that Jack had picked the goddess over her, but that he'd picked at all. The one consolation in her whole stupid situationship with the captain had been that even if he never fell in love with her, he'd never fall in love with anyone else, either. And yet here he was, his soul and his love given up freely and easily.
Forever; Flora had seen firsthand what had happened to her father and to Ronin when that love was usurped and bested.
Pressing her tongue against the bottom of her teeth as if that might stop the tears that prickled behind her eyes, Flora can do little more than nod. Just because she didn't know what she'd sell her soul for didn't mean that there wasn't something, and if anyone could dig down and find it, of course it would be Safrin. Rounding her shoulders and staring intently at her palm, the queen promises herself that later, once Jack is aboard the Ark, she'll fling herself off the cavernous pit of despair that yawns in her mind, beckoning her in. For now, though, she'd made him a promise.
"Let me know when you think you're ready to walk back." Her voice is small and if she didn't think the wine she'd brought would make her sick she might have reached for it if only to do something with her hands other than press at her palm.
It's with numb fingers that Jack belatedly grabs at the blanket to clutch it further around him, the captain dazed and uncertain even in the face of all that had just happened and all that he'd admitted to Flora. It's such that the cascade of her thoughts, in the silence that ticks by between them, slowly start to make sense, to arrange themselves into an order where his magic can organise it all.
"She told me to say it," he mumbles, on the subject of love and whether he has any to give to anyone, even a goddess. "I wasn't in a position to refuse." And he really might have meant it at the time, though one could argue that any love given on the precipice of insanity can't really be called true.
His soul, though - there's no question about that. Better for Safrin to keep it, though, than Mort.
"It'll be a few minutes," he says in response to her comment. (Understatement of the century). "It wasn't exactly an enjoyable meeting." Not like those he's had with Flora, for instance, though he doubts she's in a position to care about it.
"I mean, if you're a telepath, she's..." Rolling her wrist, Flora fumbles for a word to accurately describe what Safrin was, before opting just to give her head a shake. Sure Safrin might have told Jack to say the words, but whatever had been in his mind when he had said them had obviously done the trick.
Feeling similar to the way she had when she'd placed her hands on Asta's cheeks and asked him for the inevitable truth—of wishing she could have had just a few more moments of delusion to enjoy what had once been—so too did Flora try and glance at Jack out of the corner of her eye and remember what it had felt like to think that just maybe... In the long run, it was probably better that it ended like this, though. How much more would it have hurt to finally admit what her feelings were for Jack, maybe what they had been all along, only for him to just shake his head and offer condolences in the form of I do like havin' you around, though.
"As long as you need." Forcing a small smile, if nothing else Flora's thoughts felt far away and distant, like lanterns of flickering brightness hung in a darkened warehouse. "Mmmmm." The queen hums, her brows raising a touch argumentatively. "I mean...a few easy tasks, immortality, got to make out with Safrin for a bit." She shrugs, flicking an invisible piece of lint off of her breeches.
