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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.
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09-10-2024, 04:13 AM (This post was last modified: 09-10-2024, 04:13 AM by Flora.)
flora
"Believe what? That this feels like standing on the edge of a cliff?" Raking her fingertips through her hair, Flora utters a harsh and humourless laugh as splotches of colour appear on her cheeks. Trembling ever so slightly as she bites at the inside her lip, the queen can only turn her eyes out toward the ocean, wondering if drowning wouldn't have been a better metaphor.
"I'm not you." Flora hisses in response, the colour taking on a maroonish tilt in the moonlight as it spreads across her nose and flushes down her neck. She wasn't going to plan the way she felt around what it could or couldn't help her accomplish. No, she was shrewd enough now to know better than to act on every whim, but she'd done just fine so far emotional though she was.
"Wh—" Crossing her arms tightly over her chest, defensively even, Flora's head tilts back as she scoffs up at the stars. How the fuck this was such a difficult conversation to have with someone who could literally read her mind she didn't know. Where once Jack had described her thoughts as fireworks, she suddenly wasn't so sure if he hadn't just mistaken cannon fire for the flashes of light he so often saw. "Of course I don't." She hisses. "I might once have had rose-coloured glasses on with you, but I got rid of them a long time ago." The day he'd told her about his abilities whatever last remnants of them existed had been smashed down into the sand.
Pressing her nails against the sides of her arms, Flora jerkily lowers her chin. "I know that loving someone doesn't just magically make everything perfect and easy." It was why in the early stages of things when her feelings for the captain were nothing more than romantic fairytales it had been so easy to joke about it with him. To admonish him when he was too sweet to her, to mentally cluck her tongue at him and think don't make me fall in love with you, Jack, when the threat of it hadn't fully sunk its claws in. Only having spent seasons by his side and years in his orbit, her feelings had grown roots far deeper than she'd allowed herself to notice, until the thought of them terrified her, for the damage they'd inevitably cause.
"I know this could never work." Flora says softly after a moment, scowling down at the ground. Her thoughts edge towards an apology she isn't sure how to make, the haze of which has her blinking silently down at the sand, her mind trying to form sandcastles where there were only ruins and sunken ships. "With how you are...with how I am.." She swallows, her head shaking ever so slightly.
How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22? Will you still want me when I'm nothing new?
Drowning is a more accurate metaphor, Jack agrees, and it doesn't get any easier as the tide of Flora's thoughts pulls back for a moment before inevitably crashing forward with as much force as the captain has expected and then some. "No - you're not. And that's never been a bad thing." Flora not being like him is just one of the many reasons they do work together, in a professional capacity and otherwise. If he's Torchline's calculating mind then Flora is her beating heart, and if that's all this was, it would never stop being easy.
With her emotions detonating through his magic like - yes - cannonfire, it's only years of maintaining a very good poker face that allows Jack to keep a neutral expression, but even then, the slight creasing at the corners of his eyes can't be denied. That she'd seen him through those rose-coloured glasses is no surprise, and it wouldn't have been with or without telepathy. No, it's that she's discarded them and stuck around anyway that feels strange, leaving the captain with the sudden urge to roll his shoulders or to drum his fingers against the side of his leg to create movement where there's only stillness and silence.
"Well I'm glad one of us knows," he responds automatically as she continues, unable to help it. "Because I don't. I don't know what it's like, how it feels, what it's meant to be. I can see love it in other people - can watch it play out, go right, go wrong more often than not, but that's it. I'm just someone lookin' over other people's shoulders at it." And I think I'm tired of it.
But Flora's saying what they both know, and Jack nods his agreement and shakes out his hands at last as if to disperse the tension that had begun to gather there in flecks of ice and frost. "You're still here, though," he points out.
believer, believe it or not you'll know when it ends and how it goes
Pressing her nails into her skin, Flora nods numbly. "Well, if you don't know how it feels, it's because you've never felt it." She points out, even as the logic has sheets of ice forcing down the waves of her mind, trapping her in waters too deep and cold to possibly swim against. Young as she was, even Flora knew that love wasn't the sort of thing you just tripped over. It didn't arrive with a neat little label or bow, didn't come with a return to sender address just in case it wasn't what you'd been hoping for. It was the sort of thing realized in moments of passion or sadness, or in the middle of a fight when what you meant to say was "fuck you", but it somehow came out "I love you" instead.
Watching the flecks of ice shiver from his fingertip, Flora can only turn somewhat away from him, preferring to look at the sea instead of the inevitable ending that they'd nearly found themselves pressed up against.
"Yeah." Her shoulders slump, fingertips rubbing idly at the remarks her nails had left upon her skin. Where else? "I tried not to." Flora says softly, her eyes tracing the places the froth of the waves disappeared into the shoreline before being tugged back again and again by the tide. Though her mind shivers with the sort of mist that normally heralds tears, the queen's eyes just stare listlessly out at the sea. She'd known if they ever made it to this point in the wHAt R We conversation it would be over, never more so than when Jack had seen the word hidden beneath layers of knots she'd worked so hard to tie, only for them all to come entirely unbound, and he'd just...
Well, he'd done more or less exactly what Flora had always known he would: reluctantly salvage what he could, move on when he couldn't.
"And when I couldn't stop it I thought I could just keep it from you, but.." Glancing at him over her shoulder, a stilted smile pulls at one corner of Flora's mouth. Fucking mind readers, innit.
How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22? Will you still want me when I'm nothing new?
"...Right," Jack says, feeling suddenly colder than any frost coating his hands might cause. It's not as if he can argue, after all - he'd just told Flora he didn't know what it was like, wouldn't know the feeling if it came up and slapped him across the face, let alone started whispering v and e in his most intimate moments. So if he's never felt it, under Flora's definitions - never, in thirty-five years walking the shores of Torchline, of making and breaking relationships and fucking his way through the Halenani... right, yeah. "Lost cause, I guess."
Flora has been the closest thing to a chance to learn that Jack was ever going to get, but as he feels her pull further and further away, the words too little too late spring unbidden into his mind, and he retreats back into himself. Just as she'd always known he would.
"Should have gotten a different sort of ring from Safrin for that," he says of her not being able to keep it from him, his voice rougher than he'd like, the sea breeze ruffling through the back of his hair. "I guess that's it then, isn't it."
believer, believe it or not you'll know when it ends and how it goes
"Nah." Now the pulse of tears begins in earnest, sweeping through Flora's thoughts like a warm summer rain. The feeling isn't as painful as she would have expected, likely owing to the fact that she'd seen this moment on the horizon for months now, and despite all her efforts to steer them around it, now that it was upon them, there was nothing left for her to do than stand beneath the storm of her own making and let it drench her to the bone.
"I bet you'll get there one day, now that you're immortal at all." She adds, her voice tight before her teeth are biting down on her lower lip to keep it from trembling. Someone would make the captain fall in love. It just wouldn't be her.
"I thought about it." Flora agrees softly. "But...you said you liked being in my mind, so.." She shrugs. He'd called it his favourite, once, and that had all but cemented it, so she'd sacrificed any hope she had of hiding her feelings from him in an effort to make the remaining time they had together as enjoyable for him as she could. Yes there was the odd monsoon—the night he'd found her in the fountain after her disastrous date with Asta, the tirade of her mind on the beach with the panther, other minor girlish flares of emotion along the way—but surely that had been better than the silent isolation that it would otherwise have been? "Maybe I will now, though." That'd probably make it easier on both of them, going forward.
How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22? Will you still want me when I'm nothing new?
"Yeah, maybe," he says, the words dull and spoken for little reason other than to say anything at all. No, I won't. And he thinks Flora knows that deep down as well. It would take all of this - five plus years of building something before daring to let someone into the secret he keeps at the very centre of himself, not to mention all that had come after, and in the end there just hadn't been enough time. Why go through that again even once more, let alone over and over, just to stand here each time?
Squaring his shoulders and tipping his head back to look up at the sky, Jack thinks very briefly about going back to the shrine, to see if he might invite the goddess back down to obliterate his mind so he doesn't have to deal with this. "It still is my favourite," he mutters, hardly realising the words have passed his lips, before his gaze flicks back down towards the Doubletake and he clears his throat. "Yeah, that's probably a good idea. Just do me a favour and send a note before you sik your demigod posse on me, when I can't read your mind anymore. A five minute headstart should be enough."
He gestures behind Flora, towards Haulani's twinkling lights in the distance. "Let me walk you home?"
believer, believe it or not you'll know when it ends and how it goes
Unlike Jack, Flora is sure of it. Someone will come along, someone more clever than she was, someone not as prone to girlish outbursts of jealousy or rage. Someone who didn't need to be cuddled and held, someone with the sort of intergenerational trauma that more closely aligned with Jack's, someone not quite as argumentative and frustrating. In short, simply someone better than she was.
Silent tears trickle down Flora's cheeks as she smiles numbly, his words like icy fingers around her heart. "Yeah right." She laughs dryly; they both knew that even with a year of planning Jack couldn't shake Flora's family if she sent them after him. Not even death would keep him safe. Only she never would, and Jack likely knew it. He hadn't done anything wrong after all; much as it might feel like it sometimes, not loving her wasn't actually a crime.
"That's okay. I think I'm going to sit here a while."
How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22? Will you still want me when I'm nothing new?
"There's nothin' wrong with how you are," Jack objects to her thoughts, tucking both hands into his pockets and leaving the serpentine tattoo fully visible, stark against his skin where it curls up his side and along his ribs. "Don't go blamin' yourself as the problem when it's always been me." Right from day one, Flora hasn't been anything other than herself. And in fairness to himself, that's true of the captain as well - he's just a lot worse of a person than she is.
He ought to have expected that she'd want to be out of his company sooner rather than later, and so Jack inclines his head and accepts the decision without argument. "Oh, I'm pretty sure it is a crime," he objects as he steps past her, one hand reaching out to brush a stray curl out of her face. "So I'm not just a fuckin' idiot, I'm a criminal too." Just one more misdeed to add to the list.
"For what it's worth, though, I think you could have taught me how, given long enough. So go find someone worthwhile and give 'em all you have."
believer, believe it or not you'll know when it ends and how it goes
Flora doesn't reply, though her shoulders do stiffen. If there was nothing wrong with her, why was she so hard to love? Koa had chosen Sohalia, Asta had chosen Danta, and Jack had chosen himself, and while perhaps neither of those were entirely fair comparisons, it certainly seemed like the common factor was her. "You say that, but.." Asta, who'd likely killed far more people than Jack ever had, or at least killed far more people he was close to, had still managed to find love. Monsters, she was pretty sure, fell in love all the time.
She just wasn't the one for him.
The featherlight feel of his fingertips against her skin has tears welling in her eyes, and, torn between wanting to flinch away from the gesture and fling herself into his arms, Flora remains impossibly still. "You've been a criminal since the day I met you." And an idiot too, probably, so really, nothing new.
"That isn't how it works." Turning her gaze fully to the sea, not able to look into the blue of his eyes without drowning in it, Flora gives her head a small shake, her hands tightening around her arms. Anger flares in the back of her mind, and while she doesn't say it, steam and smoke suddenly hiss up from her thoughts where fire sputters amidst the rain. He could have tried, if he'd wanted to.
"Fuck you, Jack." She says softly, her teeth clenched. He didn't get to say in one breath that she hadn't done anything wrong, that she didn't need to be better, and then in the next say that if she'd only put in a bit more effort, tried a little harder for longer, that things could have been different. Pulling away from him, furious at his aww shucks, you'll get 'em next time kid routine, Flora walks toward the water's edge.
How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22? Will you still want me when I'm nothing new?
His hand pulls back at the sudden hiss of her anger through his magic, Jack biting the inside of his cheek and shaking his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I was tryin'," he grates out, stepping away from her properly at last. It's for the best. She doesn't want this, doesn't want anything like what this would look like, and it's for the fucking best.
"You seem to know everythin' about how this works for someone who feels like she's so impossible to love," he snaps; even a few minutes ago perhaps he'd have tried harder to temper the sting of his words, but now? To hell with it all, apparently. "How it's s'posed to feel, how it's s'posed to go, what's good enough and what's right and what isn't. So fuck you, Flora. I did try."
It had been as slow as the tide on a long day, but one look at where the captain is now compared to where he had been is evidence enough. It will almost be a relief to stop, he thinks, now that this is all said and done.
believer, believe it or not you'll know when it ends and how it goes
"No you did not." Flora snarls, turning her back on the sea and glaring at him through the darkness. "What you did was make yourself minorly inconvenienced a time or two, went well that feels like a lot of work, and now you're here trying to pass off your half-assed attempts at trying as being the real thing." Clenching her hands into fists, the mist of tears and haze of her heartbreak parts long enough for proper anger to breeze through her mind, and gods but it feels good to feel something other than pain.
"When were you trying, Jack? When you told me—" She merely raises her eyebrows; alone the beach though they were, it wasn't as if she was going to shout his secret out, even now. "—things, without even taking into account whether I'd want to know?" And she hadn't, for the fucking record. She hadn't wanted to know that their entire relationship was predicated upon even more of a power imbalance than she'd been aware of, hadn't wanted the leash that he'd handed her. But she'd taken it in stride—after a minor freakout admittedly—removing the collar and handing back the leash, promising never to use it against him, doing her best to temper her emotions when she was around so as not to inconvenience him with her feelings.
How hard it must have been for him all these years, with her mind as his favourite place to be and her body available to him whenever and wherever he wanted it, all the moreso as he dangled breadcrumbs of affection that had her opening up before him like a rose. How difficult to remain in her orbit when her friendship opened so many doors for him, her place amongst demigods and gods alike that she'd offered to him with no strings attached. And what had he ever done for her, that hadn't been mutually beneficial for him in the long run?
"Sure, the night at the fountain you did seem like you were trying, but only after you were a jealous and controlling asshole, only after you couldn't be bothered to fucking listen to me and made things worse, and really, all you had to fucking do was stay." On the one hand, she knew intimacy wasn't really his thing and for how plush and comfortable her bed was, Jack would probably always prefer his bunk on the Ark, but fuck him for acting like one night of kindness made up for the countless things she'd done for him just because.
Biting back a laugh, Flora looks up at the sky—no doubt where Jack's child was being grown or formed or whatever—and grimaces. "And you know, half of those things didn't even hurt. I knew what you were with every step that I ran to you, knew what I could reasonably expect from this. But you know what did hurt?" Dropping her eyes, in the dark her tears sparkled against her flushed cheeks, her aqua eyes a midnight blue with slashes of silver in the moonlight. "Every time I fucked up and the feeling was accidentally there. When you said you wanted to see, and then just..." Just rolled over and went to fucking sleep.
How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22? Will you still want me when I'm nothing new?
"You don't know a damned thing about me," Jack bites back - and if it's true it's because he hasn't told her, hasn't volunteered the information, only revealing details when they are all but pried out from between his fingers. But that is who he is, and for all of Flora's acceptance of it - because even #1 Selfish Asshole Jack Barclay can appreciate that the Doubletake shoulders a crisis like a gods-damned champion - she'd never tried to understand it. To do more than sit pretty and feel feelings and coo over the fireworks his mind could produce in a hidden room in King's End, never knowing how that made her literally one-of-a-kind for him.
Tasting copper and only realising he ought to unclench his jaw when he does, the captain swallows hard and turns away to face Haulani, as if the glimmering city in the distance might hold more answers than everything Flora levels at him. Eventually, in the end, he scoffs out a humourless laugh. "You're right," he says. "We don't understand each other, and this won't ever work. You were right before we kept talkin' about this." He can't do it; can't explain the reasons behind the things he does, the feelings he has, the words he doesn't know how to say.
His version of trying and Flora's self-published love story don't match up, and there's no mashing two puzzle pieces together that don't fit and trying to call it good. "Sorry." Because this, too, had been his attempt at trying, to prolong that inevitable ending, however messy it had ended up being.
believer, believe it or not you'll know when it ends and how it goes
"What I know is that you're capable of doing whatever you godsdamn put your mind to." Flora snaps back. "You raised the Ark from a graveyard with no idea how to sail or be a captain, and now look at you." And he'd accomplished that because he'd wanted it. Everything he had he'd fought for, having been born with nothing and with Torchline trying to take what he managed to scrape up for himself at every step. Maybe he was right and she didn't know anything about it, because she was entirely unmoved by his this is too hard and I don't know how excuse. Surely Jack had done harder things in his life than loving Flora. Surely loving her couldn't have been harder than murder, general debauchery, or running an entire region from the shadows.
Not when he was also a literal mind-reader.
Watching him turn away from her has Flora blinking stupidly at his silhouette for a moment, having not expected the flash of his anger to die out so quickly. It left her feeling as though she was alone on her own pyre now, rather than burning brightly next to his, matching his heat flame for flame.
"Great." Her tone is entirely petulant as she too turns around, folding her arms tightly across her chest once more. She'd have said me too had a sob not forced her teeth together; Jack would have to be satisfied with the sudden downpour that greyed out her mind. Or, you know, in 40ft, he wouldn't.
How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22? Will you still want me when I'm nothing new?
There's nothing quite so infuriating as realising, mid-argument, that the other person has got a really fucking good point. And so as Jack is left on the precipice of walking away from Flora, as 10ft becomes 20ft, the captain finds his footsteps halting all of a sudden. Alright, maybe the stroke to his ego had been needless at this point, but gods if it doesn't light that fire back under him, Jack huffing out a sharp breath and reaching up to tangle his fingers in his hair.
Is it because he doesn't want to do this? Or is it because he doesn't want the potential snags associated with it, with having a weakness that goes beyond that which he's tried and tested for years, has made provisions for? At this point, is Jack just playing hard to get with himself?
Given that Flora has her back to him and is not a literal mind-reader, as the captain turns on heel and approaches her again, he clears his throat to announce his arrival. "Is this somethin' you'd seriously want?" he asks. "I know it's happened, the feelings are feelings, but do you want it?" Or is this just one overwhelming love out of many, lost in the Astaroths and Koas of the world?
believer, believe it or not you'll know when it ends and how it goes
