how could I fear any hurricane?

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand

The market hums around her, vibrant as ever—sea breeze tangled with spices and brine, voices rising in playful argument or firm barter. Flora moves through it like she belongs (because she does, at least for now), curls bouncing in the sun, gold jewelry catching the light with every confident step. She’s dressed in her usual hybrid of practical and eye-catching: faded jeans that hug her hips and a white corsetted top that leaves her arms bare and her intentions undeniable.

Behind her, a man with a broad chest and an exhausted horse trails her slowly, the cart already stacked with coils of rope, an anchor, lanterns, crates of dry goods, and what might be a hammock peeking out from the top. Flora barely spares it a glance.

"Not that kind of sail," she says now, leaning across a market stall and tapping one manicured finger against a swatch of dull canvas the merchant is holding up. "No offence, but I’m not trying to fly a funeral tent."

The merchant starts to protest, but Flora cuts in, already unrolling a parchment sketch she’d brought with her. It’s loose but clear—a sail shaped and rigged like any other, but segmented and tinted like the wings of a butterfly, or cathedral windows cast in sunlight. "See? Stained glass vibes. Without the glass, obviously. Something sheer but strong, with a bit of shimmer if you’ve got it. I don’t care how long it takes to make, but I want it to catch the light."

She pauses, frowning slightly as her finger taps once more against the edge of the drawing. "Also—delivery only. I won’t be in the city once the barriers go up. You’ll have to bring it down to the docks."

JACK

Stepping light and stepping quick, Jack’s venture through Haulani’s colourful marketplace is one he’s made dozens of times, but there’s no denying the way that the scents of salt and spice and the familiar contours of the stalls and buildings relaxes some of the wire-tight tension from his shoulders. He’ll never say it, but it’s good to be home. Alone today, the captain’s errand is a personal one - The Ark had docked this morning and put down her anchor at last, and he’s left her in Murphy’s very capable hands while he gets reacquainted with his city.

Having strolled the boardwalk at first, in silence or in seemingly innocuous conversation, Jack has given Vesper’s forewarning all of the respect it is due, his magic spread like a net of spider silk across all those wandering in his range. Changes, rumours and gossip all twang and settle into the already extensive breadth of knowledge in the captain’s mind, and anything new is considered and filed away for later. (Particularly when it pertains to himself or Torchline’s Queen).

By the time he moves into Haulani, he knows all there is to know about the upcoming barrier against the family, the sometimes exaggerated and occasionally true stories about himself and his relationship with the Doubletake, not to mention all sorts of tidbits about her state of mind, her comings and goings, her company. One might also think Jack was invested in her, if one didn’t know better.

Still, back to the marketplace. Having paused at the doorstep of a shipmaker’s business, he’s been deep in conversation with him for a few minutes now to commission a compass rose to be carved into the deck of The Ark just within the doorway of his cabin. He’s in the process of explaining in tight terms that do not expect to be challenged that of fucking course he knows that an etching won’t act like a true compass, but that it’s for a quest and that sort of thing will be sidestepped by magic, when a familiar tone plucks at a string of his telepathy.

Turning to gaze across this branch of the market, his kingmaker coat flaring away from his body as it’s snatched by the sea breeze, tugging tendrils of his long hair from the hasty topknot he’s tied it into, Jack Barclay raises an eyebrow as he spots Flora arguing with a sail-smith. With a cart, a man, a horse, and what looks ever so suspiciously like a bunch of ship supplies.

”Can you do it or not?” He snaps at the merchant, who grumbles and concedes and advises he will personally see to it in the next couple of days, Jack gives him a gruff nod and steps off the stoop of the business to approach the stall.

The owner is still dithering a bit, bobbing his head at Flora’s sketches and trying to stammer his way through an explanation when Jack’s shadow falls over them both. ”Use the same sort of dye you use for my sails but on a more sheer canvas,” he says as if it’s obvious, addressing the merchant even if he’s almost shoulder to shoulder with the Doubletake. ”You’ve done it for me plenty of times. Now do it for her.”

you are a quiet god
and your hunger is cavernous

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand

She sees him before she hears him, her eyes immediately locking onto a silhouette absent from Halauni for weeks now. It's the shadow first, cutting sharply against the sun, long and familiar. The kind that used to fall across her pillow when he stood in the doorway of her room. The kind that used to mean safety, trouble, desire. Now it just means her heart is going to try and crawl out of her ribs again.

Inside her mind, a thousand broken things glitter like glass underfoot. A thousand Jack-shaped memories she thought she’d swept away. Only, that’s the thing about glitter, isn’t it? You never really get rid of it. It clings to the edges of things, it hides in corners. It sparkles the most when you shine a light on it.

And Jack—Jack is all fucking floodlights.

She doesn’t flinch—not outwardly—not in the market with her cart and her cargo and the merchant still stumbling over her sketches. She lets her spine steel instead. Lifts her chin. Puts her weight into the hand on her hip and lets her other one rest on the cart’s edge. But gods, inside? Inside, it's she's a wreck: a storm-wracked shoreline where the tide keeps dragging her back into the memory of his hands. A house she built out of kisses and unspoken promises, now gutted and unrecognizable. A voice—his—still echoing through every haunted hallway calling her love. A chorus of every friend she has whispering you did the right thing in one ear while the empty weight of her bed whispers then why does it still feel like this? in the other.

Her mind—the garden he once strolled through like it was his—has weeds now. Overgrown and tangled, grief curled up in the flowerbeds where joy used to bloom. There’s a faint smell of saltwater and burnt sugar. Glitter on the floorboards, a teacup cracked down the middle. The kind of ache you don’t write poems about, because there aren’t words; just bruises where love used to be.

So when his voice cuts in—cool, direct, as if none of it had ever happened—Flora doesn’t even look at him. Her lips curve, soft and venomous, as she addresses the merchant. "I don’t want anything like the Ark’s sails," she says, her voice deceptively smooth. "Mine should be beautiful." A flick of her eyes to the man, not Jack. "Stained glass, like I said. Not those brooding, stormy nightmares you dye for him."

JACK

”Ain’t ever seen no storm like The Ark’s sails,” Jack says mildly, letting the barbs of Flora’s words bounce harmlessly against the armour of his indifference. Like the bloody rise of dawn, he’s heard her compliment his ship too many times for even her pretence of ire to get a rise out of him. That still beggars the question, though - what the fuck does Flora need sails for?

The merchant stares between them, utterly dithering, until Jack raises his eyebrows as if to ask if there’s a problem despite the clear struggle of power going on between his actual customer and the captain of The Ark. ”You heard her,” he says, casual as a hand brushing dust off an old book of love stories. ”I just told you how to do it.”

And he leaves the decision, then, between Flora and the sail smith, instead reaching out to tuck an errant blonde curl behind her ears with softly calloused fingers bedecked with mageglass and silver. ”You ever hear that old proverb about absence and what it does to the heart?” he says softly, his hand dropping to rest on her cart so he might peruse what’s inside - anchor, rope, dry goods; everything necessary to settle on a small boat.

”Been thinkin’ about it lately.”

Then he steps away - because of course he does, Jack turning up his collar against a sharper breeze off the shores of the Arclight and turning to go about his business.

you are a quiet god
and your hunger is cavernous

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand

She doesn’t flinch when he tucks the curl behind her ear, doesn’t shy away when his fingers graze her cheek like they have every right to still know her. But gods, she feels it; that soft, familiar scrape of skin against skin, the shape of a memory brushing right up against the fresh bruise of her present. Because he’s doing that thing again, isn’t he? That thing where he says too little and means too much, or at least she thinks he does. Where he drops his words like coins into a wishing well and expects her to divine the shape of the wish from the ripples they leave behind.

The light of him refracts off every sharp edge she’s spent weeks sanding down—throws all the glitter into the air so she can see it again, hanging between them like grief in drag. It gets everywhere—in the cockles of her heart, in the corners of her eyes, in the way she wants so badly to touch his mouth just to see if he still tastes like sea salt and something sweet he’ll never admit to. Instead, the landscape of her thoughts flares in full.

"That so?" she says, brushing invisible dust off her jeans as she sidesteps the cart and turns to face him fully. Her smile is small and a touch meaner than she intends. "Can't relate."

JACK

”No?” Jack says with a tilt of his head, only glancing sideways at her, his body still positioned towards the sea, as if it calls him back even now. ”Torchline’s vibe must be really off, because I’ve been hearin’ different.” Flora’s mean smiles and carefully curated indifference are nothing to the fractals of feeling in the air between them or the way she turns to him like a flower towards the sun. ”You ought to be careful ‘bout that rumour mill.”

Angling himself towards her a little more now - and at their back, the merchant and the man leading the horse and cart are in very animated conversation, as if to disguise their interest in what’s happening a few feet away - Jack lets his gaze land on Flora. They flick between her eyes, down to the soft curve of her lips, and back up again with ease. ”I told you I needed space and time - a lot of it - and it feels like you took that like a nail in a coffin, like somethin’ a lot more final than it was. Instead of patience, you chose drama.”

And it isn’t even the first time. ”Good luck with your boat,” he adds, patting a hand to the cart.

you are a quiet god
and your hunger is cavernous

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand

"No, Jack," Flora says, her voice smooth as seaglass. "Your disappearing act didn’t make my heart grow fonder." Her chin lifts, eyes flicking over his face like she’s trying to see what’s still left beneath that windblown hair and smugness. "Plenty of things grew," she adds, quieter now. Bitterness. Hurt. A very inconvenient habit of crying in the bath. "But fondness?" She lets out a humourless laugh, too sharp to be mistaken for anything else. "No, not so much."

"A lot of time," he’d said. For someone like him, that could mean decades. Centuries. Forever, if it suited him. She doesn’t need to say it aloud; they both know how his immortality has skewed his perception of things. Did he really think she’d wait around endlessly? That she’d sit pretty by the sea like some sunburned Persephone, hoping the King of Ghosts would return to spit ice at her feet again and call it love?

"What I chose was not to sit around like some sad little sandcastle, waiting for the tide to come back in, because there was no one around to tell me otherwise." The merchant is practically vibrating behind them now, pretending to admire a bolt of cloth while clearly eavesdropping. "Good luck with your boat," Flora snaps petulantly before turning toward the man with the horse and giving her head a toss. "Come on, let's take this back to the docks."

JACK

Jack hears her as she speaks - hears the petulance, the mean girl mask that she adjusts as if she’s at some elegant ball and all of Torchline is the dance floor, the brush-off she gives him without ever saying as much. But more than that, he listens, in the way that only he and (as far as he knows) only one other can. His expression remains passive, perhaps quietly interested, while the fingers of his magic caress the weeds that have grown in Flora’s mind and the words that must have fed them.

And if Jack had been in a mind to reconcile, to lay some part of a new foundation away from where the cracks had formed, her response dissolves any appetite he’s got for it. Too much to do, too many real problems on the horizon. ”Maybe you forgot, while I was gone,” he says slowly. ”Maybe too many people fed you all the things you wanted to hear. But everything that happened is because of you - your choices, your decisions, plans you made and secrets you kept.”

The captain shakes his head and shrugs. ”I play the villain in a lot of stories, Flora. Not this one, though. This one’s on you, love.”

Assuming there will be some last word hurled at his back, as Jack turns to walk away through the throngs of people in the marketplace, he’s all but waiting for it, and the way the reactions of the merchants will spread like ripples in a pond.

you are a quiet god
and your hunger is cavernous

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand

The words hit like hail against sunburn—sharp, mean, and utterly unsurprising; of course Jack would twist the knife like it was just part of breathing. Her spine straightens as his retreat begins, as the crowd seems to part around him like a tide. The man who used to kiss her like she was a storm and steer her through every one of hers now tosses blame like it’s driftwood underfoot. And maybe he expects her to cry and to call after him. To stop him like she's done so many times before and beg for just another few seconds of his time, only this time, for better (or much more likely) worse, she doesn't.

"You're right," she calls after him. Loud enough that more than just the merchant will hear. Loud enough that it’ll ripple like gossip through the sails and alleyways of Haulani. "About it being because of the choice I made." That, at least, they were on the same page about it. But you're still choosing to walk away. She thinks as her thoughts grow cold in the same way the sea gets before a squall. Only there's no forthcoming thunder and lightning, no screaming or tears, because in the wake of Flora's choice, Jack had very clearly made his own as well.

She doesn’t look away, not until he’s well and truly gone. Only then does she exhale, slow and deliberate, before flicking her gaze toward the merchant who hasn’t even tried to hide the way he’s been watching. "Well?" she says, too bright, too sharp. "You know what want. Sails. Sheer. Stained glass. No resemblance to the Ark. Got it?" And when he stammers a nod, Flora turns on her heel and stalks toward the docks, her jaw clenched, her hands trembling, and her heart beating in a rhythm she refuses to take the shape of Jack's name.


~FIN