I can only hear the echo

i'd wipe the dirt off your name with the shirt off my back

Flora lets the wind catch in her hair as she leans a little further into the Ark’s rail, lips pursed in a half-smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. "I can teleport too, y’know," she says lightly, chin lifting with something almost smug—but more than a little hollow beneath it. "So if it had been me down there, I wouldn’t have been stuck for long." Her shoulders roll back, casual and confident and deliberately breezy, the way one might toss a flower into a grave and pretend it’s just another bouquet.

But the next thing Jack says—you're more'n capable—makes something pause in her, makes her chest tighten around a little knot that’s already been pulled too taut these past few days. She smiles again, smaller now, twisting at the corners like something withered by sun. "Funny thing," she says, trying to keep it light but not quite managing. "No one’s ever asked me to go. Not once. Not for any of the big missions, not for the big fights." Her brows rise a touch, lashes lowering as she glances toward the horizon.

When Jack confirms he’s fine, her nod is immediate; sharp, clipped, professional. But gods, it’s stupid how disappointed she is by it. Not that she wants him to be hurt, of course not—but she wouldn't have been mad if she’d had a reason to touch him, to reach across the space between them under the guise of care and not desperation. Even as she swallows the feeling down, she knows he’ll hear it in the flicker of her thoughts: that pulse of something too warm, too raw, that she drowns quickly in crashing waves of worry for Hadama.

She nods again, steadier this time. "Yeah. Hadama’s smarter than most people give him credit for. He’s probably already working out three different exits."." Her voice is almost playful, like she’s trying to convince herself too, if only to keep the meagre thread of conversation that they've got going.

JACK

"Yeah? So can I, just... not from that far underground. Not yet," Jack quips right back with a raise of his eyebrows, as if to say that Flora doesn't have the monopoly on smuggery if they're going to be chatting shit about it. Knowing there will be a follow up question on her lips almost as soon as he's finished speaking, the captain pushes up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal the compass rose on his forearm, swirling with inky starlight.

He isn't surprised to hear that Flora has never been asked to attend any of the larger fights, the revelation earning a small, quiet smile even as he reaches instinctively for the cigarettes in his pocket; there hadn't exactly been time for another smoke when he'd been down in the bowels of the island. "I guess all that time pretendin' to be less than you are is comin' back to haunt you. Or help, dependin' on whether you wanna go risk your life to fight void monsters."

Folding the coat and dumping it on a nearby crate to examine later, Jack snorts as she speaks of Hadama. "Yeah, but he'll dither over which one to take for long enough that the wyrm'll collapse all of 'em before they get out," he retorts, pausing with a cigarette halfway to his lips as he catches the tangle of grey-area emotions that have Flora wanting to reach for him despite consistently slapping away any attempt he's made to have a real conversation.

With a soft sigh, he glances sidelong at her. "You actually okay?" he echoes her question from earlier.

fight so dirty but you love so sweet
talk so pretty but your heart got teeth

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

i'd wipe the dirt off your name with the shirt off my back

Flora’s lips twitch—just slightly, just enough—for the smugness to slip through like sunlight through the clouds. "Mmhm, but I can teleport from that far underground," she hums, eyes glittering beneath the sweep of her lashes, even as the gloating rings a little hollow. It doesn’t matter if she’s winning in power. That was never what she wanted to be keeping score on.

Still, her gaze flicks down to the compass rose as Jack pushes back his sleeve, and though her expression doesn’t change much, something in her thoughts goes glassy. Cold. A frost that blooms without warning across her mind like thin ice cracking over a still pond. Of course it had to be another Safrin favour. Of course it had to shimmer with starlight. Her mind traitorously fills in the blanks she didn’t ask for: the low murmur of prayers, the glint of divine fingers against skin, the godly approval writ permanent across him like another claim she’ll never get to challenge.

She crosses her arms to keep from fidgeting and blows out a breath, aiming for casual. "I have risked my life, thank you very much," she points out, voice tight but light, like a cork bobbing above a sinking ship. "Plenty. But yeah. I mean...if it’s between me and a demigod, it makes sense not to ask me." Her fingers twitch, restless now, like her nerves are looking for something to throw. "I did spend a whole afternoon training with one of the Dragoons though. Practiced how to throw a punch at Pierce without him suspecting anything at his pool party." She tilts her head toward Jack, lips curling faintly. "That count for anything?"

She expects another quip. Another smirk, maybe, or a sardonic little jab to smooth over the tension. But instead he almost souded concerned and gods if it doesn’t knock the wind out of her more than she’ll ever admit.

Her smile stays in place, but it freezes at the edges, too sharp around the mouth to be soft. Okay. Sure, she’s okay in the sense that no one had died lately. That Torchline hasn’t burned and her bar is in capable hands now. She’s okay in that she can fly her ship now with two people and in that Dahlia hasn’t shown up to kill her. But she’s not okay in all the ways that matter. She’s not okay because of all the stupid drama that went on at her party, because Jack was here and not hers and because her home wasn’t really hers anymore either and for as cute as the Sugar Tide was, it was basically a glorified raft compared to living on the Ark.

But those are thoughts she swallows with the salt in the air, tucks deep beneath the surface where even he might not want to look. So she just shrugs, lashes dipping low as she turns her face slightly from him. "Why wouldn’t I be?"

JACK

Huffing a humourless laugh under his breath as the cigarette finally makes it between his lips, Jack doesn't try to offer any riposte for the way Flora's thoughts twinkle with hoarfrost at the very idea of his ability being Safrin-blessed. As if the reason she's able to sail through the sky and into the path of his skyship whenever she feels the impertinent need isn't also because of that same starlit goddess. She could sleep with Safrin for those same favours, he bets, if she were so inclined.

"Never said you didn't," he mumbles, grabbing for his matchbook in his back pocket, "only that if you didn't fancy battling it out with a giant spider, you've made a tidy way out of it. Sah ain't a demigod either, after all. Neither is Deimos. Neither am I."

As for Pierce, the sudden mention of the Family member responsible for their collective deaths has the match Jack holds in his fingers suddenly nothing more than a stick encased in ice. Taking a slow breath as if to calm the furious thoughts associated with the meathead with the black sword, the captain flicks the ruined match over the side of the ship and selects another, saying nothing further on the matter.

And for a second, he waits. Waits to see if Flora will talk to him - really talk to him this time - only for those thoughts and feelings to disappear into the murk of her subconscious, and for bravado to puppet its way out of her mouth instead. "...Right," he mutters, lighting his cigarette at last, only for one of his deckhands to appear with a letter in hand.

From this morning, missed it before you left for the island, Jack is told, before the boy scurries off again. If he recognises the handwriting on the envelope - and he does - he doesn't show it, quickly opening the missive and letting his eyes skim over it. "Damn," he mutters. "Might fuckin' frame this."

fight so dirty but you love so sweet
talk so pretty but your heart got teeth

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

i'd wipe the dirt off your name with the shirt off my back

Flora watches the match splinter and frost in Jack’s fingers like something cursed; like a talisman for all the fury that still simmers under his skin when it comes to Pierce "So I’m guessing that’s a no on Pierce’s pool party RSVP?" The joke lands brittle and quick, but there’s a real question under the sugar-spun delivery. Maybe it was stupid to think she could try to punch someone like Pierce. But with enough witnesses? Enough strength in numbers? If she was ever going to do something (else) reckless—and let’s be honest, she always was—when else would be better?

Jack doesn’t answer, not right away, and it stretches the silence taut between them, long enough for Flora to hold her breath without even noticing. It’s not just his silence that frays her, though—it’s the space between what he knows and what he says. The fact that he asked her if she was okay at all still rankles in some strange way, because what was the point of asking if he already knew? And more importantly, if he already knew, why mention it at all given that hard or emotionally soggy conversations were ones he avoided like the plague?

She doesn’t know how to talk to him from this distance, especially now that they were an arm's length away from one another. But every part of her still feels stranded somewhere unreachable on this ship she used to love, beside a man who used to know her better than anyone, and who now feels like the hardest person to talk to in all of Caido.

So when the letter arrives and Jack’s dry voice cuts the tension like a blade, Flora pounces on the change like a lifeline. Her laugh bubbles out, quick and surprised, and she lifts her chin to roll her eyes with theatrical ease. "Shut up, I’ve thanked you for stuff dozens of times," she says, voice warm despite herself. "But...yeah. I mean it." And she does. Even if they’re broken in all the ways that matter, even if nothing about this makes sense anymore, she knows Jack well enough to know how he would have had to temper his reaction in order to leave Kaisel kentucky-fried rather than charred, and that paper-work aside, that restraint had likely been done as a favour to her.

JACK

"Depends," Jack mutters, drawing a deep inhale on his cigarette. "If Pierce is kind enough to stand still while I fire a cannon at him, maybe I'll show up." Not even he knows yet whether he's joking, his jaw feathering as he exhales smoke over the railing and tries to put his thoughts of that particular Family member back in a lockbox where they belong. "An' if that's enough to keep him down for five seconds, you can always run in an' punch him in the back of the fuckin' head for good measure."

Similarly choosing the letter over the mire of Flora's thoughts that she won't speak aloud, Jack carefully folds the bit of paper and tucks it into his pocket, as if he does intend to slip it between the pages of a heavy book to keep it preserved. "Yeah, well, not recently," he mutters, flicking the ash from his cigarette. "But you're welcome. Can't guarantee I'll be as kind next time if he doesn't learn from it, though."

Being stupid once deserves a modicum of grace, he supposes. Twice, though? That's just chasing down death, and it's only polite for Jack to assist in that case.

fight so dirty but you love so sweet
talk so pretty but your heart got teeth

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

i'd wipe the dirt off your name with the shirt off my back

Flora’s laugh slips out before she can stop it, dry and wry and more amused than she really has any right to be given the topic, but gods if the image of Pierce standing there like a stupid little statue while Jack fires a cannon at him isn’t enough to make the corners of her mouth curl. “"I’ll keep an ear out for cannon fire then," she says, tipping her head toward him, a glint of mischief in her eyes. "When I hear the boom, I’ll sprint in and sucker-punch him right in the balls."

But the levity—however brief—doesn’t last. Not when Jack folds her letter like it means something, only to pair it with a comment that sinks claws into her before she can brace for it. Her jaw tenses, eyes narrowing for half a heartbeat as a flare of heat rises beneath her ribs, wild and instant. Not recently. She bites down—hard—on the first reply that comes to mind, the one that simmers with salt and venom. What the fuck have you done lately for me to thank you for? It’s right there, lodged behind her teeth like a thorn, but she forces it down with a breath that tastes like iron.

Instead, she clears her throat, a sharp little sound swallowed by the wind. She doesn’t meet his eye again right away, choosing instead to glance out toward the horizon, her fingers twitching lightly against the rail like she’s trying to ground herself. What the fuck would it do to pick a fight with him now, when they're still dancing around the real reason they can't even look at one another, and when talking about it wouldn't do an ounce of good anyway?

So when she speaks again, her voice is smooth and unbothered, even if the edges of her thoughts are still bristling like a tide pulling too hard at the reef. "I sent Kaisel a letter this morning too," she says casually. "When he replies, I’m going to tell him how fast things could have ended for him down there. And that if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll leave you alone."

She shrugs, flicking a curl back over her shoulder. "Then again...I think he and one of your daughters might be a thing, so.." So perhaps Jack would be hearing from Kaisel regardless of what Flora had to say about it.

JACK

"An' is that really too much to ask, honestly?" Jack says with an exaggerated shrug, and for a second that humour crackles back between them, dry as kindling and threatening to roar into a blaze at any moment. It's the sort of easy quip that makes him want to reach out for Flora, to try and bite back his own bitter and stubborn nature, to say fuck it, you can be right, just let things be this easy again.

And then he goes and apparently sticks his foot in his mouth, and he's reminded in seconds why things are, perhaps irrevocably broken between them. "I didn't mean it like that," he snaps under his breath before he can help himself, the words muttered and quick so as not to draw the attention of the crew working around them. "I just meant it's the first time you've wanted to thank me for anythin' since we became nothin' to each other."

Taking another deep drag off his cigarette and flicking it, half finished, over the side of the ship, Jack holds the burning smoke in his lungs for long enough to half regret it before he sighs it out again. "Yeah? You reckon he'll listen?" His skull had seemed pretty thick back when he'd been hauling insults Jack's way. Probably what had helped save his life, honestly.

"That so?" he mutters, not daring to let that last bit of information strike more than skin deep, but packing it away so he can look at it later in private. "Can't wait for another explosive family dinner."

fight so dirty but you love so sweet
talk so pretty but your heart got teeth

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

i'd wipe the dirt off your name with the shirt off my back

Flora doesn’t flinch, not visibly, but gods if her muscles don’t burn with the effort of keeping still. Her gaze stays on him, hard and unblinking, mouth drawn into a line so tight it trembles at the edges. Because how else could he have meant it? But then he clarifies—and oh, oh—something in her goes still. Like a garden in the dead of winter, the colour vanishes from her cheeks, the heat pulled from her chest.

Her curls sway faintly in the wind as she turns to face him fully, arms folded more for support than sass now. "You don't get to speak for me anymore," she says quietly, her voice low but sharp, trembling on the edge of disbelief. Her jaw tightens, her throat working as she swallows it all down; everything she wants to say, everything she’s already said too many times before. "You’ll never not be something to me," she manages, though the words nearly crack on her tongue. "But it’s great to know what I’ve become to you." The echo of it lands in the pit of her stomach like an anchor, heavy and cold and lined with rust, before the burn catches behind her ribs, a flashfire of humiliation and grief that threatens to consume her, and gods she shouldn't be fucking surprised but the pain of it is evidence of how naive Flora will always be when it comes to Jack.

Her laugh is soft and sharp, the kind that cuts on the way out. "At least this time you get to play the asshole dad," she says, the words delivered with all the casual elegance of a dagger slid between ribs, because hahahhaa how dare you talk about when we were together like that.

"I can fly the rest of the way myself," she mumbles, turning to go and tell Murph to slow the Ark enough for her to pull away.

JACK

"You don't know a damn thing. Even now," Jack almost hisses, the words purposefully quiet lest he be the one to raise his voice and cause a scene on the deck of his own ship. But then Flora is drawing up that razor sharp confidence around herself with the ease of any mental shield, and the captain can feel any semblance of common ground slipping away like sharp glass made smooth by the relentless crash of the tide.

But when she turns away - and fucking gods help him for it - Jack reaches out as if to catch her by the arm, his hands cold, though not from the charge of magic. Just cold, as if his body is saving the energy elsewhere, topping up depleted resources spent in a place that had tried to kill him from the moment he'd set foot upon it.

"Every word I ever say to you is wrong somehow," he mutters. "Things I say in passin' are like pages from a fuckin' bible to you. An' then the things I mean? The ones you should listen to an' care about?" He shakes his head. "Like ash on the wind."

Letting her go as if realising he's overstepped himself without realising it, Jack stiffens and straightens up, before gesturing for her to do whatever the fuck she's going to do regardless.

fight so dirty but you love so sweet
talk so pretty but your heart got teeth

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

i'd wipe the dirt off your name with the shirt off my back

"You don't tell me anything," she snaps, the words sharp as broken coral, too quiet to carry but still flung with all the force of someone who's bleeding underneath. "So no—you're right. I don’t know a damn thing, because you never fucking tell me anything, Jack. At least not with words that haven't been widdled down to nothing."

Her voice hisses out between clenched teeth, low enough that only he can hear it, not just because she doesn’t want the crew to know that they're fighting (though gods, they probably expect it by now). "Have you ever just shut the fuck up and actually listened to the things you say? Not the ones wrapped in all the shit you know, or the things I’m thinking but just...the words. The actual words." Her eyes flash, bright and wet. "Because that’s all I’ve got to go on." I don’t get to hear your thoughts and I swear to god it's like you fucking forget that.

And then he’s reaching for her, and her thoughts sparkle and shatter in the same breath, bursting bright behind her eyes before crumbling like sugar glass beneath a heel. His fingers are cold—not magic-cold but blood-starved, worn-out, end-of-his-rope cold—and the feel of them on her arm is like frostbite, sudden and searing, and she knows it’ll hurt more the second he lets go. Which he does, too soon and not soon enough, the ghost of his touch leaving something bruised and burning behind.

But even so, even still, she doesn’t move. She sways a little, caught in the riptide of it, her breath caught somewhere between her ribs and her throat. You say shitty things to me a lot more than nice ones," she murmurs, voice rough with the effort it takes to keep it level. "So yeah, those are the ones that tend to stick."

And then, whether she wants them to or not, tears burn their way forward—bright and sharp, stinging at the corners of her eyes and catching on her lashes. Her voice drops even lower, barely a thread of sound now, stretched thin and frayed. "And if the things you meant for me to listen to were the ones about how you’d never leave me—about how you loved me—" Her breath shudders in and her chin tips up, defiant even in her heartbreak.

"Me believing in those things is why this is all hurts so fucking much." Because not only had he left, but he'd turned I love you, into we're nothing to each other pretty fucking fast.

JACK

"I have told you more than anyone else who's ever known me," Jack growls back. "You just choose to forget that whenever you're feelin' hurt or angry or whatever ten thousand other emotions decide what's true that day." And there are a lot more things now besides burning on his tongue, begging to slip their way past and prove her right in a way that would be as brutal and as easy as any of the years he'd spent prowling Torchline's underbelly.

Feeling his heartbeat in his throat, a sensation that has the world seeming too cold and too hot all at the same time, Jack can't look at the tears that silver her eyes - can't let them hit the mark they're aiming for, not now, not after this long holding his ground. "I did leave you," he agrees. "But you left me first. Left me with nothin' but a letter and a bullshit plan I didn't deserve to know about beforehand. And you had the fuckin' gall to expect me to be grateful for it afterwards."

Sagging back to lean against the railing suddenly, he pinches at the bridge of his nose as if to focus. "I never said I stopped lovin' you though, did I?" He scoffs. "That's just the difference between us, Flora. You tell your hurt to the world and let 'em haul it back at me on beaches in front of lighthouses. I keep mine close. It doesn't leave this ship."

fight so dirty but you love so sweet
talk so pretty but your heart got teeth

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

i'd wipe the dirt off your name with the shirt off my back

Her head shakes slowly, not with disbelief, not anymore—but with that quiet, bone-deep sadness that comes from knowing exactly how this conversation will go and still hoping it might not. That maybe—maybe—this time, the tide will come in a little differently.

"That isn't good enough, Jack.." she says, voice softer now, gentler for the jagged edges it has to carry, because whatever blessing it was to be let in this close to the captain—and she knew it was—it wasn't far enough. "If you can’t ever learn to actually talk to me—like talk without assuming I’ll just know everything from crumbs you tell me—then you can’t keep biting my head off for not understanding." Her eyes flicker to his, something close to pleading lingering there for only a breath before it retreats behind steel and salt.

But when he leans back and throws it all on her—again—the ice in her belly shifts, melting just enough to flood her lungs before it freezes solid all over again. Of course he said she left first. Of course that was the story he'd built around it. "If that’s how you need to see it, we both know I'm not gonna change your mind," she says, weary now in a way that doesn't match the fire she usually carries, the resilience she pretends is armour.

But then her gaze drops, lashes low, throat working around a truth too thick to swallow. "From my side? I never left you. I told you where I’d be. I had a plan. A shitty, desperate, rushed plan, sure, but I was never going to let anything keep me from coming back to you." Her hands tighten around the edges of her coat, not for warmth, but to keep from shaking. "And I know you don't believe me or think it's stupid, but I really did think it was keep you safe." She exhales, small and tight, knowing he'd never see it that way and that he'd chosen to hate her because of it. "But there's a big difference between doing all that, and leaving because you're pissed off."

And when he throws her own words back at her—when he says he kept his pain on the ship—Flora looks at him, wounded and wide-eyed. "Yeah you sure did," she whispers, stunned. "You kept it here. All this time, just so you could say that there's nothin' between us now soon as I came back onboard."

JACK

"Yeah, I know," Jack says, the words as weary as he feels. "And that's what it boils down to, Flora. However much I was able to give you, it wasn't enough. I couldn't learn fast enough, or trust easy enough, and now every time we talk we're just rehearsin' the things we've learned to throw at each other, 'cause we know what sticks."

As for how he needs to see it, or the story he's built around what happened, Jack can only scoff, bitter and resigned. "You did somethin' that hurt me," he says. "And I told you that it did. But you don't care, 'cause it was the right thing, 'cause you were tryin' to keep me safe. That's the whole fuckin' problem." Kicking a heel against the side of the ship as if to try and stop the ice from creeping out beneath his feet, he forces himself to look up at her.

"I didn't need you to keep me safe. I needed you to keep me close. So it doesn't matter. I'll tell you that you were right if you want. You were. You did somethin' selfless, an' heroic, and you made a safe place for Haulani, and I hated it, Flora. And you don't care." Shaking out his hands as if to try and persuade some warmth back into them, Jack barely bothers to give her last remark a second thought.

"Right," he mutters, "'cause I'm the type of guy to tell you he's bleedin' when you land a cut on him. Just go, Flora. We ain't gonna see eye to eye on this. Not with you screamin' at me, not over a drink, not standin' here."

fight so dirty but you love so sweet
talk so pretty but your heart got teeth

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!