trapped within an abstract from a moment of my life

you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody

The web keeps breathing, alive and endless and too much all at once. Still seated on the bed, Flora watches Torchline unfurl around her in strange, watercoloured shades—recognisable, but refracted through a dozen other eyes. What was once soft and golden now glows with a hundred competing hues: ochre and rust, silver and teal, rippling as thought after thought joins the tide and the surge of it becomes enormous.

It’s overwhelming, still, but it no longer feels like she’s going to be swept into the void of darkness. She sits up slowly, sheets falling around her legs, her feet slipping to the floor in a quiet brush of skin against fabric. The illusion of water still glimmers dimly on the floor beneath her toes. Jack stands in the middle of it all, crowned in thought like some half-reluctant deity of mind and memory. And Flora, uncharacteristically silent, approaches without a word at first. She lets her hand drift into the space between them, fingers hesitating—hovering—before brushing against his. "It is," she murmurs back, her voice low and soft in the way it only ever is around him. Her eyes track the shifting filaments again, and for once she doesn’t reach to make them pretty. "For so long, it felt like you were short with me. Like your sentences always had these clipped sharp edges and your attention was always somewhere else." She'd thought it meant she wasn't interesting enough to hold his attention.

Wait. Flora blinks, her breath catching; what about all the mageglass she'd given him? The realization hits like a wave through the chest, knocking the wind from her lungs even though she’s still standing. Her hand tightens on his instinctively, her thoughts flashing too bright, too sharp. The glass had amplified magic. Amplified his magic. This whole vast net that never slept, that caught and catalogued and calculated—she hadn’t just fed it, she’d widened it. Strengthened it. Made it worse.

Made him carry even more.

Her breath stutters as the horror roots in her expression, wide-eyed and suddenly fragile. "Jack," she says, her voice a paper-thin thing. "I didn't know."

JACK

Flora's movements in the shadowed space bloom to life along one of the filaments as a series of fuscia pulses, ones that are echoed in all the places on her body where she might pose a threat - hands, elbows, shoulders, feet, knees - before fading again. "Sorry," Jack mutters, distracted, "force of habit." To orient a body and its relative distance to his own. His fingers twitch a moment before her hand brushes his, likely for the same reason, but he doesn't draw away.

If anything, the touch ignites an entirely new series of thought and feeling and sensation, drawing deep from the well of Jack's own mind and combining with the hesitant, tentative care with which she treats him now. There's his reluctant acceptance of affection that manifests as something softly warm wrapped in too many layers of paranoia, like barbed wire snaring a young animal. There's a flood of scarlet fog and golden heat - the captain's memory of Flora's own pleasure that washes through, potent and stifling of any of his reservations. There are quiet moments that, knowing now that this network exists, have never truly been quiet at all, and the fever heat of conflict, of crackling bolts of adrenaline to sharpen the webbing to a razor's edge

"I was. It was," he says, the irony of his short and clipped response utterly lost on Jack as he speaks. And then mageglass - the opalescent shine crystalises along some of the webbing towards the edges of his telepathic range, the captain managing an almost apologetic smile towards Flora. "I'm not a good enough man to say no to power. You know that." Not even when it's bad for him.

"How could you have known? It's not your fault." He shakes his head. "No, this is all me. And I can't let it go now, not even if I wanted to. I'm not strong enough to go without this."

no more than I was or than I want to be
when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody

Her presence pulses first as threat—hands and elbows, knees and feet—all lighting up along the filaments like a combat schematic. Flora stills in response, the way one does when startled by their own reflection in an unfamiliar mirror. But then Jack’s touch registers, and his caution gives way to something warmer, tangled and stifled though it is. She feels it like a shift in the current: the webbing around them shudders, ripples with a rush of memory and heat, and Flora is abruptly reminded of how thoroughly he’d felt her pleasure. How easily he’d held it, savoured it. How entirely he’d known it.

A flush rises across her cheeks as gold and scarlet scatter like sunlight through stormglass, and it blooms in her thoughts before she can help it—soft, curling brushstrokes of heat that echo across the room like perfume on air. She smiles without quite meaning to. Of course she knows he wouldn't have said no to power. She’s never expected that of him. And yet...her eyes flick toward the opalescent glimmer of the mageglass threading along the outer walls of his reach, and even as Jack says it’s not her fault, something flickers through her like a pulled stitch. That longing to ask why he’d let her carry the guilt of it alone for so long. Why he hadn’t said a word when she’d thought it was just another thing he barely cared for.

But she doesn’t ask. Instead, she nods slowly, her gaze sweeping out across the vast, glittering, aching stretch of his mind. "I think I understand," she murmurs.

And then she lifts her chin slightly. "This is you," she says, her voice barely more than a breath, her gaze on the synaptic sprawl that glows and pulses like the inside of a star—veined with paranoia, steeped in vigilance, softened here and there by threads of memory and feeling so tightly wound they’ve nearly strangled themselves.

"And this is me." The schematics of Jack's mind breathe and blur, melting like wax into watercolours. The light shifts. Colours swell in like breath drawn through seawater. All of it transforms into a garden where no plant grows where it’s meant to, where vines spill across a half-forgotten path and flowers bloom out of memory rather than seed. In Flora’s mind now, there’s the distant rumble of pain held at bay like a storm offshore—an island cloaked in mist and lightning, Dahlia’s name etched into its heart—but for now she's pushed it away.

What remains is more delicate: the silhouette of Jack’s presence in the centre of it all, painted in deep-sea blue and outlined in hesitant gold. Thin red strands stretch from her own thoughts to where her hand still brushes his, flickering with wavesong and refracted light, like a prism held just under the surface.

Of course he couldn’t give her what she'd needed from him. Not when his world is this, when his magic strings itself through every silence and doorway and wandering mind like a net he can never climb out of. And he wouldn’t, even if he could.

The realisation doesn’t crush her, but it rains devastation around her just the same. A warm, summer shower through the flowering garden of her mind, soaking the roots of things she’d kept scorched and buried. Flora closes her eyes and breathes it in; she'd never thought she was asking Jack for too much when in fact, she'd been asking him for damn near everything.

JACK

Jack smiles as well, the expression sadder for the way it doesn't entirely reach his eyes, and he watches the swathes of red and gold roll together before collapsing back into the endless, sharp network of his mind. He doesn't have an answer for her - doesn't know how to unpick the delicate stitchwork that has provided the logic behind all of his decisions, his reasons not to say the things she needed to hear despite the consequences.

"Well, at least you can walk away and say that much," he mutters, his smile fading. At least you think you understand.

And he almost stops her, as the room warps and changes to the all too familiar - for Jack, at least - landscape of her mind. He almost says I know, because of course he knows; he'd strolled this garden in his idle moments more times than he can count. He'd felt its thorns, weeded out its insecurities, fed some of its more dangerous blooms with opinion and suggestion. And though he's hesitant in the way he lets his gaze flick from the thunderous purple isle towards the silouette of sea-blue and fragile gold, he can still track the crimson threads that try to bind their hands.

"I did say I wasn't good for you." The quip is a rueful attempt at humour that he already knows has failed the moment it leaves his lips, Jack dropping his gaze to the summer shower raining finality down onto the parched earth. "But I wanted to be. I really did, even if I couldn't show it to save either of our fuckin' lives."

no more than I was or than I want to be
when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody

The ache expands into her limbs as Jack continues, and Flora barely manages to blink back the tears that rise like tidewater before her voice slips out, raw and tangled in a laugh that has no mirth at all. "You said you weren’t good for me because you lived on a ship," she breathes, her hands already moving as she turns to face him fully, stepping through the space between them like it doesn’t matter that it might be the last time. "Because you'd come home bloody. Because you were too murdery and rough." Whatever his exact reasonings had been, he'd never come right out and said as it happens Flora I'm a maniacal control freak who lost track of his own web and is now as tangled in it as everyone else is.

She takes his hand in both of hers, cradling it like something sacred even as her fingers trace over the map of him. Across the scar-toughened knuckles, the callouses worn in by salt and consequence and the weight of all he carried, all he held back. She’s known the shape of this hand in hers since before she had the luxury of taking it for granted, and still it undoes her now.

The rain in her mind doesn’t soften—it spills, manifesting in the wetness that streaks slowly down her cheeks as he says he wanted to be enough.

And gods, what could be crueler than that? Not the fights. Not the silence. Not even the way he'd walked away. The knowledge that he wanted to be. That somewhere, in all the barbed wire and misfires, he had tried in ways she couldn’t see until it was too late. Her voice splinters on the edges of her grief, as she lifts tear stained lashes to look up at him. "What am I supposed to do now?" she asks, her hands still cupped around his like she might hold the answer there. "Just smile when I see you in the market? Ask how the waves are treatin’ you like I don’t still love you?" Her head tilts, her lashes heavy with tears unshed and tears already fallen. "Pretend I don't still remember the shape of you? That I don't know what your voice sounds like first thing in the morning, or what it sounds like when you laugh before you realize you've done it?" The crimson threads in her thoughts shimmer. Waver. But don’t let go. Not yet.

JACK

"An' all those things were as true as the reasons I didn't say," Jack points out with a barely-there shrug of his shoulder, his eyes lifting to the way the heavens in her mind empty onto the dry and barren ground, like they might still persuade something to grow from the devastation. "Besides, it was you. Even if I'd said so outright, would it've really stopped you?" He raises his eyebrows. "'Cause I got my doubts, an' I don't know if you know this, but I can get a pretty good read on people."

It's absolutely not the time for humour, and yet Jack can't stop himself either way, the captain's gaze flicking back towards her face as she turns to face him properly, as she cradles his hand between both of hers as if it isn't covered in blood and scars and doesn't grip the world in a chokehold. "Don't cry, love," he says, as he'd once done in the moments before Pierce had snipped away his life on an ebony blade, and his free hand comes up to brush at her cheeks.

"I mean," he says, trying for airy, for a strength he doesn't feel, "it's what I've been doin'. Between you an' me, though, it's just as hard as it looks, an' I've been doin' a piss poor job." Between flinging himself at her to twist her invisibility ring, between letting her cut his hair on the boardwalk, between coming here, now, at the first inkling that something had been wrong.

"What's the alternative, though?" he asks, the words just a little tentative. "Find a god to make us forget? One of us moves to the other side of Caido? Or just... knowin' this is impossible and doin' it anyway?"

no more than I was or than I want to be
when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody

Flora’s glare cuts through her tears like a beam of late afternoon sun—unwelcome, blinding, and altogether too full of feeling. She doesn't bother to say it aloud, doesn’t waste breath telling him how wrong he is to think any of it would’ve mattered to her. She’d never cared about the ship or the blood or the nights he didn’t come home. He could have come home caked in blood or salt or regret and she still would’ve waited at the docks with her arms crossed and a drink in hand, waiting to argue and kiss him in the same breath

And then—gods damn him—he makes her smile. Not with softness, but with that lopsided, too-familiar humour that makes her want to kiss him and strangle him in the same breath. She could’ve slapped him if her hands weren’t already wrapped around his, unwilling to let go. And so instead, she leans into the weight of his hand against her cheek, lets herself melt into the kindness of it, the rare and ragged tenderness that he’s always pretended wasn’t there.

When she finally lets go, it’s only to wind her arms up around his neck, sliding closer until there’s nothing between them but the ache Flora has been trying not to name. He can’t even hold her properly—not with the damage Dahlia left behind—and she’s never hated the Reaper more than she does now. Not for the pain or the cost, but for stealing even this last what-if. This last maybe.

She presses her face into the crook of his neck and breathes him in, the sea and the storm of him, the trace of something still electric beneath his skin. "I’d kill anyone who tried to make me forget you," she whispers, and it isn’t sharp, just quiet and steady and full of a thousand truths she’ll never stop carrying.

There was a time when she would’ve said yes without even thinking—when caution was something to dance around, not something to carry. But that was before she'd had months of danger, of leaving everything she'd known, of bruises and heartbreak and too many moments of picking herself up after the wind had spat her back out.

She pulls away just enough to see him again, mascara smudged in the corners of her eyes, mouth trembling with the weight of holding too much. "Understanding how your mind works won't make me any less crazy," she says with a soft, unsteady smile. "I'll still pick stupid fights with you and still want too much." She'd still drive him crazy all day long with her nonsense and expect him to cuddle her all night, and he'd still feel like shit everytime she dreamed of more without meaning to.

JACK

He can't hold her properly - not with the claw marks carving deep trenches down her back - but Jack's nothing if not the resourceful sort, and he's got a good feeling that Flora won't mind if the hand that grazes against her hip sweeps around to cup her backside instead. "I believe it," he murmurs, his voice muffled against the silken sweep of her hair, the words murmured like kisses into the gossamer strands. "And I'll kill anyone for much, much less. But we both already knew that."

When she draws back, he's ready with his free hand to fix her running mascara, fingers brushing across her lips even as they spill out the truth of it, the heartbreaking logic that stacks like building blocks that spell out NO CHANCE. It's the sort of cool reasoning that Jack has been begging her for all this time, and he's never wished more that she'd not bothered to learn it. At least not until after this conversation.

"I'd still let you," he says softly. "And for what it's worth, I spend quite a lot of time feelin' like shit anyway, so one more thing wouldn't tip the scales." None of that, though, changes the inevitability of when it might all become too much again, and because Jack doesn't want to admit as much, he leans in instead and presses a slow, too sweet kiss to her lips.

no more than I was or than I want to be
when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody

you know what song I'm listening to for this and every line fits
Flora, who has never once minded the way Jack touches her, who has thrived on it, melted into it, ached for it—would have arched herself helplessly into the warmth of his hand if not for the wounds that mar her back. As it is, her body still tries, shifting with a soft gasp as if the impulse alone could erase the pain, as if desire might triumph over everything else they’ve broken between them.

His voice—gods, his voice—is like seafoam caught in her hair, warm and hushed and utterly him, murmuring against her like a secret or a promise that's no longer hers to keep anymore. She leans into it, into him, even as he fixes her mascara with fingers far too gentle for someone who’s wielded storms and anger and silence against her for so long. And when he says he’d still let her—that she could keep being too much, and he’d still hold that weight with everything else he carries—it tears something open inside her.

She doesn’t know whether to cry or to laugh or to just say fuck it and pull him down into the wreckage so they can be miserable together. It should be simple, but it's never been simple with them, and before she can decide which way to fall, he kisses her.

At first, she doesn’t kiss him back. Not properly, if only because her lips are trembling too much, her chest is rising too quickly, and her breath catches on the sob that builds like a tide against her ribs. The kiss tastes like grief and goodbye and sea-salt memory, like something sacred pressed between palms that cannot stop shaking. Her mind rains harder, but it’s warm, it’s soft, it’s his—and gods, nothing has ever hurt this much. Not dying. Not screaming at one another across the dock. Not being left. Because this isn’t a break. This is an ending. This is it.

Pulling him tighter, desperate to outrun the moment, Flora sips in a breath that tastes like him, brackish and sharp and impossibly sweet. Her lips tremble against his as she kisses him back with the kind of aching slowness that only comes when everything else has already fallen away. Her tears streak down both of their cheeks now, silent and unrelenting, a storm with no lightning, only weight.

When her lungs give out again, when another sob hitches high and tight in her throat, she breaks just enough to whisper against the seam of his mouth, "I’ll never not love you." Her voice is cracked glass, tender and unfixable. Her fingers clutch at his collar like she could stitch herself into the shape of him if only she held on hard enough. Then, without waiting for breath or forgiveness or the world to stop ending, she rises onto her toes to kiss him again.

JACK

Flora's mind rains within and without, and as they're doused by the illusory downpour of her grief, Jack forces himself not to drag his mental shutters down around it. Where once it would have been easy to pinch and cauterise that particular strand of telepathic pain, if this is the last thing he's ever going to get from the Doubletake that belongs inexorably to him, he wants to feel it.

I told you not to cry, he almost wants to say, but Flora is already speaking, her lips soft as they brush against his own, and Jack's answering smile is a barely there thing reserved for her alone. "If love was all it took, we'd have been unstoppable," he murmurs. "You'll have always been the first to have mine. Maybe the only one." Because if years of trust and effort, of peeling back those first ironclad layers of himself to offer what he thought love meant, if that had still led here?

Well, Jack knows a lost cause when he sees one, even if it's in his own reflection.

He kisses her back like the clouds might part and the sun might shine if only they hold on for long enough, his fingers gliding through her hair and his lungs screaming, though not entirely from a lack of oxygen. When, finally, the captain does step back, it's with the slightest frosty imprint of his fingers on her skin, before he shoves his hands into his pockets to hide the way his magic has betrayed him.

"I think I'd better go," he says, before the room shatters entirely under the weight of Flora's mind. "This was my first grand gesture, an' it didn't really go how I planned. You'll be a'right, stayin' here until you're ready to go back?"

no more than I was or than I want to be
when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody

With the taste of him still clinging to her lips and his words blooming slow and bittersweet in her ears, it’s far too easy to believe they might somehow make it work. That if she kissed him one more time, or reached far enough, or simply refused to let go, they might untangle the knots of their ruin and begin again. But Flora has always thought in singular threads—one path, one passion, one impossible hope. Jack’s mind was a web, a universe of contingencies and shadows, and gods, that difference had always made her feel so seen and so alone, both at once.

And so what now? Choose the ache of walking away, knowing it was the right thing for both of them? Or choose the other heartbreak—the slow, blistering burn of staying and destroying each other until the love turned quiet, until neither of them cared enough to cry about it anymore?

If it had been her choice, Flora would have stayed there, arms locked around him, her lips buried in the crook of his neck where his scent still clung to her skin. She would have let the illusion of their closeness stretch on until the pain dulled, or until it tore her in half. But Jack—who had always known when to cut a line loose—steps back. The moment he does, it tears something from her like a stitch yanked too early. The frost of his magic trails down her skin and she wants to scream, to sob, to fall into the space he’s placed between them like it might swallow her whole.

Instead, she nods. Because of course he’s right. He always is.

"Okay," she whispers, the word fragile and false and softer than she wants it to be. Her eyes track to the walls, still scrawled in the golden rain of her heartbreak and the crimson ache of her love for him, vivid and raw as if her soul had been painted onto the stone. "I’d say you have no idea how much it meant to me that you came," she murmurs, a faint smile touching her lips even as it fractures, "but..." Well, he did.

And when he asks if she’ll be alright, she doesn’t try to lie. Doesn’t throw up her usual defences or cover it in sass or silk. She just shrugs, slow and small, like someone shouldering grief instead of shaking it off. Like someone who knows alright might be a word that lives in other people’s stories now, but not in hers.

JACK

"Yeah," Jack says softly, finishing the thought for her so she doesn't have to, "I know." Clearing his throat and straightening up, evidently there's some part of the captain that instinctively compartmentalises the raw hurt that lingers between them, because the confidence he shrugs back into like a well-worn coat gives none of what has taken place away. When he speaks, though, his voice is still quiet and gentle in a way it only ever has been for her, and only when things are dire.

"I ain't ever done this before, so if you hear tell of me doin' some questionable shit to cope, don't take it personal, yeah? An' if the rest of Torchline could... I dunno, not hate my guts for more'n the obvious, I'd consider it a kindness." He's not saying he won't pull his punches again if the Kaisels of the world decide to come swinging in his direction, but... well, it would be a lot nicer if they didn't darken his doorway in the first place, you know?

Letting out a long sigh and offering Flora a gentle nod - they are both alright in that respect, it seems - Jack finally retreats back to the door, finding the handle in the seam of her rain-blown mind, and opens it. "I'll see you later, then?"

no more than I was or than I want to be
when you fall on me like night, I wanna kill the lights

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!

you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody

For all that Flora has spent her life learning how to parse danger, decipher nuance, slip past the barbs of others with charm or venom or something in between—there’s simply no way to prepare for this. For the jagged kindness of Jack’s voice as he finishes the thought she can’t quite bring herself to say aloud. For the way he straightens, folding himself back into that careless, cocky shape the world expects of him, while something beneath it all still bleeds for her.

Questionable shit could mean any number of things for Jack Barclay, and gods help her, she doesn’t ask. Doesn’t press. Not because she doesn’t want to know—she will want to know, when the hours stretch long and cruel and there’s nothing but the tide and the ache and the what-ifs to keep her company. She’ll imagine it then, over and over again, and every version of it will hollow her out a little more. But not now. Not when her heart is already split wide open, waterlogged with sorrow.

Instead, as he mentions Torchline and its judgement, Flora huffs something that might have tried to be a laugh, except it’s more salt than sound. She nods anyway, wordlessly agreeing not to turn their grief into gossip, even if every look at the sea from now on might still taste like him.

And when he says he’ll see her later, something sharp and bright and stupidly hopeful spears her through the ribs. She swipes at her cheeks, the gesture trembling, remembering the gentler version of it moments ago when his fingers had done it for her. She nods stiffly, then again, and again—until it carries the same rhythm as a heart breaking and trying, despite everything, to keep beating. Of course he’d see her again. On the beaches. In a dream. In every fucking star if it came to that.

As Jack turns and leaves, finding the seam in her soul and slipping through it like it’s nothing at all, Flora presses her teeth together so hard her jaw trembles. She forces herself to count—sixty seconds, slow and deliberate, one for every imagined step away from her until the net of his magic released her mind.

For one final, stupid time, the Queen of Torchline wraps herself in gold and splendour, casting her thoughts outward like a net of diamonds spun from her tears, gilded and rich and unmistakably hers. It is a farewell soaked in beauty, in love, in the softest agony a girl can bear without shattering.

And then, once she’s sure—once she’s sure he’s gone—Flora breaks.

She collapses onto the bed in a ruin of sobs that claw their way out of her chest like something feral, her breath hitching too violently to muffle. The guards outside hesitate, uncertain, until one of them finally murmurs for someone to get her mother, and Hotaru comes with magic, if not with words, to try and gather up whatever pieces remain.

~FIN