Pairing: Jack/Isabella, my OFC
Word Count: 623
Prompt: Touch
A/N: A small snippet from one of the various nights before the Hellride reached Guadalupe in Esprit de Corps. Just expanding on something I never really covered. Thank you, Chaos, for the quick beta read!
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Fables
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The night was like a winter solstice, where the planets tilt just so to their star, circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing for one another. They spun helplessly, exalted, in and out of that fleeting touch.
Even after a long day on deck, his body still felt her. She had lain in his arms long after they'd made love. In his bed that night, he felt solid. Jack had slept on ships for too long, to the point where he didn't know how to sleep with nothing moving beneath him. So he'd stayed awake while she slept, with their bodies entangled - though cooled from perspiration - still absorbed heat from the breath of faint whispers in the night.
"I had recently read that you Romans thought that bees could be slain by echoes," Jack mused, tracing Isabella's jaw-line with his smile, enough movement for her sleepy eyes to flutter. "It seems like a far-fetched, but interesting notion. The thought of a spoken word – that airy nothing which nevertheless bore and spread the impact of something – could shun these creatures right out of the air."
It felt as though a cast-iron bell hung within the arch of her ribcage, and whenever she heard his voice, it rang a long syllable of pulsing ripples within her lungs and down her bones. She inhaled deeply, stretching her weary limbs. "And if you chose to believe in such a thing, I'm certain you'd put it to the test?"
"'To him that watches, everything is revealed.'" A charming science of mystery and coyness was what he practiced; she'd learned it well.
With his forehead resting against hers, Jack stroked her cheek with his hand. The night was warm, and he had awakened her with fingers hot and dry to their own touch, like the skin of a stranger. Waves broke against the Hellride; he could feel each jolt of movement and it calmed him, but not to the same degree as the Pearl. "Close your eyes, listen to the ocean."
"I've listened to the ocean every day this year," she said, allowing her thoughts to wander. "At first, the noise sounded so harsh, but now…" She noted a slight rise in Jack's brow-line, a small urge against her hesitation. "It brings me peace. Same sand, same water. It doesn't change, oddly enough."
"But you have, and such a turn of events should never be considered unlucky. When it happens, when it singles one out - the great sea change that causes one's life to turn into something rich and strange - one is always lucky. Transformation. Always a gift, Bella. Mark it well." Jack's finger lightly tapped the very tip of her nose, validating his point. As he let his hand gently glide down the side of her face, to his delight, he discovered a smile upon her lips.
After a few moments of silent reflection, she responded, "This all is much like the story of the grasshopper - a simple creature, which left its home for a year to experience a different kind of life in a faraway land that its kind had never seen. It was an unexpected choice, but what's even more unexpected, was that when it came back, it had very little to say about its pilgrimage."
"A critter of few words, and they, no doubt, found him to be respectable. Unlike that bloody bee. Now, tell me what manner of respectable beastie would so easily let itself be bested by echoes?"
Isabella turned her head away from his, laughing heartily. "Jack, stop it!"
"No." He pinned her down forcefully beneath him. "What, pray tell, did our peripatetic protagonist say?"
Her lips grazed his ever so slightly. "'I will never see this year again, not so innocent.'"
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