Archive of Our Own

Flapjack remembers her in fits and spurts; broken bones, snapped twigs, raised fists. But he remembers her. Of course, he does. After all, he loved her more than he loved the crystalline amber sky.

He is born in fire, carved by two sets of hands, elegant, thin fingers slipping over more calloused knuckles; he comes to and the first thing he hears is the sound of humming, then the swish of a carving knife. There’s not a hard rule for when a hunk of wood becomes something more than that, but he knows that he’s early. He’s not supposed to remember the closest thing to his birth, but he does.

He remembers the warmth of her hands radiating through another, he remembers how she laughed and it sounded like gold bleeding onto him, and he remembers that distinctly, he was not hers—but she was carving him, hand-in-heart, with his true master.

There is creation, yes. In the living room, life was brought out from nothing, from the shape of love. He really, really misses that living room, when he thinks of it. His eyes flicker open to a set of blue and green gazing down at him, they’re matching, and the green is stepping away, chuckling to herself, and declaring that she’d put over a pot of soup while they got acquainted.

He could feel her smoothing him over; he could feel that this, this is where the distance started. And yet, at that time, the golden string looped around her fingers tied securely around him, around his master, around his Caleb. The name fit naturally in his mouth from the first time he chirped it, and the first time he watched Caleb’s blue, blue eyes explode into recognition.

“He’s speaking to me, Arianna!”

She chuckled again, humming to herself. Even now, when he looks back at her, he sees her like that; backlit by gold, in the doorway of the kitchen, singing a song that she never cares to teach, adoration falling from her lips with every melodic breath.

He understands why Caleb loved her then. Understands why Caleb continued to love her.

“That’s what he’s meant to do,” she reminded him, “I told you that, years ago. Tell me if he’s talking shit about my hair.”

Caleb turned his attention back to him, and even only seconds only and without a name, Flapjack had the peculiar sensation that Caleb was like no other witch.

“I’m going to ask that girl to marry me,” Caleb excitedly announced, arm halfway through the sleeve of his paint-stained shirt, “I’m going to finish this damn portal, and then I’m going to ask the prettiest and most amazing girl I’ve ever met to marry me in the rain of the Human Realm, and, and—”

Flapjack chuckled.

And you’re going to pray to everything with more power than you that she says yes even though she would kill the Titan a hundred times over with her bare knuckles for you?

Predictably, that made Caleb redden. Predictably, Flapjack rejoiced.

“S-something like that,” stammered Caleb, and Flapjack preened.

The girl in question was outside, and Flapjack would hate to inform Caleb that she was going to beat him to the punch—he watched her furiously bent over the workshop table, hissing a small golden band, not even bothering to try and hide it from him. Instead, she’d rolled her eyes with bleeding affection, and tried to work a promise.

And because sometimes, just sometimes, Flapjack was a merciful beast, he intended to honour it. After all, it seemed like she’d put a lot of work into it. It would be a pity if she didn’t get to shock Caleb. It would be a pity if Flapjack didn’t get to witness his witch with the reddest face of his life, as the gorgeous force of nature that was hiding in the skin of a mortal woman got down on one knee and waxed lyrically about him.

And although Flapjack hated to admit it, Arianna was better prepared than Caleb. Caleb would spend weeks agonising over how to do it, which precious metal to choose for the band, which stone to place in the centre—even though Arianna would marry him with paper rings.

It was years later, in the exact same kitchen, now draped in flowing blues of a melancholic evening and Arianna was scraping his namesake off the ceiling. It was out of character for her to miss a perfect flip, but as she boosted herself up on the counter again, wielding a knife, he knew it wouldn’t be the last time in recent memory.

But after all, it wasn’t in Caleb’s regular character to get his eye gouged out by his brother, either, so Flapjack supposed that he could cut Arianna a little slack.

The pancake flopped miserably back into the pan, and Arianna dropped her ass onto the counter, legs swaying in the air and making no effort to return to cooking even though the stove was still lit.

You’re going to burn the house down, Flapjack wanted to chirp to her. But of course, she wouldn’t have understood him. Of course, because while she had looked down at him with the divinity flowing off her like beads of water, she was not his creator. She was not his witch. But she was his friend, even his family.

She tilted her head, slowly studying him. He noted the bags under her eyes, how he was sure they weren’t there on that fateful day, when they first met.

“You think I’m losing it,” she suggested, laughing a little at herself. Even though he hadn’t managed to crack the code in speaking directly to her, yet, they’d learned each other’s patterns through their mutual promise of loving Caleb until the day they died.

He knew how she moved when she was upset and trying to hide it, and sometimes, not that he took any pride in it at all, he’d managed to comfort her even when his witch failed.

He flew over without hesitation, nuzzling against her upturned hand.

“I swear I have my shit together,” she tried, and he didn’t even chirp in acknowledgement, which was their favourite and universally agreed-upon method of communication. Arianna was rather good at figuring out which chirps were those of exhalation and of displeasure. She’d always glare at him, cross her arms, and cock her hip, raising her brow at him like he was her child she was reprimanding.

Her hands were still warm. She still ran hotter than Caleb, even if she’d swear the opposite. Behind her, there was a window, that looked out over an expanse of forest. She still liked to curl up on the kitchen counter, legs crossed, and watch the boiling rains terrorise the landscape.

One evening, when she couldn’t listen to Caleb’s ragged breathing without wanting to cut someone and Flapjack agreed with her, he found himself sitting in her lap.

She told him how she used to do always do it as a kid, and she promised him that he wasn’t abandoning Caleb, as if she’d known. As if she’d been his master, his witch, able to read the whirring thoughts in his mind. He returned to the bedroom before she did, as he always did; seemingly, she craved more respite than he did.

Seemingly, he could never blame her for it. That night, he remembers she shuddered through the room in the middle of the night, the wood creaking under her steps. That was out of character, too. When she wished to, she could be so silent that not even Flapjack could detect her presence if she didn’t wish for him to. She staggered into the bed, soaking wet, and collapsed on her side.

She didn’t curl up against Caleb, like she usually did.

Maybe it was good that they couldn’t speak to each other like he and Caleb could. Flapjack would have too many questions, and he knew that Arianna would never have enough answers.

Before the heartbreak, they ran.

Caleb, giggling from behind as she easily overtook him, effortlessly dodging snarling roots and lunging vines, dipping under the whack of a tree’s branch with a cackle—because she knew he’d be smacked down.

Eventually, they’d find a clearing to collapse against, and she’d breathe in and out lightly before turning to whisper sweet nothings against the skin of Caleb’s throat, and Flapjack would get to laugh at his best friend who even after all these years, never knew what to do when a pretty girl smiled at him. Even if there’s a ring wrapped around the pretty girl’s finger and she excitedly talks about pledging herself to him and that she’d do it anywhere.

The golden light blankets them into a perfect swirl of memory—and this is all before the iceberg blues against the kitchen walls, it’s when everything was warm and light and when he looks back; he knows that it’s gilded, even when they argued. Even when Arianna would fold her hands against the table and rest her head on them, sighing and trying to control her breaths.

Their hearts still beat strongly in their chests and Arianna still had her magic. There’s tragedy in looking back, yes, but there’s also the heavy, comforting weight of knowing that your pain has a home in the most intoxicating of loves.

Flapjack tries to remember more of the clearing. He thinks that Arianna would weave harmless flowers through Caleb’s ringlets of curls, and he thinks that Caleb’s hand would linger against Arianna’s cheek, as if he couldn’t really believe that she was really there. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe they were both doing it, depending on the day.

There’s too many memories for one being to hold, and eventually, they slip from him like water off his back.

Arianna folds her hands against her hips, shifts her weight. Gives Caleb a glare that says you better get your ass over here, and on the couch before I make you. For a moment, she looks like she’s going to purr and curl herself into an angle that shows off just how great her ass is and Flapjack’s going to have to retreat into the bathroom and hope they don’t migrate in there, but she doesn’t.

Instead, she drops behind her and with a loud, exaggerated groan, announces, “My ass is fucking beat, I want to hug my stupid husband until someone’s knocking on the door screaming about me being a lazy fucking bastard, so,” she meets Caleb’s eyes, narrows it, “Fucking join me. And bring the fluffy bird.”

There’s a lot of ways that Arianna and Caleb sit on the couch together. Sometimes, she’s sitting with her feet in his lap and laughing at something stupid he said. Other times, they don’t even make it to the couch, but instead, sit on the floor with their shoes still on, Arianna’s head on Caleb’s shoulder, raising a bottle of cheap-ass whiskey to the sky, toasting to it. Cackling.

When the rain beats against the roof, Caleb likes to curl up against Arianna’s chest, and Arianna shows off her height by wrapping her arms around him, tucking him against her body, the crown of his head becoming a prime spot for kissing between breaths, between words in conversations that they don’t always remember in the morning.

She’ll mess with his hair, close his eyes with a gentle prick of her fingers, tell him that he’s being an idiot to not use the prime opportunity for a nap against the scariest bitch he knows, even if she knows that he’s pressing himself so closely to her because even after all these years, the boiling rains freak him out. Especially when it’s storming.

So, Arianna’s almost neurotic in showing him that they’re fine. It’s one of the things Flapjack hopes he never forgets about her.

He rode into town hidden against the edge of Arianna’s hood, bleeding into her hair, listening to the world move around him.

For the same reason that Arianna was hugging her middle, Caleb had sent Flapjack out with her; it hadn’t been a question, it had been an order. Go with Arianna to the market, he’d said, curt and to the point and nothing like the man Flapjack loved. Nothing like the man Arianna loved, either, based on how she was glaring at the short, bearded figure shielded by Caleb.

Yet, she’d left.

It’s one of the formative memories Flapjack has of her. He has so many memories of her leaving, of her ebbing and flowing like the rivers she drew her power from, drew the water that she carried on her head back home from; pumped it out in the middle of the town square while people whispered around her.

Some of the statements were creative, even amusing. He heard an old crone note how Arianna Clawthorne lived life on ice skates, and yet, always landed on her feet. Another one said that she was proof the Titan’s heart was still beating.

A man with a thick, greasy moustache, under his stinking breath, called her a walking curse and that’s how Flapjack learned that indeed, his moustache, when yanked hard, tasted a little like the oil that Arianna used for frying.

They took the long way home. Arianna didn’t have a palisman, and up until that walk, he’d always thought it was out of choice. Of course, it would have to be. Someone as formidable as Arianna, and he could indeed feel the power that the villagers sneered about flowing through her veins, could make any beast she wished—she was even a masterful carver.

However, she patted her shoulder; their little sign of him being welcome to perch on her. He gladly did. She’d let her hood fall easy around her shoulders, still holding most of her hair. Usually, Flapjack would try his best to make a nest out of it, and depending on her mood, she would range from swatting him away to tolerating him as long as he didn’t interfere with her movement too much.

But on that evening, as she slowly sauntered through woods they’d ran through, woods she knew by heart, yet was travelling on unsteady feet—Flapjack could feel that something lingered in the air. Something pensive. She tilted her head back, looking up at the berry-red and rapidly darkening sky.

“Thank you for coming with me,” she started, wincing a little.

He cuddled against her neck, but unlike usually, she didn’t answer him with a soft laugh.

“The man who came at our door,” she continued, her voice wavering like a flag in the middle of a raging storm, “Is Caleb’s brother, Phillip. He’s human, too, of course. And he got stranded here with Caleb. But…”

One of the things that Flapjack had quickly learned about Arianna was that for some reason, she didn’t share Caleb’s eagerness in discussing emotions with Flapjack. Or anyone, it seemed. She wouldn’t admit to being uncomfortable or scared. But everyone had tells, and no matter how great she was; so did Arianna. And well, of course, that was because there wasn’t an inherent weakness in expressing vulnerability.

But Arianna was foolish, and as Caleb said, a reckless, perfect idiot who thinks that she needs to save the whole damn world.

It’s our job to make sure that she remembers to take a breath, okay, Flapjack?

Funnily enough, she’d said a variation of the same line to Flapjack about Caleb when she thought he wasn’t listening, and then she’d fallen to her knees begging Flapjack not to snitch. Of course, he snitched. Caleb got so red when he told him how much his girl loved him, how could he resist that temptation?

Anyways, like everyone—even if she didn’t say it, if you paid enough close attention, you could see when Arianna Clawthorne was anxious. And by the fury of which she focused on the ground instead of Flapjack and how her teeth seized her lip, she wasn’t just anxious. She was frightened.

Flapjack let out a small sound, and she snorted back.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she started. “It’s just…”

“I don’t want you to look at me differently, after I tell you this, okay?”

He chirped. He knew they didn’t speak the same language, but he hoped she understood that he never would. She rolled her eyes with obvious affection, cooed a little. Then, after a measured breath, she spoke:

“Phillip hasn’t had the same easy time as Caleb has. You know how Caleb got injured, right? Really badly? That was Phillip. But…”

She sighed.

“It’s complicated. It would be easier if I could just denounce him and kick his ass, but somehow, he’s acquired a curse. And he did that during the curse. And well… it’s why Caleb asked you to come with me, today.”

A leaf fell from a tree, a little early; it was the dying days of summer, after all. But indeed, it laid at Arianna’s feet, browning already.

“It’s unusual for any witch to not have a palisman at my age, let alone my calibre and of my specific clan origin. I don’t know if it’ll be a big surprise or none at all, but I had one, too.”

Arianna exhaled.

“And Phillip’s the reason I don’t, anymore.”

She exhaled, fiddled with her wedding ring.

“He destroyed her.”

Flapjack watched the bloodstained sky above them and tried not to think about what she was saying—tried not to imagine the implications, the horrors of her words. Witches weren’t meant to be disconnected from their palismen—it was meant to be a lifelong bond. It was meant to go both ways. It wasn’t meant to be like this.

Suddenly, like a cool and cleansing icicle to the back of his head, he was glad that he never gave into the overwhelming urge to ask Caleb why someone as gifted as Arianna Clawthorne didn’t have a palisman.

“He… I have to tell myself that he didn’t mean to. It was a fluke. We didn’t… I didn’t know it would, no, could happen. I have to tell myself that neither did he. Of course, he was horrified. Of course. He made a scene and everything. Cried with me, at me, mostly. You can’t fake that kind of guilt. But it still doesn’t take away from the fact that she is gone. Destroyed.”

She flicked her tongue against her teeth, something she did when she wanted to be sure she was being heard.

“It’s not that,” she tried, “It’s not that Phillip is a dangerous person. I refuse to call him that. He was… he still is my friend. But I don’t like thinking about what his curse does. I actually think I managed to block it out for many years, but…”

Flapjack knew where this was going.

“That’s why we don’t want you around Phillip—not because he would choose to do it again, but because he didn’t choose it the first time. And, I know I’m not yours, you’ve just learned why I don’t want to be yours but… I couldn’t watch that happen a second time. And Caleb loves you so, so much.”

“All witches love their palismen, of course, but I promise you, you’re something special and there’s something special about what you and Caleb have. Something incredibly powerful,” she winked, trying to save the mood that was darkening quicker than the sky, “And trust me, I would know.”

“Anyways,” she breathed out; Flapjack could hear that she was measuring them, that she was trying some of the breathing exercises the healers had taught Caleb. He nuzzled encouragingly against her. It was something that worked with Caleb, but again, he wasn’t hers and she wasn’t his; he couldn’t speak to her.

He couldn’t tell that she had done nothing wrong. He couldn’t reassure her. All he could be was a body against the waves of her past.

“If Phillip’s ever around, I want you to come to me, okay. Not Caleb. I know that he’s yours and all that., but I can protect both of you. And I promise, I will. Caleb would never… of course, he wouldn’t, Phillip’s his brother, I wouldn’t be able to do lay a finger against my brother or sister—”

(That was funny, Flapjack remembers noting, he’d never met Arianna’s brother and yet, her sister, Ellie, was seemingly over for dinner at least once a week. In fact, he’d never even heard them speaking of a brother.)

“—But, the point is that even if Phillip’s… being dangerous in the moment, Caleb wouldn’t be able to do anything against him, because he doesn’t have magic. I know that he uses glyphs but…”

There were no stars above them, but Flapjack felt like there should be. There should be stars for a glorious battle like theirs, for a story like this: the Titan should cut the lights into the sky, and should proclaim that yes, nothing was in vain, you are a good person.

There should be something to light their way back home, and out of the murky waters of the past.

“Don’t ever tell Caleb this, but I don’t consider glyphs reliable. All you have to do is burn the paper. I… I’m reliable. I’ll always have my power. My power is the one damn thing this world has given me, everything else, I’ve seized.”

Throughout the years he’d known Arianna, he knew that her faith rested not in the good of the world, but in her strength to reshape it if needed. He couldn’t imagine her without the surging power, and seemingly, neither could she.

Looking back, he realises that their fate was already sealed here.

“Just promise me that, okay? Promise me that you’ll fly to me. There’ll always be place on my shoulder for you, and we’ll protect Caleb together, okay?”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even nod or pat the side of her neck. He didn’t do anything, even Arianna knew he understood exactly what she was asking of him. Arianna stiffened slightly, before breaking into a manic grin, turning to gaze at him from the corner of her green eyes.

“Hey,” she suggested, “This conversation’s been a drag—”

And he could already feel the wind changing around her. He answered her with a low caw of glee, before transforming into his staff and landing square in her arm, joyous when Arianna flipped over the handle, landing solidly on the tips of her toes before they sped off into the night, above the trees that confined them, feeling the wind breathe new life into them as they laughed—

Like friends.

They’ve been sitting on the couch, entertaining the neighbours, for a couple of pleasant hours. It’s not always they can do this—and Arianna’s too prickly to try and be anything but blunt about it. The neighbours know why, and the neighbours know not to test their luck.

Yet, now she’s sitting next to Caleb, their shoulders clinking together like the champagne flutes at their wedding and the neighbours are laughing at all the right points of Caleb regaling them with stories of his youth with Arianna.

Some of them are stories that even Flapjack hasn’t heard yet, which is odd, because Caleb always talks to him at night. More than he talks to Arianna, and sometimes, Flapjack thinks that he’s walking a fine line between being a member of the family and being recycled into a beer coaster.

Arianna checks the sun—Flapjack’s spent years trying to pick up how she does it, and yet never mastered it with her degree of fierce accuracy—and when she sees the time reflected back to her, she nudges Caleb with her right elbow. Caleb sighs, and on cue, coughs until she’s satisfied.

Their neighbour Hanrik, watches closely, then looks questioningly at Arianna, who, in her usual Arianna-fashion, simply nods and waits for Caleb to decide whether she should fill him in. Caleb seems to approve, so she speaks, her tone cool and measured and absolutely implying a degree of bodily harm if she doesn’t like how Hanrik responds:

“Routine lung exercise, nothing scandalous. Why are you sighing, Caleb? You’ve been doing this regularly while I’ve been at work, I hope.”

Nevertheless, Arianna puts her hand over his wrist and rubs her thumb against the base of his palm because she knows that recovery is hell, and she’s constantly at him to exercise and take the ground up herbs that taste like shit and wood shavings (Caleb’s words, to Flapjack’s chittering delight and Arianna’s hands-on-hips-eyebrow-mildly-raised-in-challenge blatant displeasure).

“Sighing is good for my lungs,” Caleb informs her innocently, shifting his hand slightly to give her freer access. “I’m supposed to sigh deeply at you as often as I can.”

Arianna laughs, because she can’t even argue. But she can escalate. “Then, I see that I have my work cut out for me to be even more provocative. And if anyone calls me on it, it’s all just part of your treatment and they’re plebs.”

(She’d call them plebs anyways. Plebs is probably one of the nicer things that Arianna called someone. Plebs is not a word she used often. Bootlickers, more common. Fuckbags, common, too. Motherfuckers; a good old classic. Bastards; another one. Dickweeds is her own creation, and a glorious one. Fucknuggets; basically, Arianna had a habit of angrily and with terrifying speed and efficiency adding “fuck” to a regular word to turn into a brutal tongue-lashing with the tone and venom of her voice.)

Caleb sighs again, this time more over-the-top dramatically. “I’ve created a monster.”

And Flapjack watches it all. And Flapjack is going to remember.

Arianna’s voice quivered in the dark of night, barely standing on her own against the strumming of her lute. It took Flapjack an embarrassingly long time to realise that she wasn’t trying to stem a bleeding but was instead singing.

Except for on their wedding night, and a couple of touch-and-go midnights that he wasn’t supposed to overhear, he’d never heard her sing. Yes, when she was happy, she would hum absentmindedly, but as soon as Caleb mentioned how beautiful her voice was, she would clam up and not a sound would come out of her for days other than to speak, and maybe a low giggle.

Caleb said something about shitty dad and don’t know the complete story and they left it at that. But indeed, in the middle of the night, after her twenty-seventh birthday, Arianna was singing, cloaked in the darkness of their shared kitchen.

Nobody knows where they are going
Oh, how we try to wrap our minds
Over the edge of all our knowings
Be it a bang or the divine

Flapjack hadn’t noticed the weight of her voice before, how while it was smooth, melodic and carried the tones on the wind like it was nothing; like she was plucking strings of gold from the world around her and spinning them into beauty, he hadn’t noticed the sheer emotions hanging off them, before.

It would be rude to call her deadpan, but she had a certain way of speaking that didn’t always betray her true intentions. Especially not when she was talking to anyone other than Caleb and her sister. Sometimes, her sister’s husband, the one who always smelled a little bit like copper and almost permanently had a mottling bruise across his face, just sometimes, he would get a peek behind the curtain.

Flapjack got to see a lot of her, thanks to his connection to Caleb. Thanks to the fact that recently, Caleb hadn’t been well enough to walk without his staff. Which meant that Flapjack both got to listen on all of the great ice queen Arianna Clawthorne’s mother-henning, and when she decided to drop her walls just enough for him and Caleb to peer past.

Tip of my iceberg blues are showing

Arianna didn’t have blue eyes, but he noticed that in every other aspect of her life, she gravitated towards the colour. Just like Caleb gravitated towards red; the exact same shade as the fountain of blood falling against Arianna’s shoulders. Truly, these lovesick idiots would be the end of him. Yet, them and their love was also what breathed life into him, after all.

I've never been one for goodbyes
So, 'til I meet you there, I'm singing

Perhaps she was serenading her departed palisman? He didn’t know when it happened, and he knew that he was never asking; but he knew that being mourned by her beautiful song was the highest honour any living being could accept—it was staggeringly, wretchedly intimate in the ways that left you noticing every single beat of your heart.

A traveling song to ease the ride
And so you know, everywhere I roam
I’ll see you on the road, ooh-ooh

Her voice cracked a little towards the end, and Flapjack almost makes the fatal mistake of divulging the fact that he’d hidden behind the countless tomes about curses and the study of them. He would never be afraid of her, but still, he knew that she would prefer not to have an audience. He would grant her the belief of such, but he found that he couldn’t tear himself away.

Oh, I take it in vain
All the plans and moves that we made

Flapjack thought about the travelling bags that’d leaned against the door for two years, now. He thought about how she’d cut her honeymoon short, but kept the pirate hat and coat, swearing that they’d get back on the sea as she held Caleb up by his shaking forearms.

Flapjack had been busy doing his job of providing the emotional support part of their equation, but he noticed that even when Caleb laid his full weight against her, never did she dare to buckle, to bend or even bruise.

Half a heart is aching to grow
Soulmates aren't just lovers, you know? I know, I know

She repeated her words to herself, her voice hopping back and forth from elation and grief as she allowed the words fall from her lips like the storm pounding outside; nothing that wasn’t wholly natural, wholly glorious. She was melodic without trying, kept pace with her fingers strumming softly across the lute, the backing threatening to drown out her soft-spoken confessions.

Your eyes are the rain, just a soul that's changin' in shape

Flapjack knew that Arianna had an accent, but it was something that she’d beaten down over the years. But now, in the safety of the dark, she found it again, stumbled through the memories of childhood like the broom closet that she always swore she’d clean and yet never managed to find time for—

She sounded like a little girl running through reeds.

I'll be laughin' all of the way

Thinkin' 'bout the days, oh

She took a moment to breathe out after finishing, her hands shaking against the lute. Then, she slowly opened her eyes that’d slipped closed throughout the performance, really, even though Flapjack had a perfect, unobstructed view of her, and how the pale moonlight sauntered across her skin, he felt like he was walking through the woods with her again, the sky darkening above them; looking at something he shouldn’t.

“Flapjack,” she chuckled warmly, laying the lute down against the couch that’d been a recent, but necessary addition to their living space, “You can come out. I know you’re there and I’m not angry at you. I assume you liked my song enough to stay, so I’m flattered.”

She patted her shoulder, like she’d done a thousand times before, like she’d done when she hummed in the kitchen, like she’d done in the woods. It was as familiar as perch as Caleb’s was, by now.

He chittered against her hand as she ran mindless circles through his feathers, messing up his grooming in the best possible way where her nails scratched just right at where his beak couldn’t reach.

“Do you want to know who I wrote it about?”

For a moment, Flapjack lingered. He didn’t want to impose, that much was true, but he supposed that if she had offered the information herself without any prompting, well… that was so exceedingly rare for Arianna, so he was kind of obligated to say yes.

He nodded against her hand, and she laughed again, low in her chest, a soft sound that he didn’t know at the time, but he would carry for hundreds of years. He wonders, sometimes, how much of his witch’s soul is embedded in him. Whether Caleb saw Arianna like this, too—whether the pleasant ring of gold he sees when he recalls her throwing her head back laughing like a little kid is Caleb still breathing within him.

“I wrote it about my brother,” she finally answered, and it sounded like he was one of the first beings to hear that truth, “I wrote it about my brother, who’s been dead for a very long time, ten years, in fact.”

She kicked her head back against the wall, grinning up at the ceiling, and perhaps, the sky beyond—up where there might be a trace of the soul she was mourning, where he might be smiling right back down at her.

“So,” she said, and it sounded very much like a vow, “Farewell to my lovely friend, he who taught me to love like a beast and to feast like the queen that he fed turtle soup. The boy who I inherited my laugh from, who was the black sheep and tended to the mischief in me alongside the love for his craft. He told me that I was glorious, that I would do something and that the Boiling Isles would remember me for it.”

“On the very last day we had together, he said that I should always shoot for my dreams, that I should go straight for the stars and if I blessed him by falling to earth on my way, he would catch me.”

She smirked at those very same stars. “I’m taking him with me, whether he likes it or not.”

“I know what he’d say to me, if he was still here. He would say that I should get on with the show, and I would nod.”

She whistled a little tune.

“So, on we go.”

It ends in fire.

And perhaps the flames were prophets whispering to him, but the first thing he remembers noticing burning, was Arianna’s lute.

He doesn’t remember all of the details, even when he tries. The Bat Queen, when he eventually runs into her, decades later, after failing to wither away on his own, says that it’s something to do with trauma. That some bad shit happened, and that his mind is trying to protect him.

He doesn’t want to be protected. He wants to be borne witness to everything that happened in the raging fires; he wants to know exactly what led to the only thing he can remember clearly. But first, he has to work through the fragments.

He imagines them like the time Arianna hurled a vase at her mother. It’d been an unsolicited visit and Flapjack would quickly learn that they were not appreciated.

She’d sat on her knees for hours, sorting through the shards and cutting her hands to pieces, shaking slightly, blood staining the pale pink porcelain. Eventually, she brought them all to the table, where she began to painstakingly repair them with gold—telling Flapjack about the practice, one that she’d seemingly picked up from her brother, because she’d “broken so damn many pieces of ceramic as a kid” but the awkward laugh of how she said it made it obvious to him that she was hiding the underbelly of her words.

He remembers Caleb sitting with his back leaning against the exterior wall and pretending not to gaze exclusively at Arianna’s ass as she weeded through the garden, pretending to be a human woman instead of a beast who could slay armies with her tongue and most importantly, whip her wrist in a circle and have the extermination of fangdelions completed.

Flapjacks remembers her previously saying that it was cathartic, and he remembers that day, chittering playfully as he flew over to land on her shoulder and tug at her hair, dragging her attention away from the small, cellulose-ridden heads snapping at her eager fingers and onto Caleb’s blue eyes.

She just grinned, wagged her tongue a little, shifted her stance right as a flower lunged from her waist and grabbed it by the stem, yanking it from the dirt and throwing it into the bucket behind her—still wriggling. Still twitching. A surge of final life.

Flapjack ambled back to Caleb’s side, sitting on his knee and revelling in the scratches he happily dispensed. Eventually, she worked her way through the bed, rose from her grass-stained knees and went to join Caleb, shoulder-to-shoulder.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Flapjack remembers her saying, and that’s important, that matters; she tilted her head up towards the sun, not even wincing at its divinity.

“We should go flying, today,” Caleb answered.

Throughout his life up until then, Flapjack had seen many of her smiles—both the hidden ones that she thought no one would notice and the ones that could light up the whole damn town if she just let it—but this one was something special. Her smile promised of something born anew; it’d been a couple of weeks since the last really bad day, and she’d started to look at the bags by the door with something that wasn’t disdain swirling together with grief.

She played with a loose strand of her hair. “If you feel up to it,” she shrugged, trying to play it cool and fooling absolutely no one, “I would never deny you.”

It’d been at least three years since they’d truly raced through the sky, both of them standing atop Flapjack’s staff, arms out to catch the wind—uncaring of what would happen if they fell, because they knew they wouldn’t.

During the past three years, they’d sporadically taken it up again. Sometimes, Arianna would fly Flapjack alone, and she’d pull all of the daring manoeuvres he begun to imagine her perfecting as a little girl on her own beloved bird.

They’d lunge at the ocean, and she’d raise one leg gracefully behind her, dipping down to almost kiss the boiling waves, before flipping backwards, her fingers curling around his staff and spinning. In another life, Flapjack could imagine her performing; living for the thrill of making the crowd gasp. But now, she found her salvation in the gentle, eager smiles of one man—and well, Flapjack didn’t find that any less glorious, if he’s being honest, even though their memories feel like weapons now.

He remembers her tearing off the cuffs Phillip had laid onto her with a scream, her skin pulling away and falling to the ground. He remembers the fire dancing around her, how she split it in two, how she wove it around her body like ribbons, the tears spilling from her eyes.

But that’s not yet.

Because Arianna suddenly stopped playing with her hair when she realised that Caleb was serious, and it wasn’t just something that he was saying to try and get her out of her head. Then, she’s suddenly up; Flapjack isn’t sure that he’s ever seen someone move as quickly as her, but she was across the room, leaning against the doorjamb.

He’ll get to the story that’s gathered you all around the fire soon enough, but there’s a thing that you have to know about Arianna Clawthorne before he can tell it. Phillip Wittebane was a brilliant man, as was Caleb, but nothing would have been possible without her. They would have died before they saw their first spring in the Boiling Isles, had she not taken them under her wing.

The first witch to ever carry the moniker of Belos wasn’t Phillip Wittebane, but instead a griffin pup, named by a twelve-year-old Arianna Clawthorne.  

And the first witch to master sigils, or even develop them in the first place, wasn’t Phillip, either. It was Arianna Clawthorne, cross-legged in her kitchen, back hunched over the light of a flickering candle.

Another important thing to note is that she didn’t rub her hands together and cackle about taking over the world. Instead, she jumped to her feet, her fingers slotting together as she, trying to be as quiet as possible, excitedly regaled Flapjack with her discovery, not even caring to bring up the fact that he’d been spying on her again.

Instead, she dropped onto the couch, patted her knee and giggled as he took his perch there. “Flap, Flap, Flap,” she sung, “I did it, I did it, I did something with my power, something good, look,” she leaned down, fished a series of mismatched diagrams that looked more like the scribbles of a senile crone than a revolutionary discovery, but he knew her.

And so, he chittered happily as she began to explain.

“I made it,” she said, “After maybe harassing Phillip one too many times, and look, it’s going to channel my magic into whoever has a matching one, it’s not perfect yet, because I have to make a decent way of transmitting the magic in a one-sided loop, because now it’s give and take but—”

The moon was cutting through the windows, making her shimmer in her joy.

It’s one of the memories he holds onto, even when he watches the exact same magic she developed slice into the boy he swore to protect; the boy that’s the only reminder he has that he lived a life before despair. But for now, the night is sparkling and Arianna is alive, and Flapjack’s listening to her talk.

Another slight detour before we get to the fact that Caleb Wittebane died:

One of his favourite things to do was gather Arianna against his chest and dance with her in their kitchen. They would move the furniture around just to have more space, and giggle like teenagers as they wiggled around in the fading light. Arianna would shake her hips, pulling Caleb into her orbit, and he would pretend like he wasn’t stumbling because he was watching the curve of her waist instead of where he was putting his feet.

This isn’t the time for a love story, but everything starts and ends with love. Love builds God, builds palaces, breaks promises, builds calluses. This is the one of the inherent things we agree to, when we’re born. The other is that everything is going to die, eventually.

It’s important to mention that the boy who looks all soft and angel in the right light and who drinks until he stumbles around, into the right arms to play with her hair and tell her about how it looks like all the stars glitter in her eyes, even though they’re green. The boy who whistles when he whacks his hip into the sharp corner of the table instead of swearing, the boy who willingly cleans out the ashes from the fireplace—

Doesn’t live long enough to see how old age looks on him.

And Flapjack’s sure he would have worn it the most gracefully out of all of them.

The Devil gets him, even with his angel eyes. A sudden natural disaster. Even though the girl hosts parties and starves her body and gives her blood, sweat and tears for him—it doesn’t change anything. The water recedes rapidly from the shore, but he’s busy talking about how the sun seems to finally be peeking out from the clouds when everyone else is running.

He’s swallowed by the sand, or some other untimely act of God.

It’s important that the story starts like this, because you know about how he told quiet stories about his dad’s rough hands against his brown lute and that’s something he still remembers, even after all these years. It matters that the girl he dances with survives and unravels. It matters that the brother, too, and unfortunately, lives.

She looks around, in a blood-soaked gown and realises that no matter what she does; the boy dies. And she still takes the moment and tastes it.

It doesn’t matter how he leaves. It matters that he leaves, and that leaving is the start of the story. The part that you can’t avoid, the reason that everything else happens.

Phillip arrives a little past lunch, and Arianna is cleaning up in the back, while Caleb’s taking advantage of the good weather and health to weed the porch. Arianna shifted her weight and made a sound that wasn’t entirely approving, but she let him—because she loved him. And she didn’t think it was going to be the last normal thing that happened that day.

If it was, she’d have licked the moment from the air, savoured it.

She’s dousing the dishes in suds and hissing about not being as good as her sister when she hears his voice, and Flapjack, who’s been flittering between her and Caleb, bringing her fangdelions that Caleb’s pulling to decorate her hair, notices her stiffen.

Notices her stiffen like she knows something he doesn’t.

She confirms it when she dashes across the room in a wave of flickering, shivering gold. She’s pushing herself in front of Caleb, who’s still crouched on the ground, and Phillip, who’s waving like he’s not holding a knife behind his back.

“Good afternoon,” Arianna says, glancing back to the door, to the hiking gear that she’s not going to use. “What brings you here?”

Her voice is tight, threatening. Her stance is taut, ready to drop into a fight, ready to take him. Flapjack doesn’t know much of how Phillip is in a fight, because neither Arianna or Caleb have allowed him to learn, but he’s sure that the odds are firmly in Arianna’s favours.

Her looks could kill, and it looks like she’s trying. Phillip has a beard, and Arianna doesn’t even remark about it being terrible. She just stands, still and silent, waiting for him to answer, demanding him to, a flower half-braided into the end of her curls.

“I just wanted to say hi,” Phillip tries. He takes a step forward, and Arianna mirrors him.

“Do you remember what we talked about?” she growls, and for the first time, Flapjack sees why the neighbours whisper about her. He always deemed them rude, deemed them ignorant for not being willing to take even a couple of minutes to learn that despite her… aloofness and Caleb’s eccentricities, they were indeed very welcoming people, and some of the easiest to love.

Caleb had managed to befriend a couple, by now. But watching Arianna, with one hand, push Caleb behind her, and step fully into Phillip’s rage, her gaze was best described as murder incarnate. Wrath taking the shaky form a woman, simmering right under her fragile skin.

It was almost as if she had stepped into a different person; and he remembered the shards of her past that he’d overheard through hearsay, from Caleb in the middle of the night.

There’s things about Arianna Clawthorne that are unpleasant to know, and Flapjack remembers that, too. Everyone’s not as good as you want them to be, when they’re dead. Only bad people get to see their legacy set in stone; everyone else is a shade of grey, a little more complicated.

“I remember you breaking into my home and verbally abusing me for twenty minutes,” Phillip counters. Arianna, in a split second of herself, rolls her eyes.

“So,” she drawls, “I see that you’ve decided that you’re still a piece of shit.”

She shifts her weight a little, and Flapjack doesn’t notice it in the moment, but in hindsight and her sweet agonies, Phillip had caught sight of the swell of Arianna’s stomach.

Arianna Clawthorne had always been on the leaner side, according to Caleb.

Mostly, he was sure that it was due to lifestyle choices. Arianna’s sister, Ellie, had always been plumper, simply because Arianna would encourage her to eat more while going hungry. Caleb sounded stilted, when he talked about that, at first. Flapjack would later learn it was because Arianna and his own childhoods mirrored each other more than they were comfortable speaking of.

As a housewife, Ellie had gained a bosom and a waist. Arianna Clawthorne would never be a man’s little woman or sidepiece, but in the relative financial and emotional stability; she’d done nothing but put on muscle from hauling ass six days a week.

So, it was obvious when she started showing. And she started showing weeks before she should have, simply because she didn’t have a lot to give. She had a great ass because she lifted with her knees, and the curve of her waist seemed run in her family, as did the swell of her breasts. All in all, she was an attractive woman with good genetics and an active lifestyle.

Who lingered in the mirror, glaring at her stomach as if it had personally insulted her.

A week after the revelation, at the time when she couldn’t say she’d just eaten too much one evening, she slipped her cloak over her shoulders and said that she was going for a trip. She came back smelling of jasmine and smoke, stiff as a board.

Even Caleb whispering sweet nothings into her throat as he bore her open didn’t make confessions fall from her lips. Whatever she had done that weekend, wherever the tides had taken her; she kept it to herself.

Phillip’s eyes narrow.

“Do you have something to tell me?” he grits out.

Arianna catches his gaze. “Perhaps,” she agrees.

After twenty minutes, Phillip asks if he could speak to Caleb alone. Arianna reluctantly agrees, saunters outside and brings Flapjack with her in her hair, after a moment of deliberation. After a moment of uneasy silence, and glancing towards Caleb, who was obviously insisting that she do. That whatever was about to come, he could handle it himself.

Flapjack doesn’t have to know Arianna to know that she thinks he’s full of shit, but she’s trying to be less overbearing and terrifying, so she relents. She’s trying to be someone who’s not defined by her past, but instead giggles with her neighbours. She’s mentioned how she’s insecure about Caleb’s easygoingness.

It’s one of the reasons, Flapjack thinks, that later in life; she would double down on everything that made people whisper as she walked by. She’d tried being nice, and it hadn’t served her. She’d tried trusting, and it’d thrown her out to sea to burn.

She walks outside, and plants herself with her ear against the door.

Flapjack could bite at her jawline, but he mirrors her, and they share a smile that they try to make conspiratorial, but comes off as worried.

Eventually, Phillip whacks the door open and slams Arianna into the side of the house, squawking indignantly as she clatters to the floor and makes it very, very obvious that she was spying on him. Phillip takes a moment to glare at her, then huffs and storms off.

Caleb says that, if she wouldn’t mind, he doesn’t think he’ll be up to flying today anyways, and Arianna agrees with a small, short hum before saying something that’s absolute bullshit about having to fix up the shed anyways, and now she’ll have time to make a decent vegetable stock for when Ellie and Ezra decide to grace them again.

She walks off, muttering something about terrible diet and sure, animals are cute but what the fuck? They’ll also tear your throat out if given the option to, so you might as well eat them before they eat you.

Flapjack spends the rest of the evening trying to cajole whatever happened out of Caleb, because he’s not gifted with Arianna’s keen hearing through doors, just like he’s not granted her obvious grace when they slam into her either.

Flapjack wakes up clutched between Arianna’s hands, surrounded by flames, cleansed by the tears spilling onto him.

“Please,” she begs, “Please.”

Her voice cracks like the fires circling them, like Phillip’s manic cackle, blood dripping from his lips as he speaks.

“You’re going to die, Arianna Clawthorne. And it’ll be ten years too late.”

Arianna staggers backwards, breathing heavily.

He remembers what follows in shards, sapphire tears and the feeling of flame against him, his eye burning. He’s not even sure all the memories are his own.

The flames danced across the field and her feet burned and she kept slamming against the ground and pushing herself up and the smoke was forcing itself into her lungs, she was coughing, she was dying, her baby was dying, she could feel it turning to ash inside of her, she could hear Caleb screaming—) 

He’s crying out for her, calling her name, begging her not to leave but if she stays she dies, and she can feel the heart beating furiously inside of her and with one last look back, blinded by tears, she runs off, into the woods, into where her wedding ring doesn’t catch the light and give away her hiding spot, she stumbles and she falls and her blood’s staining the ground and the flames are surrounding her, licking at her heels—)

Arianna’s crawling back to him, crawling back to his cold, cold body and she’s clutching him like crying into his shoulder will bring him back, like drenching his shirt will bring him back, like she didn’t leave him, didn’t run away.

She knows she should leave. She remembers Phillip’s crazed eyes following her through the woods, she remembers how he screamed about cutting the baby out of her if he had to. She remembers biting down on her hand so she wouldn’t scream but she wants to hold him just a little longer, so she closes her eyes and does—

She tries to fight back against Phillip, practiced blow after practiced blow, fireball after fireball, aiming to kill, aiming to save, she’s ducking under his strikes, weaving out of the range of his knife and he’s growling and her lungs are filling with thick black and there must be something else burning than just grass, something that’s making her vision swirl and spotted with black and she stumbles and she’s nicked on the cheek and he’s standing above her but Caleb pulls him back with a scream—

Here's the worst part: Caleb blinks up at him, blood dribbling from his busted lip, eyes misty with tears.

He’s begging, too. But not like Arianna.

His voice is quiet, only audible if you’re looking at how his lips move. And Phillip is standing atop him, stroking his hair back.

She’s cupping him in her hands, her forehead against his, as she washes out his wounds.

The sap glides down her fingers, painting them gold, and she’s humming again. It’s creation, of a new hand, of a new life.

Tears stream down her face, and she does nothing to stem the tide.

“You have to go,” she breathes against him, “He is going to kill you.”

He will kill you too, Flapjack wanted to say, but she wouldn’t have understood him anyways. Her eyes slip closed, and she breathes in, then out.

He’s expecting her to promise revenge, to say something terrible about the horrible things she’s going to do to Phillip. He expects her to make another promise in the dark; he needs her to talk about everyone she’s going to burn to get what she wants, what the land she’s going to reclaim as hers.

But does he?

Is that something she can even say?

“I love you,” is what she says instead, “I love you, I love you. I did, I do, and I will always love you.” And he knows, even if her nails are digging into his feathers, and she’s speaking it, her breath hot, against his skin, she’s not telling it to him. She’s frenzied, hurried, a renegade and her illicit affairs. It’s a final indulgence, and he allows her to come undone, wondering how she’s going to pick herself up in the morning.

The thunder rattles the ground in tune with Arianna’s exhales.

Her chest rises and falls in the morning.

She’s standing by the woods that flank her former life, looking at the smouldering wreckage.

Caleb’s head is against her shoulder, and his body isn’t stiff yet. The blood across his cheek almost looks fresh, to the naked eye. She holds him tightly, and Flapjack wouldn’t fault her for refusing to let go. She sits down on the ground, leans against a tree, and cups his chin in her thin hands.

She song falls from her lips like water from a swollen river, flowing freely through the air, at the stars shrouded by the harsh light of the morning. They need champagne, for an ending like this. They need a more glorious ending in the first place, but the world’s never been a fair game, so Arianna strokes the pad of her thumb across the valleys of Caleb’s hollow cheeks, wets her skin with her tongue, wipes off the blood—

Slowly, meticulously. Loving.

So, that’s romance. Let’s dance to it.

Flapjack’s telling this story, now, and he could say that she whispered about how the sky would never look the same without him, how he was bigger than the whole of it, brighter, too.

But instead, she talked about how, if he’d blinked when they first met, she would have looked away at the first glance. That if he hadn’t blushed, they could have never whispered about this. She sings a chorus of woulda, coulda, shoulda; she talks about everything, she talks about being damn sure that she’d never have danced with the Devil. She talks about staying on her knees.

She smooths back his hair, leaves a lingering, promising kiss against his brow, then closes his milky-white eyes with her calloused fingers.

If you’d never touched me, she promises, I would have gone along with it. If I never blushed, then they could have never whispered to the ages of this. If you never saved me from boredom, I would have gone on how I was.

“My father was buried at sea,” Arianna finally says, “Caleb was terrified of the water. We’re going to bury him here.”

Flapjack doesn’t know what she wants from him, so he stays perfectly still.

They bury Caleb, Arianna swings the shovel over her shoulder and trips on a rock.

They stand in the clearing, staring at the small mound of dirt marking the spot. Arianna’s strong shoulders are quivering, trembling.

She offers him her hand for the last time, and he settles around her fingers. She scratches at his feathers, leans down to kiss him goodbye, and they don’t have to speak about it. She doesn’t have to say anything, he doesn’t have to chirp and pretend that she’ll understand him.

Her lips linger, and that’s it.

The golden string that tied them together from his birth has been cut, all the love has unravelled. There is nothing left for them here but a fork in the road.

The Bat Queen had known of Arianna Clawthorne, and it’s half of the reason that he went with her.

Apparently, it’d been years even if it only felt like days, even if the heartbreak still should have been fresh; still was, still surged in his chest as he sailed over the trees, looking down at the meadows Caleb would have been in awe of, at the horizons that could never amaze him anymore.

As Flapjack thought about everything he could have done differently, seemingly, Arianna had decided to live. She had taken to the seas, said the Bat Queen, freed victims of all shapes and sizes, brought her wrath to those who dared raise a hand at another. Called herself Captain Wittebane and sailed a terror of the seas and slavers dubbed the Heretic.

It suited her. Flapjack imagined that it looked good on her, and he hoped that one day, he would have the strength to fly to her, to land on her shoulder and hear her deep, rumbling laugh again—the one that made sunshine spill into kitchen doorways, the one that dappled her in it.

But just like the last time they spoke, he found himself petrified that he would find her in the shattered pieces he remembered. He didn’t want to remember her like that. He didn’t want to remember her like someone he couldn’t help. After all, she’d never been his witch. He could never tell her that she hadn’t done a single damn thing wrong.

He could never tell her that Caleb’s dying words had been whispering salvation to her name.

And so, what good would he do her? He would just remind her of her own lost bird, of her lost husband, now. He was a mosaic of everything that had been taken from her, and he understood why she hadn’t sought him out. He didn’t blame her. After all, he looked at her, and he remembered how the first thing he’d seen had been her eyes, but Caleb’s, too.

A small blue chameleon comes into the fold a decade after Flapjack, filled to the brim with tales of a fierce captain as stormy and dark as the sea she commanded with a flick of her wrist. And well, it solidified the promise in Flapjack’s mind.

Let her bleed the world dry in her wrath. Let her destroy Phillip. He trusted her, wholly. Because if there was one thing that was surely true about Arianna Clawthorne, it was that underneath her thin skin, brimmed a flame stronger than the ones that took his life away.

He was hurt, too. He didn’t want to hurt more. He just wanted to crumple inside of himself and remember the kitchen. In his head, he did everything right. In his head, Caleb was still alive.

But that wasn’t the truth. The truth was that they’d lost. The truth is that Flapjack didn’t want to be in his body anymore, that he wanted to wither away into the earth, that he wanted to find the kind of solace in absentia that she found through the swirls of the sea, through the maddening red of rage spilling down her back like an oil spill. Like blood spilled on grassy meadows from a boy on his back, looking up at the sky changing.

The Bat Queen says that Arianna Clawthorne is dead, and that she was eighty-nine.

That’s…

He doesn’t know how to react to that. Emphasis on the tense. Not past, present. He still doesn’t know how to react to it, and her gravestone’s all but crumpled into obscurity now.

She lived sixty-one years without Caleb. That’s a long time. That’s a lifetime, for some. In a way, he thinks she would be glad that her penance is over. Flapjack doesn’t know if Arianna ever believed in a Heaven like Caleb did, but he knows that she believed all things must end.

He tells himself that he’ll visit her grave.

He doesn’t, not for the first couple of hundred years.

He doesn’t attend her funeral, but he hears that it was something grand. Something that he’s sure, the Arianna he knew, wouldn’t have wanted. But what did he know about her? He was the one who chose to leave, after all.

She didn’t abandon him.

But he thinks, no he knows, that she would want a twin, humble grave next to Caleb’s.

He doesn’t look to find a new witch. He doesn’t blame the ones who do, but he appreciates that the Bat Queen never asks him why he doesn’t. He likes Luz; in a way, she reminds him of Arianna, and in many, many other ways, her frenetic excitement is akin to Caleb’s.

It’s nice when she speaks to him like he could be hers, even though he knows how it’s going to end. It’s nice when she tucks him against her shirt, when they take off into the night alongside another Clawthorne’s bird, one that didn’t meet the wrath of Phillip’s insatiable lust.

It’s nice when they save things, it’s nice watching the world burn around him. He can see why Arianna was entranced by it, why she left the house in the middle of the night; why she wished she’d put up more of a fight.

Then, he sees the boy.

And everything slides into place. He paints Flapjack’s nights in technicolour, and even though he shies away from Flapjack’s affection, Flapjack is ever-insistent, and loving.

He wiggles his way into the boy’s life. He learns his name, gets hidden in his room, manages to weasel pet names out of him, and the feeling sinks back into him. This is going to hurt. He is going to be hurt.

But now, he understands why Arianna threw herself in front of Phillip, why she cradled Caleb, even when she knew he couldn’t feel her. Why didn’t beg him to open his eyes. The cold, hardening proof was in front of her. She didn’t need anything else.

Flapjack doesn’t, either. He’s thick as thieves with love, forgetting that fear’s ever been an issue, feeling the gold wash over him.

In the Human Realm, the stories about her bear the wrong name and face.

She’s not Evelyn, and she never liked wearing dresses. She certainly didn’t have brown hair, and she didn’t have a bob cut for most of her life. At least not when he knew her, when she still had Caleb to love. And she didn’t burn down churches for fun. She burned down the churches because they deserved it.

Still, Flapjack lingers at the drawings of her leading Caleb and Phillip into the fires.

Tries to remember more about her—tries to remember enough to tell Hunter the story, to fully exonerate her.

But he can’t.

So, he nuzzles into Hunter’s shoulder at night and tries to gild the Arianna he wants to remember in his mind, the one who never left Caleb’s side until circumstances forced her to. But he knows, as well as the wood he sprung from, that people are rarely so uncomplicatedly good.

The first time he hears her voice in over three hundred years is when he’s pushing his way onto Hunter’s chest, magic leaking from him, and even though the world is fuzzy around the edges—he is sure she is real. He sure that he hears her snarl, “I am going to eviscerate that motherfucker.”

He’ll never forget her voice, just like he’ll never forget Caleb’s.

“Hi there.”

He chitters excitedly as soon as he notices the red hair framing a sharp-angled twenty-eight-year-old face.

Arianna!

She chuckles against her slender fingers, almost like she doesn’t want the world to see her smile. “Good thing you remember my name,” she notes, playfully raising her brow and waiting for the weight of her words to settle against his feathers. Admittedly, it takes him an embarrassingly long while to realise.

You just responded to me like you heard me call your name.

She grins. “I did.”

She drops down against the white ground, crossing her legs like she always did. “I guess there are small mercies that come with sacrifice, old friend. You’re much more eloquent than I imagined.”

He doesn’t hesitate to fly over and rest against her knee. As soon as he perches there, he decides against it, and flutters up to her shoulder. She, again, chuckles at his antics. It’s a sound he didn’t know he missed until he’s staring it in the face now. Her green eyes are tinged with something golden and moving.

He’s not the fondest of the colour gold, not anymore.

Not all palismen are as eloquent as those born from the strongest witch the Boling Isles ever saw deep in the throes of the strongest love.

She reddens, and she reminds him of Caleb. For someone who spent most of her life pissing people off and preaching about her power on pedestals, she was terribly awkward when genuinely complimented by someone whose opinion she valued. Flapjack was old enough to recognise it, but seemingly, Arianna wasn’t old enough to have learned how to take it yet.

Arianna slowly raises her hand to scratch at his feathers, like she never stopped all those years ago.

“You’ve been running for a long time,” she says, her voice melodic, lulling him into a false sense of security like she always did, “Caleb is going to be very glad to see you.”

There’s something about the love of his master down to him. He’s not sure that he would have mashed his face against the pads of her fingers, had she not been there when he was breathed to life; had she not been one half of the whole breath. Sometimes, in the dark of night, back home, he wondered if she’d been the one to truly make him—or if it was just Caleb’s adoration speaking.

He knows that Caleb likens himself to a statue, brought from mere rock into beauty by Arianna’s steady hand. Flapjack wonders if Caleb’s managed to find the words to tell her that, and all the other, less eloquent things he thinks about her—mainly about parts of her anatomy, in all these years.

Did Caleb tell you that he likes how you shake your ass yet?

Arianna cackles.

“I don’t know,” she answers, airy and not quite there, “I haven’t seen him.”

But you’re dead.

Arianna sighs.

“Not quite. Not entirely.”

Flapjack thinks about how he felt himself thrum through Hunter’s veins, and meets her gaze, holds it in a way few living beings ever managed. Whether she’s his creator or not, he’ll always revere her. She’ll always be golden, to him.

Like me?

She doesn’t have to speak for him to know that she’s wondering whether she could get away with lying to him. He knows her face. Half of him is from her, after all. And the other half is from the love of her life.

The cause of all this.

She licks her lips, plays with her hair.

“… No.”

She lingers for a moment, opening her mouth like she wants to speak, but rams it shut before anything can come out.

“There’s a lot of things that need to be fixed.”

And he immediately, with a sinking, terrible, terrible feeling knows exactly what she’s going to do. He doesn’t know the details of her actions, but he doesn’t need to. She’s defined her life by throwing herself away, into danger, flying towards the sun knowing that she will burn into nothing but embers and tinted memories.

Screw that! You have a family.

He wants to squawk that that she has him, that she’s not alone, that he’s sorry for leaving her and that he’s mourned her for hundreds of years—in the dark, in the Bat Queen’s careful embrace, but nothing’s been like what they had before. And of course, it was never going to be.

Until now, and she’s the one who’s leaving this time.

“I know, I know. But someone’s got to make the hard choices, right?”

He thinks about how she’d curled into herself in the middle of the night, when she’d talked about her dead brother. How she’d hugged her knees and looked smaller than she ever should have.

How she’d thrown herself in front of Phillip, into a lifelong hatred that might have warmed her heart but still left her cold in the grave.

He thinks that really, this shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Really, sacrifice is in both of their blood.

In Caleb’s, too.

Really, they were a family of perfect idiots who pushed the others out of danger, again and again, only to throw themselves in front of it instead.

Why does that someone have to be you? I missed you.

The scarred remains of her tattoo shimmer in the eternal sunlight. Flapjack’s gaze lingers on it, as does hers. They’ve known each other too long for words on the guilt that she still feels, but they’ve been avoiding each other for most of that time, too. It’s been an open wound that they’ve allowed to fester.

It’s time to salt and burn it.

“I have a couple of things to atone for. And I want to get even.”

There’s not a lot of things I regret, but I regret that I could never change your mind. Will you at least protect the boy?

“Down to my last breath,” she answers, full of conviction.

It’s the easy part of his words. Arianna’s loyalty may be hard to earn, but once you claimed it; you had it for the rest of your life and whatever comes after. The rest has to sink in. Regret’s always been more complicated, than blind rage. Than basking in your hurt for seventy years.

Arianna takes a short, steadying breath.

“I’m not sure you’re just talking to me anymore.”

Flapjack nuzzles against her hair.

I’m the blood of both you and Caleb. Of course, I’m not just talking about you.

“I never,” she tries, “I never managed to tell you that I really was sorry for how I turned out.”

“Wise men build their houses on rocks, but the rest of us have to settle for skeletons,” she whispers against him, her fingers scratching at his feathers in the way that not even Caleb had managed to master, all the right places all at once.

Flapjack remembers her only in pieces, but he knows one thing for sure: she was kind.

If we haven’t taken our last dying breaths,
I will always be here to start this all over again.