okteiviakom | The Cape Rouge, Port of Fandom, Monday Morning

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The Cape Rouge, Port of Fandom, Monday Morning

Duke was out for his class thing. Octavia wasn't sure for how long, but she was taking a chance, and so she sat at the table in the galley with two things in front of her. One, the phone Duke had given her after she'd shown up. Two, the locket Niylah had made her in the bunker. She'd finally opened it. Taken out the SIM card, and carefully, almost hesitantly put it in the phone.

She was honestly surprised to find it still worked. As soon as she turned the phone on, the notifications poured in. Texts, voicemails, missed calls. Almost all of them from Duke.

For a moment, Octavia just stared at them. And considered just deleting them all without looking.

But when had she last made a sensible choice like that? So instead, she went through the texts, from the selfies with goats through the increasingly worried questions, all the way down to just a picture of the ocean meeting the sky, with no caption, no words attached. She checked the date. A day, two days before she'd come back.

Then she moved on to the voicemails. "You missed lunch. You're not at the flower shop." The texts hadn't been easy, but at least they were short, quick to get through - a little more distant than the voicemails. They were his voice but not his voice.

(And then there was a voicemail that wasn't from Duke -- "So if you don't mind, I think it's time to come out of hiding." -- and that was its own kind of tangled emotion.)

"What's the point of anything if you can just go away? Fuck!" The texts hadn't had the sounds of glass breaking. None of Duke's shaky breaths. "I was and am very fucked up, and people need to stop asking me how I'm doing before I start stabbing them with your sword." She wanted to stop listening. But she also didn't want to miss even a second. All those years of wanting to talk to him, and he'd been talking to her, and his voice was -- "It's okay, you know. If you come back broken."

She wanted to stop listening.

She didn't. There was just one more voicemail left.

"Someday, we'll both be butterflies. And then we'll both be sharks. And then something else we haven't even dreamed of yet, but -- we'll find each other."

She'd just... sit here and let that last one loop a few times.

(Too many times.)

[ooc: Open, but angsty. Duh.]

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Duke had, in fact, gone to his class thing today. And spent some time on the beach with Lucifer. And just generally tried to give both of them a little bit of space without him hovering over her waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Which, as usual, meant he was at least half expecting to come back from the boat and find her missing again.

"Hey." He didn't try to hold back a smile when he saw her sitting in the galley, at least until he saw the look on her face. "How's it going?"

Octavia had scrambled to stop the voicemail from playing as soon as she heard him coming. Then wiped her eyes, just in case.

The locket was still laying on the table. Open, empty.

She cleared her throat, but there was still an odd creak to how she said, "Fine."

“You sure?” Duke asked, trying for nonchalance and almost nailing it. “Did something happen to your necklace?”

That 'almost' was crucial for jolting Octavia into giving him something of a dry look, though. Because she knew what you were doing, Duke.

Then she looked down at the table.

"I opened it."

"Okay," Duke said carefully. "On purpose?"

Octavia nodded without looking up.

Then she tapped her fingertips against the phone, also on the table. "'Cause that's where I kept the card."

"The card," Duke said, not understanding. "The -- oh." He looked at her, then at the phone. Then sat down a little sharply.

"So, uh. Did it work?"

Did she hear him falling apart at her phone number in real time?

It'd felt more like fast-forwarding through it, if that helped.

Octavia looked up at him as he sat down. "Your mom recognized you."

Of course she'd latch on to something that wasn't about her, first. But, more than that -- Look. She knew that had been a big thing, even in the middle of everything else.

No one else had known. Which had made it much easier for Duke to not deal with it.

He dropped his head into his hands, rubbing his whole face.

"Yeah. She did."

It'd been years and years, and Octavia still remembered following him from the park by the zoo all the way to the island. And then sitting with him up on the deck, well into the night.

She didn't think any of that had happened this time, no.

"And she was clean," she murmured. "And then she was gone again."

"She ducked out before I could even offer to help. Danny offered to help find her, but. . . ." Duke trailed off. "Honestly, I wouldn't mind just pretending she never came back."

"If that's what you want to do..."

Well, it wasn't like Octavia had any room to force anyone into talking about anything. She was watching him, though, concern mixed into her ever-present tired look.

"That whole day was just." Duke shook his head, then frowned and gestured to her phone with his chin. "How much did I end up telling you?"

"Sounded pretty thorough to me," Octavia said.

She couldn't imagine a lot more happening. Or at least she didn't want to.

"Right." Duke sighed. "So you know just how stupid I got while you were gone."

Octavia shook her head, slowly.

"You weren't stupid, Duke."

"I got sucked in by a cult," Duke said. "Because they told me you were on the mainland. You might be totally calm about that now, but you sure as hell weren't before you left."

"You went on the mainland before they got you," Octavia pointed out. (He'd said he'd checked the aquarium. She wasn't sure why that broke her heart a little extra.) "You wanted me to be somewhere better than I was. I'm not gonna call that stupid."

“Fat lot of good it did either of us.” Duke ran his hand down his face. “I should’ve known better than to get sucked in by pretty promises. That’s not how life works.”

"No, it's not," Octavia agreed, her gaze sliding away from his face again, down to the table.

She picked up the locket. "But you survived."

“Well, yeah,” Duke said with a rueful half smile. “It’s going to take more than a stupid cult to take me down.”

"So stop calling yourself stupid for it."

She twisted the locket around between her fingers, feeling the ridges and imperfections in the metal.

“Sha, gona,” Duke said softly. “So, uh. That card must’ve been hard to keep track of, all that time.”

Octavia let the locket drop to dangle from her fingers on its chain.

"Not so much, after Niylah made me this," she said. "My phone got destroyed in the conclave. She made this specifically for the card."

Duke reached out to hold the locket still, taking a good look at it. "Why'd you keep it?" he asked. "You didn't think you'd be coming back, right?"

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