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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“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?"

It wasn't like anything you'd find at a jeweler's, that was for sure. Niylah was clearly good with her hands - it latched closed securely, for one thing - but it was still a piece of scrap metal, and she'd clearly lacked either the equipment or the drive to make it pretty.

"I didn't have much else."

She hadn't exactly gotten to bring much with her from Fandom.

This was true. She also wasn't generally the sentimental type. And she'd already had the tattoo as a reminder.

"I'm sorry," Duke said. "I didn't think you'd ever hear most of those."

Octavia twisted the chain around her fingers until the locket was resting on her palm again.

"Should I not have listened to them?"

She didn't sound very sorry that she had.

"No, it's -- it's your voicemail. I just." He let out a pained laugh. "I'm pretty sure I remember yelling at you at one point."

Octavia shrugged one shoulder. "You did, a little," she replied in her best rasp. "It's fine."

Almost everything else had been harder to take. Anger was simple.

"It's not." Duke shook his head. "I don't feel that way. I'm glad you got me to open up. To let you in."

"It's fine," Octavia repeated mildly. She looked down at the locket again, then closed her fingers around it. "I get thinking that. It's only been a couple of weeks since I told someone... really important to me that love's a weakness."

Her head tilted a little, but her eyes stayed on her hand that was now a fist around the necklace.

"And that the only way to not get hurt is not to love."

Duke swallowed hard.

"Do you still think that?"

"I think it's solid advice because that's where most of the worst pain comes from," Octavia drawled without looking up. "But I know it's not that simple."

There was always love inside her that just refused to day, even when she'd tried to suffocate it.

"Anyway, I was angry. And disappointed. That's why I said it."

And then Indra had immediately made her regret it.

Duke nodded. "I did think that way," he admitted. "For kind of a long time. Can't help but keep falling for people, though, can we?"

"I guess."

Said a woman who had not done so for seven years. Mildly.

She fidgeted with the locket again, opening her hand.

Well, she'd had other things on her mind.

"Are you going to put the card back in there?" Duke asked.

"Not really the plan, no." The locket had served its purpose. Or the maybe its purpose was shifting. "Not that I really need a phone, either."

"Not yet, maybe," Duke said. "Though . . . I mean, I kind of like the idea of being able to call or text you for real again."

Or getting random texts from her. He'd missed that.

It was probably going to take a while before she'd get back into the habit.

But hopefully, at some point.

She shrugged. "So the card's not going back in."

"Alright." Duke nodded and flashed her a little smile. "Do you want to put something else in it, instead?"

Not that she'd had much -- or anything -- else on her when she'd gotten back.

"No."

Well. Hadn't thought of anything by now, anyway.

Octavia looked down at the locket again, and snapped it shut. Then ran her thumb over the front for a quiet moment.

Then said, "She made this out of scrap metal from Arkadia."

Duke nodded. And tried to remember if he knew what Arkadia was.

"It sounds like she was a good friend."

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