first one who touches the ground loses

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.]

Octavia had been back for two days. In those two days, she'd done little more than sleep. (And eat, although that one was more at Duke's insistence than it was her body's will.) She definitely hadn't even considered leaving the boat. She wasn't considering it now, either.

She knew Duke had texted some of her -- some people to let them know she'd returned, and so she knew there were people in town who would probably want to see her. But as long as she didn't go out there, none of that was real, and she wouldn't have to find out how she felt about any of them now.

And they wouldn't have to find out how they felt about her.

But at least she was on the deck, now. Leaning against the gunwale and looking towards open water. It had not been many days since she'd seen this same ocean be nothing but a wasteland of sand. She kept trying to put the last two weeks together with where she was now, and failing, and feeling almost dizzy with the dissonance.

She didn't even realize her knuckles were white with how tightly she was gripping the railing.

[ooc: Ooopen, if you want to try your luck.]