#jack flash

They had fought the Romans—an aerial attack against the Princess Andromeda. Jack was snatched by an eagle. Screams. Flynn’s roar of fury. He remembered falling in the water…

The clothing he wore was white, baggy, and cotton, too much like his hospital garb from the first time Steve, his step dad, institutionalized him. This prank has gone too far, Steve had said, angry Jack would dare scare Ashton and Shelby by claiming the walls were screaming. Jack’s skinny jeans and band shirt were gone. What if all of it had been a hallucination: Camp Othrys, the Princess Andromeda, the monsters, the gods.

Jack choked back a sob. This. This wasn’t the hospital. Jack dug his nails into his pockets, the material too thin and delicate to keep him from clawing his legs in a panic. No Mr. Sunny. His pillbox, and all of his medication, was gone. How much time did he have? He knew the withdraw symptoms: vomiting, hypersalivation, diarrhea, diaphoresis, insomnia, agitation, and rapid psychosis.

He had woken in a cold sweat, but a cold sweat didn’t always mean withdraws.

Rapid psychosis. Jack’s heartbeat thudded in his head. This felt real, but everything always felt real—that was the problem. There was a distant song—lovely and eerie, just abstract enough to question its authenticity.

His stomach churned with ignored hunger. A platter with tropical fruits, bread, and a mug of water lay beside him. Jack knew enough about mythology and fairy tales not to eat something unless you were directly invited and only if you knew that the owner of the food wasn’t a witch with powers to trap you eternally.

She must have undressed me. That girl with the caramel braid. Unease squeezed away any hunger: a stranger had taken off his boxers while he slept.

When Jack got to his feet, his legs trembled and his head pounded. He slipped a blanket around his shoulders. As he wandered towards the cave entrance, he passed a shelf filled with dried and drying plants that smelled of Alabaster’s laboratory. Several ancient tomes lined a desk beside it. One was open to a page illustrating human anatomy with words in… Minoan, if Jack had to guess. Some of the titans at Camp Othrys wrote in the dead language. Jack turned the page and flinched. There was an inked sketch of him, sleeping. He turned the page back.

Was it him? Or had his brain filled in the gaps?

It’s starting. Monsters. He was going to start to see and hear monsters again. Not the real ones. Not the friendly ones on his ship. Not the ones that came to his monster seminars about how demigods were friends, not food. Innocuous, innocent things would become sinister and comfort would lilt to paranoia.

         But there were no monsters outside the cave. Just her.

         The sun’s amber and coral hues broke against the ocean’s horizon, bleeding into the water and clouds to unite them into zigzagging, heavenly passageways. Crepuscular rays danced through their holes, making this girl’s hair glow as though one more constant in the coming of dawn. She stood, singing, at the edge of a beach. Her bare feet made lumps in the sand, compounding with each flush of the tide; if she forgot herself for long enough, the earth would reclaim her.

         Jack swallowed. In the oncoming lighting, he could see the silhouettes of flowers—so many flowers. There was a maze of roses, larkspur, delphinium, lilies, hollyhock, and sunflowers, all reaching towards the sky and curling about with a careless grace that looked both wild and tamed in their pattern. Some whisper cooed that these flowers didn’t belong together, making Jack fear they’d bow and bury him if he dared to walk through.

         But he needed to walk through to get to the beach, to follow the siren call. He hesitantly passed the first rose bush, expecting it to jump into Alice in Wonderland levels of criticism.

         “Jack!”

         The call made him jump away from the roses. After an exhale, he realized it was the girl, not chatty flora. He rushed past the rest of the flowers.

         “You’re already up,” she said when he reached her. The comment sounded more surprised than the disappointment he’d detected last time. Her white, sleeveless dress and braid fluttered in an ocean breeze. The effect made Jack’s blanket feel like an epic cloak.

         He gestured to his clothing and back towards the cave. “Thank you for the hospitality, Ms…” He trailed off, frowning. His throat felt worn. He’d have to do his warm up exercises. At least there was plenty of salt water to gargle. “How did you know my name?”

         “Ms?” she echoed, her brow furrowing in confusion. “Oh,” she giggled, “You talk in your sleep.”

         Jack didn’t—or no one ever said he had before. Pax (and Axel under the guise of worrying over Pax) had slept in his room when they’d had particularly bad nightmares. That sounded like something Pax would abuse, even subconsciously, and would result in Flynn taping both their mouths shut.  Morpheus liked to keep a strict record of who talked in their sleep, so he could play with demigods that slept through Alabaster’s lectures.

         Jack swallowed. “Um, Ms., I hate to be a bother, but I had a pill box in my pocket—”

         “I disposed of it. I don’t allow plastics on my island and the contents had been soiled by the ocean.”

         Jack choked. That was the first gift Flynn gave Jack—the first time he realized all his ballads, poems, and offers to carry her books hadn’t just annoyed her. She and Phil had been teaching him to carry it on his own, a marker of independence that made him proud, even if Flynn double checked every hour to assure he hadn’t overdosed on anything. Most people didn’t trust him with important things, but she and Phil were entrusting him with that.

         “You won’t need them here. Ogygia itself can soothe you—”

         Trembles shook from Jack’s core to his fingertips. “Ogygia,” he whispered, taking a step backwards. The beautiful horizon tilted. His hair felt course as he tugged at it. “You’re—you’re Calypso the Seductress, detainer of men—”

         Before the words left his mouth, he turned to flee. The sand slipped under his bare feet. The blanket tumbled from his shoulders, disappearing with the sight of that horizon. Jack ran towards the retreating darkness of the island, away from the sunlight that sparkled in that glowing hair.

Others at camp found Homer and Hesiod’s work boring, but he’d put the Odyssey to proper music and knew most verses. He knew of this nymph-goddess.

Each step made Jack’s body feel leaden. His panic numbed with an encroaching exhaustion. He shouldn’t be this tired—he knew his body. He healed fast. This weakness—how could she—did she—?

Jack’s legs failed him while racing through the gardens. Rose canes loomed over him and curled around in a canopy of thorns. In their sharp and cloy embrace, consciousness hazed to nightmares.[1]

 ***

Pain pinched Jack’s cheek. He jerked away, expecting to see Pax with a super glue tube and fake mustache to make Jack “look more esteemed.” That prank had not gone well. Turns out, Flynn did not like Jack with a Western train-robber look and she did not like how the fake black hairs tickled when he nuzzled her.

Instead of Pax, he saw Calypso with a small bandage that she must have ripped off his face. There was a tiny, brownish-red scab on the other side.

Jack sat up and jerked back from her. They were back in the cavern, on the mattress made of white fluffiness. She had a basket of tiny bandages at her side.

“Calypso the—”

“Don’t.” She placed her hands on her hips, glaring. Considering how she knelt beside him, her regale stature was impressive. “I get messages from the gods, you know. They call you Jak-Jak the Scourge of New Rome, Jak-Jak the Plague Bringer, Jak-Jak the Corrupted Spawn of Apollo. Need I go one? Shall I assume you’re here to plague me? To give me cancerous sores? Shall I make assumptions of your person off hearsay, like you have done with me? How long ago did Homer and Hesiod write that libel about Odysseus?”

Her eyes watered.

Jack frowned. Had his name really traveled that far?

A tear streaked down her perfect cheek: a raindrop down the smoothness of a statue. Rumor had it that Pax could cry on command. What if she could too?

Or, what if she was a good Samaritan helping out, decried, like many women had been, by the histories written by men?

Jack exhaled, telling himself to relax. He tried counting, the way Axel told him to when he got confused. Axel would be furious at him for this kind of assumption, for upsetting a mythological creature based off hearsay. There were lots of fabled monsters at Camp Othrys that were friendly (when well fed. Jack had to make rules about demigods being in the dining hall during monster feed time).

“I—I’m sorry, Ms. Calypso,” he said, looking down at his hands. There were more little bandages tapped across his forearms. From a quick examination of his skin, the thorn pricks had already healed and scarred over. The base guitar chord was still braided in a bracelet around his wrist. He touched the scars there, finding ridges where he’d healed Lucille and Lou Ellen’s skin by peeling off his own. That new kid, Ethan Naka—something, had joked that Jack’s arms would start to match Flynn’s burned face. Jack gave him a case of chicken pox for that. No one was allowed to talk about Flynn’s face, except Flynn herself and their son, Pax. Pax, only because he was a sweet little munchin and the only person other than Jack that could make Flynn blush.

Calypso gently touched his chin. Jack didn’t flinch back this time. “It is alright.” And, she ripped off another bandage. Some hair came away with it, making Jack wince.

Everything seemed… clearer. Sharper than it had in years. His thoughts raced with a hyper clarity that scared him. “What else was wrong from the myth?” he asked, observing the cavern in a new light. The cool breeze that rustled the white curtains was refreshing, intermixing the gentle sweetness of flowers with the herbs in her cabinet. He frowned at the tomes there. Had he imagined the drawing of him?

She dabbed a cool, wet cloth against his stinging skin. Sadness lined her eyes. She hesitated. “I don’t know what you know of this place, brave one. The island is a phantom island, my imprisonment for helping my father in the first Titan War. Time does not have the same meaning here as it does elsewhere.”

Jack glanced past her, to the roaring fire in the wall’s inset fireplace. There was a pot over the flames, boiling furiously. He swallowed, despite her earlier assurance. “You’re not going to… eat me, are you?”

“Eat you, my sweet?” Her eyes seemed to dance.

“Well, that response reaffirmed every fairytale fear that I had.”

Her laugh was melodious. She must have thought that had been a joke. It was not. “I’m afraid we mostly eat vegetables and fish here. There’s a scarcity of cannibalism on the island.”

Jack nodded, somewhat comforted. That hadn’t been in the original tale, but you never knew with Greek mythology. He didn’t want to be rude (again) but, if this was the Calypso, he had an important question. “How do I get off the island?”

“Jack, a terrible fate awaits you off the island. I cannot, in good consciousness, allow you to leave until you are healed, well-rested, and well.” She gestured to his lanky frame.

Once again, Jack considered pointing out that this was his natural state of stick-figure Jackness. He let the offense slide. In the Odyssey, she said something similar to Odysseus. Staying here would worry Flynn, Luke, and the boys, but he had no way off the island unless he lucked into some abandoned boat or cartoon-barrel. In the Odyssey, Calypso gave Odysseus a bronze axe so he could build his own raft. Jack doubted he could lift an axe over his head without falling backwards let alone build a raft with it. Greeks were master ship-builders. Jack was a master builder of group-therapy sessions for monster support, metal bands, and stories to make Luke, Flynn, and his boys smile.

Besides, Calypso helped Odysseus only after she held him captive for seven years and he provided her a son (or several, depending on the author). There were no sons on the island, unless they were hiding in the cartoon-barrels. Maybe the ancient authors truly had discredited her.

“I can stay,” he said hesitantly, “but only for a few days. Flynn, Luke, and my boys need me.”

Calypso’s lips pursed and her gaze softened, making her look both relieved and troubled. She glanced away. “You’re so young to have children.”

“Oh, we adopted.” Jack beamed. “Luke says they’re too close in age to be my sons, and Axel says I’m not allowed to both be the head of our metal band and his father, but they’ve taken well to it. They haven’t started calling me dad yet, but I’ll work them over.”

Calypso looked confused. “Metal band?” she repeated.

Jack leaned forward excitedly. “We already played once at the HMM—a bar for monsters—er—a tavern.” He scrambled to find words that would translate to ones she would recognize. “The crowd loved us. Clops threw a goat at us!”

“A goat?”

“Yeah! A goat’s this four-legged—” Jack fumbled, realizing that’s not the part that confused her. She repressed a smile at the pause. “It’s a really big deal to have a monster throw a goat at you instead of trying to eat it. Kind of like when people throw their underwear at the stage and about as sanitary. Much lighter impact.”

“What?!” Her face scrunched in disgust. The expression was almost cute. It put Jack at ease. This was the first time he felt like she wasn’t acting or hiding anything. “People have thrown their underwear at you while you’re performing? Is that… normal?”

Jack considered this. “I don’t really know. It never happened to me when I did solos in the church choir—” Well, once after service but that was a little different. One of those instances where the boy denied it happened the next day. “—but Pax—one of my sons—talks about it like it’s a marker of success. I think they’re mostly thrown at Axel. He’s a handsome boy and a hearthrob amongst demigod and monster alike. Plus, he’s the guitarist, and the angsty one, and people always love angsty guitar players.”

The look of confusion deepened. Jack absently tugged a lock of his hair, wishing it was a little longer. “It’s like a lute—oh, wait, that was 13th century. Uh, it’s a fretted stringed instrument—anywhere from four to nine strings though standard is six, and you play it by plucking or strumming with one hand while fretting with the other—or picking. Or bapping the body. Uh—how about I make you one? All I need is a box, a longish piece of wood, some sticks, and some of your uncut harp strings.”

I can make an instrument, but can’t make a boat. Not for the first time, Jack wondered why Luke and Flynn wanted to keep him around. He managed to use his powers to save Axel, Pax, and Alabaster (though, really, he thought it was mostly Flynn. She was so incredible). But he still didn’t feel like he was great at the killing department, regardless of Phil’s continuous encouragement. Even during the interrogations he and Flynn had been conducting on Romans, he flinched and shrieked when someone’s finger was broken. Despite all this time, he hoped Flynn and Luke found him useful.

Calypso nodded slowly. “Will you teach me how to play?”

Jack nodded enthusiastically. “The positioning might seem weird, but you’ll pick it up easily. From what I’ve heard of your singing and harp-playing, you have perfect pitch and a natural grasp on music—”

She tucked a lock behind her ear. “You like my singing?”

He tilted his head quizzically. “Of course. You’re incredibly talented, both naturally with your voice quality and the amount of work you’ve put into perfecting your craft.” Jack supposed that’s what he’d do, too, if he had an eternity to work on anything. An eternity of music—the foundations for paradise. Maybe that’s why God is said to have a choir of angels and how he crafted souls: by singing them to life. “Each word you sing weaves a secondary layer of emotion—both melodious and melancholic, interweaving multiple stories into—” He frowned, feeling his explanation lacked poetic value—ah!

“’Tis sweet, when mournfulness enshrouds

The spirit sorrowing and pale,

And gather round the angry clouds,

To take the harp and tune its wail.

‘Tis sweet, when calmly broods the night,

To wander forth where waters roll,

And, mingling with the waves its voice,

To rouse the passions of the soul!”

When Jack was done, she stared at him, her eyes wide and her expression unreadable. He frowned. “I—sorry—” he said, his insides churning. Had he done something wrong? He didn’t feel confused right now. The world felt so much clearer. An uncomfortable dread settled into him upon realizing something for the first time: not everyone burst into poetry at random. How stupid had he been to not know that before?

“No.” She put a hand on his. Her eyes watered. “I—that was beautiful. Did you—”

Jack blushed and pulled his hand back. “No. It’s by John Rollin Ridge, a famous Native American poet. I was just reciting.”

She cleared her throat and looked away. “I—let’s get you a box. I wish to hear this guitar of which you speak.”

 ***

Normally, Jack felt such mania for whatever project he focused on, everything else fell in the background. As he twisted the tuning pegs of his guitar (sabotaged off Calypso’s extra harp) his mind scattered with worry.

This newfound clarity was almost overwhelming. There was so much wrong in the world for him to mull over. Each time he stopped singing, it hovered on its peripheral, like a night terror lurking along the receding rays of the sun.    

Between each question from Calypso—she enjoyed hearing updates from the outside world—he’d hum or sing the ballads he’d composed about Flynn’s ventures. Calypso would pause her work on the strings and stare at him with that unreadable expression.  

After she finished with the sixth string—winding them of her hair—she sat closer to him. They worked in the shade, where the woods met the beach. Some distant whisper warned Jack that more time had passed than the evening angle of the sun, but he couldn’t be sure. The sun was all he had to go off of, and he wasn’t used to the awareness of passing time. Normally, Jack felt the passage of existence through the crystal notes of a song, the annoyed flash of Flynn’s smile, Pax’s giggle, or the upwell of elation at the end of monster help session, measuring life in crescendos and decrescendos of energy and joy. Jack didn’t like wanting to look at a clock, especially now that there were none. That was always someone else’s job.

“Why did you adopt children?” Calypso asked it with the practiced calm of an over-thought question.

“Flynn can’t have children.” Jack had to be gentler with these strings than the metal ones from home. He wondered how their sound would differ, and hoped it would ease the 2,000—4,000 year transition in music for Calypso.

“She’s barren?”

“So says the goddess of childbirth.”

“And this doesn’t bother you?”

Another reason Jack couldn’t stay long: it was almost the weekend before he vanished and he and Flynn would need to go to her Nainia’s apartment to sing to her, as they did every Sunday. The kind grandmother’s health was failing and Jack knew they needed to visit more often. “Why should it?” Jack frowned, repeating the question in his head. “Well, it did when I first found out. I wanted a family. Then, I adopted[2] the boys, and now we have one. And, it wouldn’t matter even if she could. We’re not… physical. Recently, we started curling up without clothing, but nothing else. Just snuggles.”

Jack felt his cheeks flush, both at the memory of Flynn snuggled up in his bunk (she never let him near hers; she wanted a place of her own) and that he’d told Calypso about it. Was that something else people didn’t normally blurt out? To Luke or Phil? Sure. To Calypso the Seductress, the Detainer of Men…

Her cheeks rouged. Shame crept along his awareness. You weren’t supposed to blurt stuff like that. Negative two on the Jack social protocol scoreboard.

“Oh… um… But you’ve already adopted—have you two not been married long?” She struggled to maintain eye contact.

Something pinched in Jack’s chest. “Um… she’s not really into the idea of marriage, but we’ve been dating for…” With no clocks on the island, he didn’t know how many days he had been unconscious. Normally, Jack could recite the length of time down to the minute. The thought of Flynn’s blush when he asked her to prom. The day before he met Luke. The day Jack accidentally killed his whole mortal family with a song.

That memory hadn’t resurfaced in so long, not since he was sobbing into Flynn’s arms over it. How could he banish it from his thoughts? It wasn’t like the thoughts of his half-siblings he killed—the other children of Apollo. No. They deserved it. They had reaped the favor of their father since birth. The cessation of that favoritism brought the world back to order, the way things should be to balance the scale that an unfair god created, like correctly a flat note to perfect harmony. But his family… Had he ever even had a funeral? And did it matter?

“And that doesn’t bother you?” Calypso asked.

The funeral part did bother Jack. It took him a moment to retrace the pieces, sliding his fingers along the guitar string. Flynn. Sex. Marriage.

Flynn would puppet and charmspeak boys into their room to humiliate and toy with them, but, she wouldn’t take Jack. Jack never wanted to pressure her, but icy insecurity crawled through him at the thought. What was wrong with him? It didn’t matter that Prometheus said Jack and Flynn viewed sex differently: Jack, as an expression of love; Flynn, as subjugation. Jack didn’t understand that. All he wanted was to be everything Flynn needed, and he didn’t understand why she could puppet others but wouldn’t puppet him. If that’s what she wanted—

         The string snapped and lashed him across the cheek.

         He shrieked and jerked backwards. Blood trickled down his skin. A full string wasted—an instrument piece dying before it could sing its first song.

         Something cool touched his face. Humming filled his ears. The lashed skin tingled and Jack wondered if this is how others felt when he healed them.

         When Jack blinked to clear his vision, Calypso knelt beside him. Her too-perfect face rested in a gentle, knowing smile. The strap of her white dress slid onto her shoulder, tickled by the length of the braid. For the first time, she looked like the goddess of the island—something about the subtle shift in confidence.

         Jack flinched when he felt her spider fingers in his hair. She must have put them there to hold him steady for a cheek-cleaning. “You ran from me when you first found out who I was. Do you—did you really think I could make you forget Flynn?” The question could have been rhetorical, but there was enough real curiosity to make Jack tremble.  

Fear coiled his confidence, the same fear present when Luke lost himself to Kronos or his anger. If Calypso lost her temper…

         “Odysseus never forgot Penelope,” Jack whispered, “So the stories say.”  

Could that fear come from the possibility of forgetting Flynn? Do people only experience fear when they’re experiencing doubt or uncertainty?

At the watery glisten of her beautiful almond eyes, an idea made Jack sit up and almost clock foreheads with her. She startled at the sudden movement. “And you never forgot Odysseus!” Jack cried. “Calypso, do you always fall for the people on your island?”

Calypso hesitated. A tear broke from the dam along her eyelashes. “I… I try not to say anything when travelers first come…”

“Have you heard of platonic love?”

Her brow furrowed. Her melancholy faltered to confusion. “Platonic? You mean… relating to Plato? Or the idea that abstract objects are objective, timeless, and are non-physical and non-mental?”

Jack would need to ask Alabaster about that later. “Uh—well, I want to be your friend. You’re really nice, but you don’t need to fall in love with everyone you meet, or at least not romantic love. Let’s be friends! I mean—have you ever heard of a rebound?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think you ever fully moved on from Odysseus. So, we should talk about him. Tell me what you loved and hated about him and why you fell for him in the first place.”

Calypso’s expression darkened. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Exactly! You never forgave him for hurting you or yourself for loving him. Both are still hurting you. So, let me be your friend. Let me help you get over him without being a replacement for him. And, after this war is over, we can still be friends! Either we decapitate Zeus and his lackeys and his power no long holds you to the island, or we can keep in touch. I know the myths say I can’t come back twice, but I’ll bet I can Iris Message you. I mean, you have rainbows and Iris can go anywhere rainbows can.”

Her lips cracked to protest. Upon considering his words, she stared off at the coastline. “No one has thought of that before.”

Jack beamed. The fear was gone. He shoved a hand between the two of them (awkward due to the close quarters). “Let’s shake on it?”

Calypso glanced from Jack’s hand back to his face. Curiosity perched her lips. “You’re… one of the oddest men I’ve ever met, Jack Flash.”

Jack blushed. “I get that a lot.”

Cautiously, she shook his hand.

At the time, Jack didn’t think to make her swear on the River Styx.

He should have.

 ***

author’s note: Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed! This series is going to continue! I’ve just been struggling to focus on writing with some crazy stuff going on at home. ^.^’‘‘‘ Thanks for your patience and continued support!

 Footnotes:

[1] So, Homer’s Ogygia is as Riordan described it. I needed to at least alter the flowers so Jack wouldn’t immediately recognize where he was. Also, flowers for symbolism because I’m a tool.