#wereachandfall

“Should I take this to be our newfound pattern, then?” Jack thought he caught a glimpse of familiar blue eyes, when he first stepped into this hole in the wall of a pub. He’d just assumed it was yet another trick of his mind. 

“So is it always twenty years? Do you set a date on the calendar or something?”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who he is. She’s heard enough stories of him over the years, and honestly, there’s something like a protective knot thrumming in her chest. 

“Well.” It is, perhaps, a sad state of affairs, when all Jack needs to know just who is sitting at his bar, is catch a glimpse of that pearl-handled knife. 

               “Your horse seems unfit to weather the bluffs.”

17. Rain kiss

It’s the first time they’re going out on the boat since Phae showed up at his door that night, stammering and unsure unlike Jack had ever known him to be, and it’s…strange. Some of the tension he hadn’t realized was there is now gone——but there’s a new sort of nervousness there that wasn’t there before.

The weather’s been holding up for the better part of the week, and even though Jack knows it’s going to rain in a few moments, it won’t be a big enough storm that he won’t be able to sail to their spot and back. 

As it is, Phae seems a lot more comfortable with working the sails, not so tense when Jack directs him to this and that post while he steers the boat away from the docks, and out of the marina. 

It’s only once they’ve stopped that drops of water slowly and gently start to fall from the sky. Jack’s done with the anchor when Phae calls him over to help secure one of the lines, “What—didn’t I teach you that knot last time?”

"So teach me again," There’s something like mischief in those blue eyes, and Jack squints at him with playful suspicion before he obliges and ties the line firmly and easily to its cleat. He looks up, ready with a comment about the great General’s lack of memory, to find blue eyes just a few inches away from his.

Phae’s hair is wet, messy damp strands of brown kissing his cheeks, and temples, and the skin between his eyes. Jack gets lost in the way that raindrops leave trails of tears down Hephaestion’s face—and they both hold their breath for an eternal moment that lasts no more than a few seconds. 

The sky crashes above them then, and Jack finally threads his fingers through those wild, stubborn locks of hair and closes the distance between them. The only reason he doesn’t worry about the desperation with which he kisses Hephaestion then, is that the hands clawing at his back spell out the same urgency that currently strangles his heart.