Work Text:
Tangerine Sky
By The Muffin Muse
//When nothing is real around us but the burning, saturating life that falls from a red-lava midnight onto a myriad of masked extremes, we submit to the mercifully unreal demands put upon us by our own denials.//
James pressed his forehead against the window and watched as the raindrops trailed past his eyes, breaking against the glass and sliding down in a gentle dance, meandering, joining, and dividing, but always continuing down, unerringly, inevitably. Past the shimmered pane, though, the rain was not nearly so patient. It streaked across the landscape in determined slashes and each drop threw itself into the earth, into the myriad perfected gardens that allowed the citizens of Port Royal to assert themselves over Nature, that most wild and vibrant of beings, who here in the Caribbean found her place to glow and thrive and prove her exotic, exquisite, untamed power. Perhaps it was why the natives here seemed all the more prone to their wanton worship of her sovereignty, this tendency of hers to lash out at and still caress these little islands, to fling life and virility at them from every angle, so that the very leaves on the trees and grains of sea on the shores quivered with it. A sympathetic shiver coursed through James' spine, and he tipped his glass of port back to his lips. It seemed wrong, and yet completely necessary, for the Commodore to cling to such decidedly English niceties as port, especially port, a drink whose personality was so intense, but so very unexotic. Like a prize rose amidst a cluster of birds of paradise. The rose was beautiful in her own right, complex, richly perfumed, refined, elemental to the cobblestone roads, the never-quite-summer days, the muted pastels and earthen tones that were so distinctly British, and completely out of place amidst the flashy beauty that the birds of paradise had, robed in fantastical colors and boasting an unnaturally intoxicating fragrance that was in itself nothing more or less than a summer sunrise. And so it was with a glass of port tonight. But there was nothing else Commodore Norrington would have been drinking, on a furiously rainy night in Port Royal, with lightning setting the sky aflame and making it glow coral, and the smell of anticipation, and of satiation, and of *life* stinging his nostrils and settling heavy in is lungs. Another sip of port, and its luxurious refinery bled to the edges of the surreal evening, where nothing was anything now, and everything was waiting for what it would become once Nature had stopped slowly killing them all with effusions of life.
There is something about rainy nights that allows one to let go of one's grasp on reality, to let the heavily laden air cradle one's overworked body and relax into the feeling of pointlessness, of complete suspension.
Jack loved the rain. Loved the desperate way it rushed at him. Loved the way it caressed his skin and hair. Rain was like being enveloped by the sea, and there is never anything more perfect than finding oneself utterly ensconced in one's true love. And if anything, or anyone, could claim to be Captain Jack Sparrow's *true* love, it was the sea. He knew her moods, her desires, her mannerisms and her curves. He knew when she was the most beautiful, and when she was the most dangerous. He knew that those two moments were often one in the same. Like now. She was gleaming under the fiery sky, which was blood-red despite it being considerably past sunset, her glorious faceted waves set alight by the lightning that freaked the heavens and made the clouds smolder. She was exotic, erotic, and indescribably beautiful, but to touch her would be death, Jack knew. So he thanked his lady for the rain, for she knew him as well as he knew her, and knew that however deadly it would be for him to touch her, it would yet kill him not to. Captain Sparrow firmly believed that she sent the rain to console him, and he thanked her for it, and took all he could. He walked through the streets, safe in the knowledge that the few who would be awake at such a time were shuttered in against the furious indecency of the rain, for Caribbean rain was unlike the soft lullaby rain of gray London. When it rained in the tropics, nothing was natural. The sky either turned so black it could swallow every light that ever burned and still not relinquish its velvet onyx, or it flamed with all the lurid passion of a silken succubus, colors like fuschia, coral, tangerine; improper colors. Water flung itself from the sky in shattered bits and pounded with relentless tenderness against the town and wilds alike, which the town took as a tremendous insult. It was electric, enthralling. Sweet, salty, spicy. And worst of all, completely impractical. After all, of what use or necessity is rain in the middle of the sea? But that was what Jack reveled in. Tropical rain existed for no other reason than *to rain*. It didn't simply live in the moment, it *was* the moment, and Jack joined it, sacrificing himself to its whim, doing nothing more than *being*. Whatever he did, he committed himself to with reckless abandon, a burning, sparking crystallization of pure energy, saved from self-destruction only by the rain that coated him in vitality and drove him onward to he knew not what, but did not need to know.
There is something about rainy nights that compels one to plunge forth, regardless of consequence or obstacle, and indulge oneself in pure, frantic existence, to drink greedily from the life being offered and refuse regrets.
James sighed and absently swirled the port in his glass. Jack murmured and hummed and spiraled his way through the town. Each man could feel the tension that pulsed through every living thing around him, the waiting for he knew not what. It was a golden thread through his spine, humming a frequency that permeated every bone in his body with fragrant longing and a gleeful sense of blind apprehension, pulling him taut and quivering, making him want to laugh and to sob but holding him in a gauzy contentment and singular unreality that made either act fully unnecessary. It was a purple sort of foreboding, this feeling that reached into them both. Purple like the night orchids, whose beauty was so intense that it could only show under the careful guard of the evening skies, the pale light of the unassuming moon. Under the sun, their glory could never survive; it would consume itself in an explosive show of raw splendor. But in the night, the realm of whispers and dreams, the orchids revealed their magnificence through a veil of impossibility that shielded those who saw them, for humans can not comprehend the fevered perfection of true beauty; it would be destruction. The rain and the night and the vermilion sky spun a strand of gold on needles of lightning, and fastened one end to each man, the commodore in his quarters and the captain on his unplotted course. The two could not be more opposite, and the rain drew them together, the one dark and burning, always moving, shivering with delight as the rain smashed against his body and the tangerine sky beckoned him with promises of bright and gold and shine and gleam, the other pale and cool, quiescent, thoughtfully observing the passionate skies through his invisible barrier as he reveled in the surreality and the steadfast uncertainty that swathed him in a feeling of absolute purposelessness, a rare luxury. Jack was the how; James was the why. Jack was motion; action without cause or foreknowledge. James was stolidity; compulsion and desire without any acquiescence to either. The distance between then fell away, each drop of rain stealing a piece from the thread and coaxing the labor to the motive, under the red-gold sky. James' sweetly aimless impulse grew to a bright, piercing urgency, and he luxuriated in feeling it to the full as the rhythm of the rain held him immobile, willingly paralysed. Jack flew through the night, urged on and on by the wind and the rain, speeding, climbing to a terrifying crescendo as he frantically obeyed the need to move, and he was sure that he neared the thing he had to reach but had never known there was any intent of reaching. A lightning claw stretched across the sky, flashing white and jagged and forked, and the sky changed with each new light, from a pale, flushed-cheek pink to a nearly intangible, purpled salmon, to a supernatural, morning-seafoam green, and James was overtaken with motion, throwing the window open and lashing the curtains back with a sudden desperate fervor even before the sky returned to its vigilant, vitalizing red. When the two saw eachother, then, the lightning echoed through them both and burned the remnants of the guiding golden thread. Seconds froze, then snapped and sped, and each came crashing to the other with all the unbridled energy of the storm that surrounded them. There were no words, no explanations; none were called for; each knew now that this moment was the reason for the storm. There was a how, there was a why, but that much no longer mattered, no longer held any relevance. Now there was only the zinging energy, the frenzied motion, the perfect touches, the blazing heat of skin on skin as clothes fell away, the liquid ice that cooled but did not calm as rain replaced the fabric. The two perfect halves wound together to become one beautiful whole, so that neither knew himself, but only the other, his senses filled and flooded with his opposite. There were tongues, and hands, and legs, hips, backs, shoulders, all those things that there ought to be, but deep within there was something brighter, something dangerous, something absolutely essential, and the two strove to meet it, to find it, seeking with every fiber of their beings. As moths to a flame, they reached for the one thing that promised destruction truer than anything human, something that could only be theirs on a rainy night in a bed of purple orchids under a molten sky.
There is something about rainy nights that allows one to let go of one's grasp on reality, to let the heavily laden air cradle one's overworked body and relax into the feeling of pointlessness, of complete suspension.
There is something about rainy nights that compels one to plunge forth, regardless of consequence or obstacle, and indulge oneself in pure, frantic existence, to drink greedily from the life being offered and refuse regrets.
There is something about rainy nights that coaxes one to search for perfection without any fear of finding it, to fall into destiny and harmony and lose oneself in the light, for there is something about rainy nights that touches the real to the surreal, the sea to the sky, and the rose to the bird of paradise.
END
AN: It was about 8:00pm in the middle of a storm when I started this, and 3:00am during the selfsame storm when I finished. I had meant to work on "By Hook or By Crook", but the rain wouldn't let me. I haven't let myself write like this, write for the sake of writing, for far too long, and such an inspiringly unnatural night seemed the perfect time to do so.
*A "bird of paradise" is a flower. As for its plural form, it's one of those "mother-in-law" dilemmas. Birds of paradise? Bird of paradises? Birds of paradises? I chose the first. *However fantastical the sky's color might seem, it is all based on what I saw through my window as I wrote this. It truly was a strange shade of coral, or tangerine. And it did, during a particularly violent streak of lightning, show shades of first pink, then lilac, then green. It shocked me too; that's why I had to write it in.
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