powerhungry | SALTBURNT

[ Jinx doesn’t explain herself until she’s so deep into the woods, she has to wonder if her phone has signal.

It’s the only way to leave him (without looking, without talking). The distance hurts like a gushing wound, torn wider with each step. She wonders if she’ll bleed out before she and Sanji find Nami (if the only thing holding her together is the way she opened and mended her chef’s skin before they disappeared into the night — not a substitute for Silco or Nami but something else entirely, alighting her from within). ]

nami never made it to this shitty commune

[ He realizes something's wrong the moment his eye socket begins to throb as though it were empty. He searches their room — the cabin next to it, the grounds, the whole of the village — before his phone lights up, his teeth worrying his lower lip as he parses the words and the meaning behind them.

That she's gone.

You failed her, like you always do, thrums Vander's voice. Some father you are.

She never wanted you, comes the echo, from a shadow with violet hair. You're poison to her.

Then a woman, more familiar to him now in death than she had been in life. She'll die out there, just like I did. And it'll be your fault.

He types and deletes, again and again and again. Each message comes out wrong, too angry or too vulnerable or too complacent. And with each passing moment, he can feel the bullet holes in his chest widen, yawning open again. Phantom shapes loom around him, crackling and sparking as a single thought burns through the rest: living hurts without you.

But he can’t stand the way the words blink back at him. Instead, hardly a barked command nor real disapproval, ]

where are you
jinx
don’t go alone

already gone boss

[ because it had to be this way, when there was no other path ahead. she doubts even the silco unaffected by this place would allow her to leave willingly.

and she can take it. the agony, the disappointment, the rejection. she can take anything and survive, even when she wishes she was dead. like now, all she can think is that they all would be better off without her —

except, perhaps, for nami. the one person who needs her. the only broken thing she can truly fix. ]

sanji’s with me
i marked him before we left
do one of your girls if it helps

[ jinx will deal with the hurt (the girl) later, if it comes to that. ]

Edited 2025-09-10 20:53 (UTC)

[ Boss, not dad, or— or any of the pet names people use for their loved ones that she's never called him. Because she doesn't feel the same way, you deluded old man.

He thinks of the river. Vander's hands around his neck.

You never learn.

Poison seeping into his skin. Water in his lungs. Disappointment. Heartbreak, worse the second time around. Do one of your girls, not a peace offering or compromise, as he sees it, but a death knell. A sign that it doesn't matter to her. That maybe it never really had. Not when she has Sanji and Nami, when he's just an afterthought, a shard of an old life that she's outgrown.

Ellipses track on the screen for a while. His hands tremble.

And then— nothing. ]

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