DWC June 2026 Day 2: Vibrant
@daily-writing-challenge
She'd mentioned it once, just once, while sitting on the windowsill at Chuck's with her knees drawn up and her shawl wrapped tight as she watched the last of the gray light drain out of the Boralus sky. She hadn't been talking to Ridley, not really. She'd been talking to the air, or the gulls, or whatever invisible thing she was always half-listening to. "Back home," Sybil murmured, her voice carrying the weight of a forest she might never see again, "when autumn turned, the sky would sing. Colors, like—like someone spilled dye across wet cloth. Green an’violet and sometimes a pink so pale ye'd think ye dreamed it. Me mam used t' say it was th’hidden folk shakin' out their skirts after th' harvest, lettin' the hem trail through the stars." She paused, her fingers had moved on the sill, tracing slow arcs. "I miss that. Th’way it moved like it were breathin'. Like the whole sky was alive and it wanted ye t' know." Then she'd gone quiet, and Ridley had grunted something about drafts and shut the window, and that had been the end of it.
Except it hadn't. Because the words had lodged in him the way a splinter lodges under a nail—small, invisible, and impossible to stop feeling. He'd lain awake that night on the floor of the room they shared at Chuck's, staring at the water-stained ceiling while Sybil slept curled on the cot with her shawl pulled over her head, and he'd thought about a sky full of breathing colors, and he'd thought I ain't never seen anyfin' like that, and then he'd thought she ain't gonna see it again eivver, not 'ere, not wiv that collar on 'er, and then he'd rolled over and pressed his face into his arm and told himself to go to sleep.
He started collecting bottles two days later. Not obviously, of course, Or in any way that could be traced or questioned or, Mother forbid, explained. Ridley would sooner swallow his own tongue than explain. He simply started noticing them. The green ones first—wine bottles, mostly, thick glass with that particular murky sea-color that taverns threw out by the crate. Then blue, which was harder to find. Apothecary vials, the odd flask from the Tradewinds Market, and a chipped perfume bottle he fished out of the gutter behind the Ashvane Company Yards while pretending to check a dead drop. Purple was the worst. He found exactly one, and it was a slim, elegant thing that had probably held something expensive once. It was in a bin in Upton Borough, just being there long enough to fish it out made him sweat through his coat, but once he had it in his hands he wrapped it in his handkerchief and tucked it inside his coat with the care of a man handling a grenade.
It was Pebbles who caught him at it. "Wha' the fuck are you doin'?"
Ridley froze, crouched behind a stack of fish crates on the wharf, one hand closed around the neck of a red glass bottle he'd spotted glinting between the slats. Pebbles stood three feet away, arms crossed, blonde hair spiking in the harbour wind, wearing the expression of a boy who has just witnessed an adult doing something profoundly stupid and wants a full accounting. "Nuffin'," Ridley said.
"I ain't nickin' 'em. They're rubbish."
"Yer nickin' rubbish bottles an' puttin' 'em in yer coat like they're gold." Pebbles' eyes narrowed. "You gone soft in the 'ead?"
Ridley straightened up, drawing himself to his full height—which was considerable, and usually enough to end conversations with teenage boys. "Drop it."
Pebbles did not drop it, because Pebbles had never dropped anything in his life except other people's coin. "Is it fer 'er?"
The silence that followed was so sharp you could have cut a sailcloth with it. "Wha'," Ridley said flatly.
"Sybil." Pebbles tilted his head, foxish and knowing. "It's fer 'er, innit."
"It ain't fer anyone. I told you, it's—"
"Rubbish, yeah." Pebbles looked at the red bottle in Ridley's fist, then back at his face, and something shifted behind the boy's sharp eyes. Not mockery, or rather, not only mockery. Something softer and more careful flickered briefly in his gaze. "Right. You want 'elp, or wha'?" Ridley stared at him. "Don't just stand there gawpin',” Pebbled snapped. “I got places t' be. You want 'elp collectin' yer not-fer-anyone rubbish bottles or not?"
What Ridley wanted was for the dock planks to open up and swallow him into the harbor. What he said, after a long and agonizing pause, was: "...Blue ones. An' green. Nuffin' cracked too bad." Pebbles flashed a smile that was both feral and delighted in the way of a boy being let in on a secret and took off down the wharf at a loping run before Ridley could add conditions.
By that evening, Pebbles had recruited Oliver. "I found three!" Oliver announced, bursting through the back door of Chuck's with his too-big coat bulging at the front, dock rope straining. He upended the coat onto the table with all the ceremony of a merchant unveiling fine silk, and three bottles rolled out: one green, one brown, and one that might have generously been described as yellow if you squinted and had a forgiving disposition.
"Tha’ one's brown, Ollie," Pebbles said.
"Syb says amber's just brown tha's been kissed by th' sun."
"Syb says a lot of fings." But Pebbles set the brown bottle aside rather than throwing it out.
"Wha's it all for?" Oliver asked, bouncing on his toes with the barely contained energy of a child who suspects a secret and would rather die than not be told it.
"It's a fing," Ridley grunted.
"A fing fing. Don't worry ‘bout it."
"Is it a present? Is it fer Syb? Pebbles said—"
"Pebbles needs t' learn to shut 'is mouf." Ridley shot a glare at Pebbles, who was examining a blue bottle against the lamplight with a facade of practiced innocence. "It ain't—look, it's just somefin' I'm doin'. Wiv lights. An' bottles. An' it don't need explainin', a'right? Just...find more blue ones."
Oliver processed this with his entire body—chin jutting, brow furrowed, and fists clenched at his sides in concentration. Then a grin split across his little face, and his eyes lit up. "Yer makin' 'er somefin' pretty."
"M’endin’ this conversation, Oliver."
"You are! Yer makin' Syb somefin' pretty cos you like 'er—"
"Ollie." Pebbles cuffed the boy lightly on the back of the head. "Shut up an' go find blue bottles."
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The shed took him four nights.
It was an old storage lean-to that had been abandoned since the Ashvane Company had consolidated the nearby yards. It was too small to be useful, and too out of the way for the guard to bother patrolling which is why Ridley had used it once or twice for dead drops. He worked alone, after dark, when Merrick was elsewhere and Sybil was sleeping. The bottles went along the back wall first, arranged on a shelf he'd hammered together from scrap timber. Green ones in a long row at the bottom, ranging from near-black to the pale milky colour of shallow sea glass. Above them were the blue ones—the apothecary vials, the flask, and three squat bottles Pebbles had liberated from a chandler's bin. The single purple bottle was in the center, slim and jewel-dark. And scattered among them, the reds and ambers and that one yellow-brown Oliver had insisted was amber. They were to serve as warm tones to break the cool, the way firelight breaks through fog. The broken pieces went on a second shelf, and this was the harder work. Ridley had taken a hammer to the bottles that were too cracked to stand and broken them into rough shards, and then he'd spent two nights fitting those shards into a wooden frame he'd nailed across the wall—overlapping them and layering the colours until green bled into blue which bled into purple which bled into rose, with gaps between to let the light fracture through. His gloves were ruined by the end of the first night and his fingertips were cut to ribbons by the end of the second but he just wrapped them in scraps of linen and kept going. Ridley didn't know what an aurora looked like. He'd never left Boralus, and he'd never seen the sky do anything more dramatic than rain sideways. But he remembered her words, like someone spilled dye across wet cloth, and he remembered the way her hands had moved when she said it, tracing slow arcs on the windowsill, and he built what her hands had drawn. When he tested the lantern on the third night, the light hit the bottles and the shards and scattered across the opposite wall in a wash of colour—green and blue and violet and rose and the deep warm red of the single red bead Agatha had contributed, all overlapping and rippling where the uneven glass bent the light into soft, trembling bands. It wasn't an aurora, or the sky she had grown up under. It was bottles and broken glass and tar-stained planking. He stood there for a long time, looking at it, and he thought: it ain't enough. And then he thought: nuffin' I do is ever gonna be enough. And so, he adjusted the lantern two inches to the left, because the purple wasn't catching right, and kept working.
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"I can see that, Ridley. Out where?"
"Just out, somewhere. It ain't far."
Sybil walked beside him through the damp evening streets of Boralus, her shawl pulled tight against the salt breeze, bare feet silent on the wet cobblestones. She never wore shoes if she could help it, as she said she couldn't feel the ground properly through leather, which was the dumbest thing Ridley had ever heard and also, privately, drove him mad with worry about broken glass and nails, but he'd learned that arguing with Sybil about shoes was like arguing with weather. She kept glancing at him, studying the side of his face with patient curiosity. "Yer bein' very strange," she observed. “Yer walkin' like ye've stolen somethin' and haven't decided whether t' run or not."
"I ain't stolen nuffin'."
"Yer hands are in yer pockets."
"Ye never put yer hands in yer pockets, ye always keep them free. So eivver ye've stolen somethin', or yer nervous, and I've never once seen ye nervous about anythin' that wasn't—"
"Can you just—" He stopped walking and drew a breath before releasing it through his teeth. "Can you just...come wiv me an' not ask questions fer five bleedin' minutes? Is that somefin' you're capable of?"
Sybil blinked, then her head tilted in that familiar birdlike motion. "Five minutes," she said. "I'll time it."
"I've got somethin' better." She tapped her chest, over her heart. "This one keeps perfect time.”
Ridley made a noise that wasn't quite a groan and started walking again. Sybil followed, quiet for once, or at least as quiet as Sybil got, which still involved her humming under her breath and occasionally murmuring to a stray cat that wound between her ankles. Meanwhile Ridley's pulse was doing something he refused to acknowledge. His hands, stuffed deep in his coat pockets, were clenched into fists around nothing. This is stupid. This is the stupidest fing you've ever done, and you once let Merrick talk you into robbin' a cadet, so the bar weren't exactly 'igh t' begin wiv— The shed loomed dark and shuttered ahead. He turned down the narrow alley beside it, boots splashing through a shallow puddle that reflected the amber glow of a distant street lantern. The lean-to door was right where he'd left it, warped and salt-bleached, the latch held shut with a bit of wire he'd twisted into place.
"It's a shed," Sybil said carefully.
"A very nice shed, I'm sure—"
"Just—" He turned to face her, and the expression on his face must have been something, because Sybil's teasing died in her throat. Whatever she saw there, whatever mix of terror and defiance and raw, exposed wanting was written across his features made her go still. "Close yer eyes," he said.
She studied him for one more heartbeat, then she closed her eyes. Her lashes lay against her freckled cheeks, pale and fine. The collar gleamed at her throat and her lips were slightly parted. Standing there with her eyes closed, trusting him in a dark alley in a city that had given her no reason to trust anyone, she looked so small and so certain that Ridley's chest seized like a fist had closed around it. He turned to the door, and unwound the wire. His cut-up fingers fumbled with it several times and he swore under his breath. "Are ye all right—"
"Fine. Keep 'em shut." The door swung open with a protesting creak. Inside, the shed was dark, the lantern sitting cold on the stool where he'd left it. He crossed the threshold, fumbling for the tinderbox in his pocket. The wick caught on the third try, and the flame crawled up, small and golden. He adjusted the lantern's shutter, angling it toward the rows of bottles and the mosaic of coloured shards in their rough wooden frame. The light hit the glass, and colors bloomed across the opposite wall, rippling, overlapping and shifting with every tiny flicker of the flame. Green bled into blue, deep and cool as winter twilight. Blue dissolved into violet at the edges where the purple bottle caught the light and threw it wide. Rose and amber crept between, warm threads through the cool wash, and at the center, where Agatha's red bead sat, a single point of deep crimson pulsed like a heartbeat. The broken shards fractured the light further, scattering it into soft, trembling bands that wavered and breathed on the rough grey planking. "...A'right," Ridley said, and his voice came out rougher than he liked. "Open 'em."
Ridley heard her step through the doorway, her bare feet shuffling onto the gritty floor. He heard the sharp, soft intake of breath that followed—a sound like someone being struck, except gentler. He didn't look at her, instead he looked at the wall, at the colours, at the imperfect wavering bands of green and blue and violet and rose, and he said nothing because there was nothing to say that wouldn't come out wrong or too much or not enough. "Ridley." Her voice was barely a whisper when it came, and it cracked down the middle like thin ice. "Ridley, what—how did ye—"
"It's just bottles," he said quickly. "Found 'em around, mostly. Pebbles an' Ollie 'elped. Agatha found that red bit in the middle, dunno where, she just gave it to me. It ain't—I know it ain't the same as wha' you—I know it ain't right, it's just glass an' a lantern an'—"
"—it don't move proper, like you said, the real ones move different, I know that, but the flame sort of—if you leave the shutter cracked just a bit it flickers an' the colours shift, see, an'—"
He stopped, swallowed, and forced himself to turn and look at her. Sybil stood three paces inside the door with both hands pressed over her mouth. Her mismatched eyes were wide and luminous, catching the reflected colour—green on one cheek, violet on the other, her sandy hair lit rose and blue where the scattered light fell across it. Tears tracked down her face and over her fingers, silent and steady. She was weeping the way rain falls—quietly and inevitably, as though something had simply opened inside her that could not be closed again. "It's just bottles," he said again, helplessly.
She shook her head, dropping her hands from her mouth, and her lips were trembling. The smile that broke through the tears was the most devastating thing Ridley had ever seen—it wasn’t the crooked and careful half-smile she typically wore, but wide open and radiant with grief and gratitude so tangled together he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. "It's home," she whispered. "Oh, Ridley. It's home, it's—”
"I didn't, it's not—" She crossed the space between them in two steps and her arms went around his middle, her face pressing into his chest and she held on like the floor was tilting. Sybil was shaking, he could feel it through his coat, through the leather and the layers, the fine tremor running through her like a plucked string. She made a sound against his chest. A hiccupping little "hhh—" that dissolved into a wet, shuddering breath. Ridley broke then, his arms coming down around her, heavy and uncertain. One hand cupped the back of her head, his fingers sliding into the loose braid at her nape. She was so small against him, the top of her head barely reaching his collarbone. He could feel the ridge of the collar against his wrist where it circled her throat, cold bronze against warm skin, and the hatred he felt for that strip of metal in that moment was so vast and so quiet it didn't even feel like anger anymore, but a black mark on his soul. "I can't give you Drustvar," he said into her hair, low and wrecked. "I can't. I ain't got—I don't know 'ow to fix anyfin', Sybil. I don't know 'ow to make it right. Any of it. But you said—you said you missed the colours, an' I fought maybe—I dunno. I just fought maybe you shouldn't 'ave to miss everyfin' all the time."
She pulled back just enough to look up at him, and her face was wet and flushed and blotched with crying, and the coloured light played across her skin. "In all me life," Sybil said, very quietly, her voice thick and cracked and musical even in breaking, "no one has ever tried t’give me the sky." She curled her fingers into the fabric of his coat and pressed her forehead against his collarbone, the heat of her tears soaking through to his skin.
"Don't—" Ridley’s voice cracked and he cleared his throat viciously. "Don't read nuffin' into it."
Sybil laughed, the sound wet and ragged and warm against his chest. "Wouldn't dream of it," she whispered, and her fingers tightened in his coat. He held very still with her warmth against his chest and the lights pooling around them both. The stone he'd been carrying inside of him shifted—not dissolving, not yet, but settling somewhere deeper, somewhere it could put down roots and grow into whatever terrifying thing it was becoming.
