Summary: Treasure (n.) - a quantity of precious metals, gems, or other valuable objects. OR: JJ finds a pearl and thinks of Kiara.
A/N: @alphinias this is for you!! my quick little ficlet of the ultimate jiara & everlark parallel. it’s my first ever jiara fanfic and it’s very scrappy because I literally wrote this in one day, but I just couldn’t help myself. I hope you all like it! also, I’ll be posting it to AO3 soon! I promise! (EDIT: I just realized that tumblr literally ate up an entire paragraph and I couldn't restore it because I wrote this in my notes app, so I tried patching it up but apologies if it seems a little choppy in the very beginning or if there are doubles of certain lines.)
••••••••
There are a lot of reasons why being stranded on an island should spark a particular envy towards rich people.
And yet, as he sits by the water with wet sand between his toes, JJ feels no hint of envy whatsoever. He probably should, and has certainly felt that jealousy millions of times, but he isn’t. Because he’s knee-deep in oysters and clams, and jesus christ, what kind of drugs are rich people on?
Oysters are fucking disgusting.
They may smell like ass, but he didn't know that then. So sue him, he went overboard.
They may smell like ass, but he didn't know that then. So sue him, he went overboard.
The smell isn’t the only thing. When he takes the spear from his fishing mission with Kie to pry one of them open, the oyster opens up to reveal a foul, beige sort of… mucus?
Okay, he thinks, maybe the one he’s opened is just bad. Like, some other fish killed it and this is just a rotting oyster corpse that wasn’t buried deep enough. He picks a second one up, weighing it in the palm of his hand thoughtfully before going in with the spearhead and prying the small clam open.
Much to his disappointment, it’s still slimy mush.
Great. It smells bad and looks bad. At this rate, he doesn’t want to eat like a king. As a matter of fact, he’s never been happier to be a pogue. He’s had his share of mussels and shellfish before, which were delicious, but he’s never had real market price oysters or anything and he certainly has never handled them himself. Only rich people would be deranged enough to touch this stuff, nevermind guzzle this down. Honestly, it’s nauseating. The stuff is slippery, evades his touch when he pokes a finger into the flesh, and— “Ew,” he says out loud this time as he frantically retracts his finger, because there’s something legitimately moving inside of this goddamn freak of nature.
But then, curiosity gets the better of him. Clearly the thing is dead, if it hasn’t clamped down on his hand yet, right? So whatever’s moving in there must be something else.
It’s only after a moment of poking his finger around in the oyster again, when he feels something round and smooth, does JJ remember: oysters hold pearls.
Ah, so that’s why rich people like them so much. For them, eating them is probably like dominating a creature as punishment for withholding something shiny from their greedy hands.
He keeps poking around, massaging the flesh with his finger until an opening is found and a small pearl rolls out effortlessly.
The pearl isn’t white like he expected it to be. Instead, it’s a kind of steel blue so dark that to the unsuspecting eye, it’s just black. Matte but glimmering, the pearl sits lightly in the palm of his hand now. He discards the oyster shell and starts kicking all the other unopened shells back into the water. None of them matter anymore. Original plans be damned.
This pearl. Something about it is enchanting, feels precious and familiar. And maybe it’s just because he used the fishing spear to retrieve the pearl that he thinks of Kiara, or that he associates pearls with jewellery. But he thinks of her nonetheless.
The others are trying to gather materials for a fire, and he knows he should be helping with that. And yet, the pearl chains him here, sitting in the sand and looking out on an island they don’t have a name for. It’s a unnameable place, host to an unnameable feeling sinking into him.
Or maybe it’s not unnameable at all, because he rolls the pearl back and forth in his hand and it’s Kiara. He thinks of her, and feels her in the weight of the smooth stone. The feeling he has is her, and so is the stone. It just is.
Warm wind blows in his hair, and pulls his eyes away from the view to his left side, where Kie is standing.
“Mind if I join you?”
She’s already starting to sit down next to him before he can muster a spoken answer, so he just shrugs in the affirmative. Instinctively, his hand closes into a gentle fist around the pearl, concealing it but never putting it at risk of breaking.
“I love it out here,” he says, and it’s true.
“Me too.” She smiles, first at him, something genuine and incomprehensible, and then out at the view, crisp blue sky and waves included. “I mean, I miss having a comfy bed and all, but with a view like this who could even think to close their eyes and miss it?”
JJ looks out to the view (reluctantly, because Kie’s admittedly a whole other kind of view he loves), finally starting to smile himself. “Yep, it’s a pretty sweet view. Makes all the crazy shit we’ve been through worthwhile.”
“Is that why you’re out here instead of with the others?”
“Nah,” he says, “I was just trying to get some oysters.”
“I know.”
He snaps his head back in her direction to find her looking at him again. “You do?”
Kiara nods. “I saw you just a minute ago, huffing and puffing trying to open one. You talk to yourself all the time?”
“Only when cursing at disgusting sea slime,” he tells her, in a dry sort of humour as he shakes his head. “Fuckin’s oysters.”
As if smelling them in her thoughts, she scrunches her nose up in that cute way she does and winces with a smile. “They do smell pretty gross, don’t they?”
“Yeah, they’re awful,” he laughs, and laughs some more until it dies down and he settles into a calmer state. “S’not all that bad, though. Look.”
Cautiously, he stretches his fist out between them and opens his clasped palm to reveal the pearl that he found.
“Wow,” she says, sucking in a sharp breath of awe. “It’s gorgeous.”
And then, before he can even understand why what he’s doing feels so right, he does something unpredictable.
“Here,” he says. “For you.”
She blinks, her gaze softening into something dangerously alluring and, above all else, confusing. “Really?”
“Yeah,” he assures her, and suddenly starts to feel uncertain about it which makes things insufferably awkward. “It seems like you. I don’t know. You don’t have to if you don’t—”
The words stumble out of him as he tries to stop himself from revealing all the delicate parts of him that are partial to her.
But she grabs the side of his hand ever so gently, yet still with alarm. “No,” Kie interjects firmly, stopping JJ’s world with one look and holding that glance as she slowly glides her fingers into his palm. She removes the pearl. He lets her. “I love it. Thank you.”
She looks down at the dark pearl now in her hand, and smiles. That alone causes a wave of relief to wash over his whole body, swooping his tension away with the tides.
Still, for his own comfort, he adds, “Just don’t go losing it or anything because, y’know, it’s probably like, some super rare special kind of pearl that’s worth a million dollars or something so…”
“Right,” she chuckles sweetly, standing up from the sand. She’s still laughing as she ruffles his hair with her spare hand. “I’ll make sure to keep it on me at all times, and cherish it forever.”
“I’m serious,” he calls out to her as she starts to walk away.
As she turns around to face him again, still walking, she replies, “So am I.”
She says it with a lip-biting smirk that leads JJ to worry for a moment that maybe she’s just fucking with him, that she hates it, that he said something stupid. But then she takes the fist with the pearl in it and holds it to her heart. Her smile becomes more sincere and affectionate, and it stirs something fierce in JJ’s heart, and he knows she is serious. She really will keep it safe and cherish it.
It’s then that he decides that maybe he likes giving Kiara things.
••••••••
Kiara’s POV - a while later…
••••••••
“Kiara, dear, come on out!”
Kie lets out a pouting huff as she looks at herself in the mirror one last time. Her mother is waiting for— well, for this more than her. This dress, this look, this reformed version of her. Kiara looks at it in the mirror, inspects the semblance of elegance that she pulls off in the formal floral dress she finds herself in, and feels so uncomfortably dissociated from her reflection. Half of her thinks she should be used to it by now, and the other half knows she never will be.
Her mother is waiting for her though, so she ignores both halves of her heart and begrudgingly pulls back the curtain to show her the dress.
Instantly, her mom’s eyes sparkle with an excitement like ecstasy, something Kiara used to mistake for pride and love.
“Oh, dear! You look beautiful!” She clasps her hands together and then moves them to Kiara’s shoulders, herding her into a spin.
So Kiara has no choice but to comply, doing a full 360-degree rotation as her mother coos and gasps in awe. Nevermind that she’s been frowning the whole time. Nevermind that she’s already had her fair share of clothing and dresses picked our for her in harrowing situations over these last few weeks, none of which have felt remotely comfortable. Nevermind that she just wants to dress like herself for on goddamn night, not have all these greedy adults with nefarious agendas treating her like a doll or a prop. Things like that don’t matter to her mother. After all, she didn’t even bother to ask.
“Oh yes, this is the one,” she decides. “It’ll work perfectly for the anniversary party.”
“I don’t know…” Kie hesitates, and fights the urge to slag her shoulders a bit. “This isn’t exactly what I’m used to.”
“Well it shouldn’t be, dear. These things aren’t supposed to be comfortable, after all. But oh! I almost forgot,” she remembers, “the jewellery. That’ll really tie it all together. I saw a piece I thought would go nicely with your dress, hang on.”
She scurries away excitedly to fetch whatever dazzling necklace she has in store, and her sudden yet momentary absence allows Kiara’s anxiety to bubble to the surface. To calm herself, she instinctively moves her hand up to the necklace she has on now, and its small charm. The familiar steely blue pearl rolls easily between her fingers, its smooth surface reminding her of a sweeter, more boundless time when she felt most alive, most exhilarated and, perhaps, most in love with the person who gave it to her. So much so that she’d wrapped it in twine and pieced together some sort of necklace out of it, just to have it on her at all times.
Her mother comes back, and Kiara rips the necklace off of her own neck frantically, as if protecting buried treasure, or the last remaining part of herself that’s truly her. (The part of her that, in all honest truth, is JJ’s.) She holds it in the palm of her hands and stuffs it in the pocket of her dress which, to her, is the only real upside to this dress.
“Here we are,” her mother says, bringing out her necklace and parting Kiara’s hair at the back to put it on her. Kie can immediately feel how heavy it is. Big, clunky, jewel-studded. It’s gaudy, and she rolls her eyes. Her mother, still behind her, doesn’t see it.
Instead, her mom holds a hand mirror over her shoulder and tilts it at just the right angle so that Kiara can see the necklace. Just as she expected, it’s a gigantic, kook-like, showy statement piece of a necklace that could be objectively nice in the right setting, but just isn’t her.
It’s so ridiculous that she lets out a wild burst of laughter. Her mom pulls the mirror away, and Kiara knows instantly that she reacted the wrong way.
“What? What’s so funny?” She asks.
“Nothing! Nothing,” she tries assuring her mother, though she still feels her cheeks sore and stretched into a smile, fighting back laughter. “It’s fine, it’s a fine necklace.”
Her mother’s face sinks, flattens into something deadpan and sad. “You hate it.”
“No, I—” she tries sobering up to reality and putting on a good face again, because she really doesn’t want to get into it with her mother. “I don’t hate it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Kiara,” she sighs. “I’m your mother. You think just because you go off gallivanting with your friends that I can’t tell when you like or dislike something?”
Kie finally lets her shoulder sag. “Mom, I swear I don’t hate the necklace. It—It’s fine, it is. It’s just… it’s not really me.”
“I don’t get it,” her mother says.
Sadly, there’s the crux of it all. Kiara knows her mom truly does not understand it; she never had and never will, no matter how much she tries (or doesn’t). There’s a pitiful sort of disconnect between them, one that spawned into full fruition from the moment Kiara realized what kind of life she wanted for herself, from the moment she kissed JJ, and maybe even from the moment she met the guys. It was never going to work. This life was never meant for her.
Kiara thinks for one second, brows furrowing, and then slowly takes the necklace off. Delicately placing it back in its casing, she then grabs her necklace out of her pocket and puts it back on herself.
When she walks back over to her mother, who’s watching Kie with wildly confused eyes, she pinches the pearl between her index and her thumb and lifts it up to show her mom.
“This is me, mom,” she tells her. She drops the pearl but clasps a palm over it, holding the charm to the part of her chest right over her heart, just like she had in Poguelandia when she’d told thanked JJ for it and said she’d keep it safe. “This is me.”
“Okay…” Her mom says, though Kie can tell she doesn’t actually get it and is just trying to smooth things over. “Well, I’m sure you can wear whatever jewellery you want to the party. Pearls are very classic too. Now come on, let’s find your nice heels.”
Again, Kiara rolls her eyes. Her mom grabs her hand and drags her away, down and under to a world of someone else’s cruel creation. And though she is not ready for all of the hellish kook antics, the fake smiles and speeches, and above all else the complications with her and JJ, she rolls that gorgeous, simple, precious pearl between her fingers over and over, religiously, until she’s reminded of all the goodness in her life. With JJ, with the rest of the pogues, in the dream they share.
It’s enough to keep her going, running on a fuel of everything that makes it worthwhile.
with seafoam wrinkled fingertips (we make this earth our own) by lavenderblooms 2/?
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Summary: Kiara would be lying if she said she didn’t think about it.
He’s wearing cargo shorts and a sleeveless shirt. Kiara thinks about reaching into the haphazardly cut holes and spreading her fingers on his stomach, letting her head fall into the space between his shoulder and neck, leaning her weight on his back. She’d forgotten; how much he can make her want without even trying.
Kiara and JJ go on a surf trip, just a couple of years late.
andulkaphoto
kianamaiart
jbbartram-illu
