likepalegold | (no subject)

The light grows brighter as Jay Gatsby turns away from this moment and begins to understand that this is a striking pivotal point and nothing will ever be the same again. The absent scattering of autumn leaves scratches along the stone paving, but even that is a world away. Sinking, he's sinking, and there may not be a way up for him. And yet, that too is a world away.

Jay Gatsby is a self-made man in control of his own destiny, but he stands on a spot of land he doesn't recognize, clutching his dripping chest to ease the hurt of a wound he didn't plan. His life, his whole life, had been the accumulation of riches achieved in the pursuit of a dream; a dream he's unwilling to abandon because his blooming flower gleams and glows as brightly as the summer they met. Distantly, he hears the shrill cry of the phone and he thinks ...

Daisy.

He thinks of Daisy the way he's thought of her for years. Every dollar, every fabric in his closet, every square inch of his floors accompany thoughts of Daisy Buchanan, but the phone's cry begins to dim down, growing quiet as the hush blankets him and brings with it a wave of uncertainty.

His fingers tap against his beating heart. He eases his hand away, but there's no wound. Numb, Gatsby stands there with the ghost of cool water haunting him and chilling his fingers and toes until they're blue and still, he thinks of Daisy. The blood had bloomed, but not like her. The water had claimed him, but delivered him to this new whirligig as though God above has insisted that his life is not over, that Jay Gatsby's destiny is not done. He is far from complete and yet he is without direction for the first time in his life.

His life, so often full up of rumors, now affords him possibilities the likes of which he has never dreamed. For a man so preoccupied with his past, it's now his future that calls his attention forward.

Threaded | Flat

For nigh on a week, Jordan Baker had been drifting sleekly through the tall, paneled rooms of the Nexus hotel, watching guests and employees with cool detachment and burying her keen curiosity beneath wan disaffectedness. She felt an innate connection to the place, which reminded her of the Plaza, if the Plaza had been dipped up to its neck in all the scandalous, modern ideas no person of good breeding was supposed to acknowledge.

She thought she rather liked it and would stay, and dimly imagined snatching Daisy away from Tom so that she could do the same.

The gardens were effusive and green, ideal for a leisurely walk to accompany the cigarette Jordan was, surprisingly, not permitted to smoke inside. Slender, manicured fingers poised just at her mouth, cigarette smoldering into the gentle breeze, she paused at the edge of the lawn and took in the familiar figure wavering like a mirage atop the verdant carpet.

Dressed for swimming and wet, in the sun he looked dipped in gold, the spectre of Venus risen from an invisible sea. Jordan flicked ash into the neatly-trimmed hedges and stepped forward.

"Well, this is a surprise," she drawled, head tilted with polite curiosity but voice stitched up with tightly-controlled bitterness. "I've never met a ghost before."