Breakfast at the Edge of the Bay, Part 1

Posted on Thu Jul 10th, 2025 @ 8:59pm by Lieutenant JG Jacqueline Holder & Lieutenant JG Jean-Baptiste Dorsainvil
Edited on on Thu Jul 10th, 2025 @ 9:01pm

1,619 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: Character Backstories
Location: Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco, Earth
Timeline: October 11, 2381, Late Morning

The air around Fisherman's Wharf still held that clammy dawn residue, even as the late morning light started to angle in, bright and forgiving. The city looked half-awake even for a Sunday. Like a man blinking at his first coffee, one shoe still missing. A few street musicians tuned up outside the old Embarcadero museum across the street, their cases yawning open for tips, half-hoping someone would mistake them for jazz geniuses.

JB sat at a small iron table on the terrace of the café--some place with a name that had probably once sounded clever but now just looked tired in chipped paint above the a weathered door. A red enamel kettle sat between them, breathing out little puffs of steam. Two mismatched mugs. A plate with a half-eaten croissant. The remains of a lemon wedge that had nowhere more important to be.

His hair was still damp at the temples, curling faintly where the salt hadn't quite let go. He wore a plain white t-shirt and dark jeans, the simplest armour he could find after the rawness of the cold swim. A faint line of sun had already started to appear along his collarbone. It was the kind of detail you only notice when you're sitting across from someone you're trying not to memorize.

A row of seagulls perched along the railing, heads cocked like a group of disapproving women at a matinee. They squawked at the occasional clatter from the kitchen window. Down on the sidewalk, tourists trundled past with sticky buns the size of Jupiter's moons.

Across from him, Jacqueline chair sat tilted back a fraction. It was the posture of a person ready to spring into story, or laughter... or flight.

They hadn't started talking yet. Not really. Just the easy shuffle of plates, the clink of a spoon stirring sugar into something too hot to immediately drink. JB watched the shape of her silhouette against the city beyond, felt the invisible tremor of something enormous and ineffable pushing out from behind his sternum.

A breeze rattled the metal trim of the awning overhead. Somewhere nearby, a busker's violin faltered and picked up again. It was a sound as thin as thread, and just as prone to snap.

This was not a date. Just breakfast. But under the thin paper napkins and half-formed words, it sat there: the quiet fact that something had already begun. And maybe--if they both didn't look at it too directly--it might even grow.

They had devoured their breakfasts with the kind of single-minded focus usually reserved for shipyard workers or cardiac surgeons. Heads bent, forks clicking, the occasional involuntary sigh when something warm and buttery dissolved on the tongue. Two plates that started as bright constellations of eggs, toast and fruit now looked like devastated landscapes after a passing storm.

JB pushed his empty plate away from him. He leaned back, his palm curling around a half-full mug of flat white, eyes squinting against the drift of late-morning sun that pooled across the terrace. A freighter moaned in the bay beyond, and he watched the sound travel through her in the gentle shiver of her shoulders. Funny, the things you notice when you're no longer drowning in your own head.

He turned to her at last, the movement slow, almost cautious. His thumb ran idly along the rim of the mug like a nervous metronome. "So," he began--that single syllable carrying all the weight of a question that might be too big or too small or exactly right. "What made you sign up for a swim no sane island kid would ever willingly choose?" The faintest of smirks lit the edges of his face.

"Was that a confession just now?" She asked the question like it was a challenge, though she was only teasing him. "Are you warning me that you're insane?"

He felt her words slide across the table like an easy challenge. His grin spread a little wider, revealing a few more teeth than usual.

"Ah," he said, voice curling around the word. "You caught me. But if I'm confessing, might as well admit the whole thing: I'm either insane, or I just like doing things that remind me I'm alive." He flashed another grin, adding, "But you're dodging the real question here."

"Who, me?" Jacqueline's eyes widened in the sort of feigned innocent expression one makes when they are not-so-secretly hiding something. "I would never dodge a question."

Her expression changed to something more serious as she answered. "I guess I just like a challenge. To accomplish the things that people think aren't doable. Telling me I can't, is one surefire way to make sure that I will."

He watched her as she spoke and saw the shift in her face--how it moved from teasing into that sudden, clear flame of conviction. There it was again, that spark he kept catching glimpses of in her: the unspoken dare to the universe, the itch to push past the line just because some prick drew it there.

JB leaned in a little, as if the words might scatter if he didn't close the space between them. "Guess we're both guilty, then," he said, his thumb circling the mug rim in little, thoughtful orbits. "You take on the impossible to prove them wrong... I do it to remind myself I haven't vanished behind the walls I keep building." He let that admission rest on the table between them. Then he tipped his head, a smirk returning. "Dangerous pair, aren't we?"

She skipped over the question, instead latching on to the comment he had made just before. "What do you mean by walls you keep building? What's that about?" She asked. While she waited for his answer she lifted a finger to waive the server over for more coffee.

He exhaled, a soft sound that slipped past his teeth invisibly. For a moment, his eyes dropped to the battered tabletop. His thumb stilled on the mug, pressing into the ceramic lip as if grounding himself there.

When he looked up again, there was a different cast to his face--something rawer, half-lit. "Walls," he said, testing the word in his mouth. "You grow up somewhere like Bainet, you learn early that what you show the world can be used against you. That trust is a currency you spend only when you have no other choice."

His gaze drifted past her shoulder, out to the slow churn of the bay, and he gave a small, almost private shake of his head. "So you build walls. Quiet ones. You keep your real self folded away, safe, so nothing can find it and strip it for parts." His voice softened at the edges, like it had been left too long in the sun. "Problem is, after a while... you start forgetting there's anything behind them at all."

Then his eyes found hers again--clear, dark, and present in the most startling of ways. "But maybe," he added, "some swims, and some breakfasts, start hammering cracks into them whether you like it or not."

As Jacqueline listened her gaze shifted back and forth between watching JB's expression and gazing out toward the sea. She turned to him again, something in her eyes hinting to him that she knew more about walls than she was letting on. "What's so bad about Bainet?"

"Bainet isn't bad," he said finally, the words coming up from deep within him. "God, no. It's... beautiful. Mango trees so heavy they crack their own branches. Mornings that smell like cane smoke and ocean spray. There's even a coffee plantation less than a kilometer from my house that..." He paused, a remembering smile stretching across his lips. "On the days they're performing torrefaction, the air smells heavenly."

His smile faded away, disappearing into the invisible recesses of an emotional well. "People there know your maternal great-grandmother's middle name without ever asking." He took a small sip of his lukewarm flat white, the bitterness of oat milk and espresso entwining to create an earthy comfort just below his ribs.

"But that's the thing," he went on. "They know you. Or they think they do. Every scraped knee, every fight behind the school, every girl you ever walked home, every rumour about your father's debts or your mother's soft heart. You grow up wearing all of that--like a second skin you didn't choose."

He glanced out at the bay again, as if it might offer a little mercy. "Sometimes, it feels like there's no room left for you to become anything else. You're just the next verse in a song they started writing before you were born."

Then he looked back at her, and something tentative sparked behind the careful lines of expression. "I love Bainet," he said, softer now, almost a confession. "But I had to leave before I forgot how to hear my own voice under all the others."

JB’s gaze drifted to the awning overhead, its metal trim rattling softly in the breeze--anything to keep from looking at her just then. He felt the slip of vulnerability slide under his skin, a raw edge he wasn’t used to exposing. It wasn’t comfortable; it never had been. But somewhere inside, it rang true, like a musical note struck in an empty room.

He sensed her eyes on him, felt the quiet tug of her searching look like a hand offered across water. But he didn’t meet it. Not yet. He held himself just beyond that threshold, unwilling to surrender to the soft insistence of her brown eyes in such a fragile, bright moment.

Finally--without looking up, he said, "Tell me more about you."

~tbc~

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