[SE] She could ruin my life all the same

Raining on me so damn long, but that's relief to a man who calls a desert home

It does not take her long to retrace the path to this particular bar. Even if the shape of it is different, renamed and rebuilt, the things around it remain the same. It sits like a snag in the fabric of time, caught and twisted until the folds in some areas are patterned with the past, others rolled with speckles of the present, and in between it all, the threading of the future shimmers with the inevitable promise of ruin and change.

Standing before the closed doors, Colt takes a moment to soak in the new face. Her head tilts back, golden wig-hair shifting along the cloth poncho draped cozily against her shoulders. A breeze strums the pale feather stuck in her hat, the faintest whistle given off the edge, a nose-driven exhale joining it. It'd be wrong to call her anxious, but there's nothing easy about this either, and Colt uses what little time she's got left to button down the full span of her composure.

Lifting up the bottle of champagne, she uses the wide base of it to knock at the door, careful to do just enough to encourage the sound of her arrival. Her other hand pulls the cigarette from her lips, smoke shooting out the side of her mouth as she tilts her lips to one corner, thumb and forefinger squeezing the red light out.

---

Colt

Still gripping the shovel that got me here, fear if I let go I might disappear

flora

The knock sounds through the empty bar cleanly enough to carry, and from somewhere beyond the back room there is the brief scrape of movement before Flora appears, not hurried exactly, but certainly not leaving Colt standing long enough to decide she has been made to wait on purpose. The door has been unlocked; this is not an ambush, nor a test, nor any of the other things Flora has spent the last handful of days trying very hard not to turn it into inside her own head.

Spice is draped around her shoulders in a loose white curl, her small body cool against Flora’s collarbone, and as Flora steps fully into view the little dragon’s pale eyes flick toward the door with immediate, chilly interest. Flora’s own gaze lands first on Colt, then on the cigarette, then on the bottle of champagne, her expression smoothing into something bright-edged and careful as she slips behind the bar rather than going to meet her in the open space between them.

"Oh," she says, eyeing the bottle before one brow lifts with polished precision. "Are we celebrating something?" Her voice is chilly rather than sharp, the kind of cold that has been deliberately poured into a pretty glass instead of thrown, and with her brows still raised she reaches beneath the bar for a champagne flute, setting it down in front of where Colt can take it if she wants. For herself, Flora chooses a highball glass, because apparently whatever this is going to be, she has already decided she would prefer not to drink it delicately.

My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!