open ended endings

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

Her hands lift before she can stop them, all surrender and fury in one motion, then ball into fists at her sides until her fingernails leave crescents in her palms. "I asked about Caly because I’m not an asshole," she says, breath pulling thin as thread through a needle. "I wasn’t about to just say hey, what if we just said fuck it and made things work, when you were dating someone else." Her head shakes, curls loosening against her cheeks as the wind combs the flowers. "What did you think I was going to do after you gushed about how amazing it was with her? Kiss you again? I pulled back because what else was I supposed to do?" And, because at the end of the day Flora was still just 23, she'd brought up bringing Caly around for a date as if to give Kai every chance of saying it wasn't what he'd wanted.

Flora draws herself taller, though the oversized sweater slouches around her, making her seem smaller somehow as the soft gray fabric swallows her whole. "I never asked you to go," she adds, softer but edged, and her eyes flicker to his mouth before she drags them away. "Even when I couldn’t look at you without wanting to feel your lips again or your hands, I still stayed. I picked awkward, grave cleaning over not having you." Lifting her eyes for a moment to dare meeting the warm copper of his gaze, Flora nearly flinches. "You chose to decide what was best for me behind my back and make stupid wishes."

Then as Kai says he’s been trying to fix what’s between them, a laugh rises that never makes it past her teeth. "When," she asks, and the word floats out like a petal with a blade stitched inside it. "When you were going to Safrin about Caly? When you were meeting Soh to talk more about Caly? When you were writing letters to Caly and planning dates for Caly?" Whatever his stupid quest was she didn't doubt he'd been doing that too, but the way it looked to Flora was like Kaisel had all the time in the world for Caly-related endeavours, and only deigned to write to her so he could talk about his date with her.

Anger tightens every line of Flora's body, then; the field feels too bright and the sky too wide for the conversation they're having. So when his admission comes—because he couldn’t have her—she recoils as if struck, shoulders knitting tight, the first tears slipping hot and traitorous down her cheeks. She wipes them away with quick, impatient fingers, as if closing a breach in a dam. "You could have," she whispers, and it doesn’t sound like hope so much as something once polished left out to rust. "You did."

Her gaze drops to the flowers as if they might steady her, all that impossible colour pretending to be firm ground. "I couldn’t stop thinking about that night," she admits, voice low and seaworn. "Even when I didn’t hear from you, I went to your parents’ house and made you that keychain so you wouldn’t feel alone in King’s End. I sent it without my name so you wouldn’t have to feel conflicted, because I knew you’d never want anything with me because of Koa." She swallows, small and stubborn, then pushes on before the silence can close over her. "I went to talk to Caly to try and smooth things over, and gods, she was icy." The tears that rise now are warmer than anger and heavier than pride, and she lets them go, salt tracking clean lines through the flush on her cheeks as her lips twist. "I basically had to give up my bar because of all of this," she says, the words catching on the rim of a breath, "when all I was trying to do was the right thing." Her voice wavers and cracks; she swallows hard, furious with herself for letting so much of what he’s done to her seep through the armour she has held shut with sleeves and stubbornness, the sound of it fraying in the bright air like a torn sail that refuses to quiet.

real big things I still gotta figure out

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3

I'm like a titan that's risin'

"Make things work?" he scoffs, the sound of it echoing off all the spaces inside him like they've emptied. "The only thing you were trying to make work was me and Caly. You were practically running to talk to her to fix it after I told you I had ruined it. You said, we can't. You said, I could have something real with her." his tone rises, frustration starting to leech in, because gods if she had just given him a sign that night. "What was I supposed to think when you were telling me no and avoiding the sight of me? I'm not a mind reader Flora!"

Fuck, how did he get sucked into this sparring match with her about who had done the most wrong? He closes his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose for a minute as he pulls in a fresh breath, trying to resettle everything. It almost works, but then a half-crazed laugh chirps free at the rest of it. "You think that was me gushing?" His eyes dart open around the curve of his hand, lips twisting crooked with a smile that lacks his usual warmth, but still manages to carry heat. "Ask me about our night if you want to hear me gush." The intensity of his stare holds her with the dare of it, unblinking for a moment as he waits. His hand is the only thing that moves, falling back to his side with a swish of his jacket.

Then she softens, suddenly seeming far less impossible and entirely too small. "I was still around," he offers gently, a subtle shrug and a swish of his shoulders. "I would have come, if you needed, if you asked." Because maybe he'd been purposefully putting distance there, but the same could be said of her. He had not ignored her letters, and he would not have denied her invitations. He just hadn't found a reason to run to Torchline, and without the Family broadcasting some new threat towards her every other day, he didn't have to panic. "But you're right," he concedes with a sigh. "I didn't make you part of the decision, and I should have." It had seemed pretty clear to him at the time, but now it's evident it'd been little more than unpolished seaglass he'd looked through, clouded with salt.

"I went to Frey about you first," he offers softly. "I went to Soh about you first..." Being first had mattered a lot to Caly, perhaps it would to Flora too. He'd hoped to have his task completed by the time he saw her again, thought she'd like it, but the masquerade and the toad had all filled up time before he knew it, and all the while the worry over her wild letters had been scratching the back of his brain, driving him to Torchline to just resolve this, even empty handed.

He starts forward at the first sign of her tears, a half-step ghosting against the flowers, their subtle sway perhaps the only giveaway before he stops himself. She wipes them away so adamantly though, he's uncertain that she'd want anything from him right now. Even the understanding he keeps trying to provide is returned in mangled condition, so he's worried what extending a hand into her cage might result in when she's this feral with hurt. "That was one night, Ro." He swallows, fingers twitching with the desire to reach for her. "I don't just want you in the dark, on a bed. I want you out loud and in the open. Endless, so that the time of day never matters. If I had you, you'd never wonder, because the world would know." So when could he have done that? When she was telling him that she's worried about the future (the one between them)? That he's a horny teenage boy?

He can't just stand and watch her cry though. He'll risk losing both arms if he has to, his legs too, and become a potato that has to be spoon fed, as long as it means maybe just for a moment he can make something better for her. The distance vanishes and he pulls her into him, even if it's kicking and screaming. "I didn't know," he breathes, the sound straining to be heard as everything inside him starts to cave in. He had no idea everything she had done, everything she had felt.

Kaisel

Show you the harder the battle, the harder I fight

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

Her hands fly up, disbelief glittering sharper than sun on snow, then fall to fists against the sweater. "How dare you make it sound like you only went after Caly because of me," she says, the scoff bright and brittle as glass. "I’m not a mind reader either, Kaisel. You had every chance to correct me when I said it wouldn’t change things between us—and you didn’t."

His dare about gushing strikes like heat under the skin, and her eyes flash with it even as she keeps her tone level. "The most you ever said about that night was that you wanted to stay and were just as much to blame," she answers, and in the space behind the words her thoughts spill anyway, conjuring all the soft hooks she’d cast to bring more truth to the surface—how she said she’d started it, how she joked about him being a horny teenage boy, how she left him room to say what it meant—and every time the net came up light, vague answers slipping through like minnows she could never cup in both hands.

She clutches at his newest words as if they might keep her head above water and discovers they only sting the eyes. A sharp laugh leaves her, edged in salt. "I had just nearly died," she says, exasperation braided tight with something more intimate and rawer. "Of course I needed you. Did Caly have to ask you to write to her? Did Soh ask you to meet? Did Caly ask for a third date? Did Frey or Safrin ask to see you?" Each question lands clean and precise, petals scattered, yet falling in a row. "Funny how many things you found a way to do without anyone asking—just never with me."

He offers firsts as if they are coins that might tip the scale, and she shakes her head, tears blurring the field into one wide ribbon of colour. "I don’t care who you went to first," she says, arms cinching tighter until the oversized grey gathers like armour at her elbows. "I care what you did." Save for Enzo, no one had ever put Flora first; not her parents, not her friends, and not Jack. It wasn't a think she expected or needed, sad as that was. "I didn’t need you to go to Frey. I didn’t need you to sub in Sohalia. I needed you. You were the only thing I wanted."

Then he says it—that was one night—and the plateau tilts under her feet as if the whole green world has shifted a fraction off its axis. She steps back like the words have weight, heartbeat climbing into her throat until breath becomes a narrow seam she must sip at. He keeps speaking and the meaning tries to soften, but the hook is already set even if undoubtably he'd meant that it hadn't been just one night. "I wanted you when you weren’t mine to want," she says, softer now, her voice worn and aching. "And you just...wanted someone else. Missed someone else." Wanted mornings and firsts and love with someone else.

When he reaches for her, instinct and longing surge like twin currents, and for a dangerous instant, she nearly lets herself be taken. But she knows the cost of crumbling in his arms, knows this isn’t like sleeping like Jack where the rule are ones she understands; this is something new with her heart already exposed, and Kaisel has already nearly broken it once. Her fingers find her ring and turn; the air shivers around her and she thins into absence, a slip of breeze moving through colour to try and evade him. The blooms part and close in her wake as she threads back toward the Sugartide, the sound of her voice trailing like a bright ribbon over her shoulder—steady, controlled, refusing to break even as her tears come a touch more freely now for her invisibility. "Come on," she calls, invisible among the flowers. "I’m going back."

real big things I still gotta figure out

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3

I'm like a titan that's risin'

"No," he says evenly, jaw tight. "I continued to go after Caly, in part, because of you." At the start, Caly had been all him, Flora an already out of reach idea he'd been content to share any time with. After the night on the Sugar Tide, Caly had been a way to prove that nothing had changed. He liked her for her, and wanted to chase down something real when Flora had become a memory he could hold and nothing more. At the House of Midnight though? He would have ended everything to keep Flora, but she'd shoved everything back tenfold, and Caly became another way to show he could move past it all and be a friend.

"You act like I knew what would happen," he snorts. "I thought it wouldn't. I thought I couldn't face Koa with it." He flops his hands against his side, having nothing else left to give, starting to feel the circle of the argument looping back around, each of them somehow no closer to agreement or forgiveness. "I have now, though," he admits with a heavy sigh. He's still breathing, so perhaps all his fantasies of protecting someone had just been cowardice in disguise.

His jaw slackens again as disbelief threatens to run him flat into the ground like a stampede. "Wha—Flora! Gods, I didn't want to keep pushing back when you pushed me away, I thought it'd ruin any chance of still being your friend. I couldn't stand to lose you twice." Yet, for all his attempts, it's feeling like he just might. Each set of words she brandishes next feels like a hand pulling one brick after another from the foundation he thought he'd made so steady. His balance is wavering when pitted against the sway of all her hurt and his uncertainty, freshly raw with each failure she lists out like she's been dutifully keeping score, nearly expectant with it.

"You never said that," is all that manages to slip free of him as more and more cinches up in dread. Needing him, wanting him, she just expected him to know that, what inbetween her kicking their best night into being nothing more than him feeling tired, hopped up on sugar, and horny? "Why didn't you just say that Flora? That would have changed everything."

When she vanishes before his eyes, it sends everything sinking in deep and final. His mouth instantly dries, his fingers grappling at wind and light instead of gold and flowers. He closes his hands back into his jacket, staring after the subtle trail of parting flowers as they bend back towards the Sugar Tide. A swell of such immense sadness nearly makes him step after her, intending to trail along in defeat. Instead, he blinks against the prickle rising in his eyes and firms up the line of his lips. "No!" he calls out after her. "I'm not giving up!" He clenches his teeth, a flare of anger rearing up.

She's going to say all that, and then just call it quits?

"That night on the Sugar Tide? It's the best one of my life. I think about it all the time—I started renting the fancy rooms in the House of Midnight just to fall asleep in the closest imitation of your ship." He crouches down among the flowers, firmly planting his ass around them, barking out memories over their colorful heads. "You smelled so good—lilac? Your moans are my favorite, especially the ones right before you cum, when I had my hand on your clit? I can't tell you how many times that's been a lullaby. But gods, the way you feel Ro, that's the part that really does me in. You're perfect, actually perfect."

He tilts his head back, like he's chasing the unwinding memory. "I mean, every day with you is always the best. I can't eat ice cream without thinking of you now, and I got I think my first ever good tan this past Longheat. I'm amazed by all the things you accomplish constantly. You're a terrible packer though, like one of the worst at moving houses. You make up for it though, with all the ways you love so much. That's why you hold onto every trinket, isn't it? You're hoarding love and memories with every treasure.

Kaisel

Show you the harder the battle, the harder I fight

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

Flora lets a silence settle between them long enough that it begins to take a shape. She studies Kaisel through it; the hard line of his jaw, the way the warmth in his copper eyes has cooled to something forged and inflexible, frustration bright as a struck match behind it. For all the looping and fraying of their words, one thread is finally clear: they have both made a mess of this. I didn’t know has always sounded like an excuse to her, a shrug disguised as an apology, but the thought tilts unexpectedly as she stands there, invisible and aching. Too many hours with Jack have taught her the ease of being read without asking, of thoughts answered before they’re spoken such that perhaps she's developed a habit of thinking a look is a letter, and silence can be a sentence. Maybe the signs she thought she left Kaisel were only shadows he could never catch.

When his anger flares and he vows he isn’t giving up, she can already see the version of events where she tries to force him to his feet by threatening to leave him, the SugarTide beginning to hum as her hand hovers over the wheel. He would stay rooted in the flowers, and she— even with the hull lifting—would never actually leave him there, and he knows it as surely as she does. It irks her how perfectly he matches her penchant for drama, even if she understands it completely.

"Fine," she says at last, and the word comes out small, worn at the edges, thin as fabric that’s been washed too many times. His memories of their night spill into the air and heat floods her unseen face, a quick, betraying flare across the bridge of her nose. Her lips part for a breath that somehow doesn’t reach the bottom of her lungs, with it’s too late pressed against her tongue. Explanations don’t return the nights she sat alone or soften the mornings that went quiet; they arrive after the feeling has already settled and made a place for itself deep in her bones where affection for him had run rampant. But, hating how final that would sound, she swallows it and lets the quiet carry what words would only bruise.

With a soft sigh, Flora lowers herself invisibly into the flowers to lay on her back, eyes tracking a pale scrap of cloud drifting an indifferent path across the blue. When she speaks again, the words are rubbed thin with salt. "It hurt, what you did," she says, and the honesty of it empties her voice of every blade. "You came after Pierce’s stupid pool party, and then after Dahlia attacked me.." She swallows, the sound hardly more than a ripple. "Maybe it was stupid of me to think you’d come back on your own, but after everything that happened between us—"

The sentence unthreads as tears find the curve of her temples and slip into her hair unseen. There's no accusation in her voice now, only grief given room to breathe. She draws a breath that snags anyway and tries again, softer, as if something more might break within her if she speaks too loudly. "Whatever you thought you were doing...it was the wrong thing."

real big things I still gotta figure out

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3

I'm like a titan that's risin'

He expected to lay siege to her stubbornness with his own, compliments and memories raised like mortars. He thought she wouldn't go down without a fight—Spice aimed like artillery, some god conjured as a snare, or Flora's personal weaponry targeting him until she achieved compliance. He even figured she might leave him. He'd never seen her this upset at him after all, so while he banked on the likelihood she wouldn't strand him, he did not set it outside the realm of possibilities today and committed to the idea of making camp here if needed—at the very least he assumed she'd come back after an hour or so, although the sheep might have mauled him by then.

He does not expect the way she yields. It's as faint as the difference between eggshell and white, but it's there, and he'll take it.

The muffled noise of her easing amongst the flowers draws a careful exhale from him, and slowly he leans back into the folds of color too. He doesn't dare speak, even fears the sound of his breath tearing this tissue paper moment. One where neither of them are slinging explanations or wounds and they get to just be. He knows it doesn't mean anything is better, not in the ways that really matter, but he can't help but wish they could lay here all day and find shapes in the sky to laugh about.

As with all other moments he's tried to hold still though, this one too breaks and moves on, bending into the hushed spread of her voice. He inhales deeply through his nose as he listens, eyes closing shut until it's just the sound of her in the faceless, dark sea of the world. "It wasn't stupid of you," he murmurs around the corner of a frown. "I wanted to come see you...I would have," he licks his lips. He should have risked more for her, even her rejection. Should have gotten a clear answer instead of created one. Too many things he should have done.

A grumble of acknowledgement proceeds a deep sigh at her final words. "I know...now." When he'd asked if she'd change anything, at the time his answer had been no, but now he wishes he had the ability to go back to that night at the House of Midnight and redo it all, or at least one of the days afterwards, even if it made the future him someone different from who he is now. He'd prefer someone else. His fingers pluck up a flower and curl it's stem over and over in his hand. "I'm sorry, Ro. I never wanted to make you feel like this." He tilts his head, trying to glance from the edge of his view to where he thinks she is.

"Let me make it up to you?" He can't change what'd happened, but he could go forward better prepared to never do this again, not to her.

Kaisel

Show you the harder the battle, the harder I fight

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

For a long moment she lets his offer rest where it lands and tests it against the shape of what she knows. She has felt something for him far longer than a single night aboard the Sugar Tide; it was there at her going-away party in the bright, embarrassing flare of jealousy when she saw him with someone else, and it was there in the words she leaned to whisper against his ear—I’ll always be here—meant as a promise with more chambers than she dared to open. She thinks of the dance they owed each other that night, the vow to make it happen; of the way they’d talked about stars on her deck and a trip to Halo to watch the sky unspool its lights. Of running away where no one could find them. So many plans spoken aloud like constellations traced by fingertip, and somehow they never found the time, never found the road, never found anything more than the shape of each other that night, and gods but the longer it looked, the more the magic of his words felt painted on; lovely, until touched, and then it all blurred back to reality.

How is he meant to mend something when anything he says will be sifted for the grains of salt she'll need to believe it, and anything he does will still carry the faint outline of this? Tears move quietly along her temples; she presses her mouth into a line to smother the useless hiccup of a sob before it can betray her.

None of this feels like them. Not the hush. Not the space. Even when she couldn’t look at him at the House of Midnight, he’d still found a way to make her smile; his foot nudged out like a lifeline, absurd and perfect, a thing to touch when touch was all they had left. Now she lies invisible in a field built for grand gestures, high in the Draig Cordillera where the world pretends to be nothing but colour and wonder, and still her chest feels scraped clean, a hollow no beauty can reach. She could reach for him; he could reach for her; but her fingertips feel cold in a way that feels permanent, as if the world has quietly moved everything warm an arm’s length beyond her.

She pulls in a breath, thin but steady, and tries to dress herself back in composure. "There’s nothing you need to make up to me," she says at last, the softness of it bruised and broken. "It just...is what it is."

real big things I still gotta figure out

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3

I'm like a titan that's risin'

The flower's stem eventually becomes too limp to hold any sort of curl, wound and unwound too often that it's begun to break apart. He lets the ruined thing fall from his hand as the too-quiet answer comes from her. He just lays still for a bit, giving up on seeing what's invisible in favor of shutting his eyes again. The flower's talk for a while instead of them, petals bowing to breeze.

"Cap," he finally breathes, hauling himself back from the edge of despair yet again. Behind his eyes, he'd grabbed hold of all the golden moments they'd had, and desperately looped them around this horribly black one trying to dress up as a rainbow. "I've seen you do things no one believed possible. I've seen you change so much, for the better. I don't think there's anything that can stay what it is, and especially not this, I won't let it." He sits up partway, twisting over onto a forearm to peer towards where she should be. "I'll make it up somehow, just watch."

He doesn't know how yet, but suddenly a piece of paper to connect him to her doesn't seem like nearly enough to matter. He's got to do something that even this field would have trouble containing, because if she's doubting his words now and his motives and his ability to actually deliver, he'd have to make it something impossible to ignore just to prove her wrong.

What he does know is that he's gotten as far as he'll be able to today, much as he'd sit in this field with her until they'd grown grey. She's hiding still, she's all gossamer still, but it feels like something better than where they began, which is just proof of how terrible that starting line had been. "C'mon," he sighs, rousing to his feet. "I think I heard another Alpina. Bet the bastard went and got some friends."

Kaisel

Show you the harder the battle, the harder I fight

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

It feels like standing with her toes at the lip of a winter shore, the water numbing first and then tugging, grain by grain, until the sand gives underfoot and she begins to sink. Kaisel speaks of the things that she's done, and she can already feel the machinery of him whirring toward a plan; the way he has always reached for action before attention, for promise before listening. "I meant that you can't change the past," she clarifies softly. Maybe she is trying to make a mind reader of him again; maybe she has forgotten how to speak plainly when the truth is this tender. Either way, the sense of him gearing up for some future spectacle loosens fresh tears down her cheeks. She has never been the type who needed fireworks; her heart has always belonged to the ones who show up, who stay, who learn the shape of the room she’s in and sit there with her until the weather changes rather than forcing the sun out of hiding.

When Kaisel turns to look her way, Flora looks back at him, taking advantage of her invisibility to study the face she once thought she could trace with her eyes closed. The angles are the same, but something essential feels misaligned, as if the two of them have been stretched into shadows of themselves and now overlap without touching. She twists her ring and lets herself appear as he rises, the world drawing her back into focus. The moment feels brittle with future regret, a point she can already see from far ahead where they might both wish they had reached differently, said differently, held differently. This argument has not followed the map she drew for it when she'd thought of it in the shower or before bed, and some stubborn part of her wants to stop him and tell him that there are a thousand small, ordinary ways to go forward, that she'd rather go back to yelling at him than this sense of foreboding, but she doesn't trust herself to say it without her voice breaking.

So she only looks at him, as if memorising, eyes bright and wet and full of a kind of farewell she cannot bring herself to even begin to acknowledge. In the past, she tried to make Jack love her the way she wanted and watched it go nowhere; she won’t try to bend Kaisel into that shape, and she won’t do that to herself again; if he is set on getting it wrong again, she'll be sure not leave her heart in the path of it.

Swiping the tears from her cheeks, Flora pulls her gaze away and lifts two fingers to her mouth, releasing a whistle that cuts clean through the field to call Spice back to her, before turning and heading aboard the Sugartide.

~FIN

real big things I still gotta figure out

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3