Love will always find you here

I swear I couldn't love you more than I do today
and yet I know I will tomorrow

Beloved as her spa may be, there is little the House can't recreate when the chips are down and her daughter needs somewhere to escape. Ru had considered having one of the workers in for massages, but the heartache on her daughter's face had changed her mind immediately. Nobody is worthy of hearing her daughter's feelings and secrets, and unfortunately Hotaru can only compel people, not mind-wipe them.

"Do you want me to braid your hair after this?" A soft murmur as she gently twists and pins it loosely out of the way, exposing barely-there freckles across Flora's shoulders. The House's favored warming oil covers them soon after, and the firelight from the hearth shines like illusory gold in it. Hotaru's thumbs cradle the delicate vertebrae in Flora's neck and rock gently, working up the pressure in a slow and unhurried fashion. "Big breath in, and slowly out." The seated massage chair may be plush enough to burst, incense and the sound of both distant waves and forest birds may fill the air to remind her of home new and old, but Hotaru knows the tension under her hands can't be fixed by those things alone. "I've got you, petal. You talk when you're ready."

Ru

this is why we can't have nice things, honey

"Mmhmmm." Flora hums, not trusting herself to speak as she melts against the massage chair and tries to lose herself in the sounds of her childhood that swirl all around them.

For the rest of the world the queen had always put on a brave face; when Enzo had died, when she'd lost the election, when Torchline had been ravaged by Starfall's arrival. Only her mother had ever seen what lay properly below her mask in those dark moments, and so it was to the Valkyrie that Flora had run after The Incident at the Hanged Man.

Moaning as her mother's fingers found a knot she hadn't even realized was there, Flora exhales shakily as fingers of tension roar out from the pressure and threaten to strangle her. "He was supposed to be the good one." The queen whispers, pressing her eyes closed and doing her best to focus on her breathing despite how her body wanted to continually tense at both the memories flashing behind her eyelids as much as her mother's hands.

Hotaru had heard the drama already about Koa and Sohalia and how the dragoon had fucked everything up before disappearing. She'd heard too about her daughter's dabblings with Jack. Where Koa was careless but genuine, Jack was the complete opposite such that in careful proportions, they balanced each other out when it came to providing Flora what she'd needed.

But Asta?

Gods he'd been the whole package. A gentleman, knowledgable (so she'd thought), wonderfully dangerous, and gods so fucking hot.

"And the whole time he was in love with Danta." Flora is saying, the words hiccuping from her lips. "Which is so fucked up because it was Danta's idea for us to go on a date in the first place? And Asta just...I mean we even had future dates planned." Whether or not it makes much sense, clipped and disjointed in its retelling as it is, Flora doesn't know.

I swear I couldn't love you more than I do today
and yet I know I will tomorrow

Her heart twinges at the first whispered words that come to Flora's lips. The first, the loudest, and the quietest - words that will always ring truer than the rest. Hotaru's thumbs crest up to the bottom of Flora's skull and take a moment to kiss behind her jawbone in a gentle hold before resuming slow strokes down her neck and into her shoulders.

"Danta may not know how he feels," she points out, though Hotaru would bet plentiful coin on it being due to mutual idiocy or aversion to love than obliviousness. "If he does, they're both idiots in denial. Or they better hope they are." If it was something more sinister, more intentional? Then Hotaru will gladly lure the Maverick back to the House of Midnight, only this time his cock will find a very different, much bloodier end. "But this really hurt you, petal. Why?" An unassuming, gentle tone, one that prompts Flora to look within instead of bristling. Why, when it had been so fast? Why, when she has never cared about goodness before?

Ru

this is why we can't have nice things, honey

Humming a rather tragic note of agreement, Flora can only shrug her shoulders before forcing herself to relax into her mother's strong fingers. She adores the Valkyrie for her instant rise to violence and where most might think that Flora gets her own from Remi, they'd be very wrong in that assumption. Her mother's willingness to lay down her life for her children and those she cares for had carried the Doubletake through her formative years, sequestered away in the Greatwood as they had been back then, and gods but it felt good to have someone fully on her side, even if she was perhaps in the wrong about it all.

"I..." The question has Flora's stomach tensing, her breathing growing sharp, then shallow, then held completely. "I just want what you and Sunjata have." She murmurs softly, her voice tight and broken, like shattered bits of coloured glass now too small to reflect the light. "What my dads have..." No doubt she'd be told to be patient and that these things take time, but it wasn't as though that wasn't going to stop the Doubletake from desperately wanting it. From holding too tightly to the first glimmers of true love even if they were only fool's gold in the end.

I swear I couldn't love you more than I do today
and yet I know I will tomorrow

This is a perfect moment of gratitude for Flora's lack of Attunement, or she would have discovered far greater depths to Hotaru's allusions to violence than the Valkyrie's brevity imparted. She might have cultivated those thoughts if Flora had answered in any other way - any of the ways Ru had expected, which would have heaped greater fault onto Asta or Danta - but this? This is an answer she couldn't have predicted. 

Hotaru slides her hands down Flora's arms to her wrists in one swift motion. Her fingers brush blindly over knuckles so familiar she can read them like braille, coaxing fingers to intertwine so she can squeeze them tightly. She envelopes Flora from behind like a brooding bird perched over its young, golden hair melding indistinguishably with Flora's as she embraces her. 

"Oh, Flora..." where did my little girl go? The pain of crushes and flings is a hurt much easier for a mother to soothe than this raw, aimless yearning. "You deserve that kind of love. It's the strongest thing I've known, and to know it yourself is all I've ever wanted for you." Ru's hands tighten over Flora's as if by the strength of her grip she might force the world to produce it for her daughter here and now. "But you know its power can go both ways." Love of that magnitude can grant the ability to win wars, cheat death, and alter history - but it can so easily destroy its creator with that same awesome might. Flora has seen it firsthand and is far from unaware, but - "That means the pain of searching for it and finding nothing, or believing it has arrived and being wrong, is far greater than casual dating or flings."

Hotaru presses a butterfly kiss to the baby hairs at Flora's nape and murmurs, "It will always hurt, because to love like that you must make yourself vulnerable. Pain is always greater when you don't brace - but love can't get in if you do." Flora doesn't need the conclusions drawn for her. Hotaru's baby is brighter than any star Caido can parade past in vain competition. "So what matters more to you where you are now - to love, or to be free of pain?"

Ru

this is why we can't have nice things, honey

A day not so far in the future, her mother's words would ring in her ears loud enough to temporarily blot out the enormity of what she was feeling. It would make the hurt of now feel insignificant and laughable in comparison, only she won't run to Hotaru then. Instead, she coils in on herself, the pain too raw, too real to be anything other than felt in isolation.

For the moment, though, with the mostly self-inflicted wounds of what she thought she was to Asta and he to her still feeling like the worst thing that could have happened, Flora can only sniff softly in response to her mother's questions. How much pain, she wanted to demand; for how long? And if she accepted it, if she opened herself up every time, could the Valkyire promise that at the end of it, she'd have her happy ending?

Naive and small as she was, even Flora knew that her questions had no answers, and so rather than voicing them, she simply reaches a hand over her shoulder, clutching at the spill of her mother's hair and arching herself back against her.

~FIN