funny how true colours shine in darkness and secrecy

and all that we intend is scrawled in sand

"It isn’t gone," Flora corrects, grinning a little as she tosses him a sidelong glance, the mischief curling at the edges of her words like ivy on brick. "We’re gone." Her fingers splay in a vague gesture to the glade around them, to the hush and the hush within the hush. "The trees shifted. We’re somewhere else entirely." She draws in a breath, turning a slow circle as if to confirm it, curls spilling free from where her messy bun has long since given up the ghost. "Being able to do this is why I was unbeatable at hide and seek, growing up."

But then Koa steps closer, and for the briefest flicker of a second—just long enough to steal the breath from her lungs—she wants to stay here. Like this. Suspended. No fighting, no too-full stares, no questions she doesn’t want to ask because she’s too afraid of the answers. Just his hand on her shoulder, the quiet between them spun from childhood memories and moss, and the easy kind of affection that used to come naturally.

But the moment isn’t suspended; the trees can only do so much, after all. So Flora exhales through her nose, lifts her chin, and answers with a quip instead of an embrace. "You were great too," she says, voice light as she meets his gaze again. "Very heroic. You could’ve let me faceplant into a tree root and made a clean getaway while it chewed me up." She bumps her arm gently into his palm before retreating again and considering the glade. "Though..I actually have no idea where we are now."

Koa

Don't you just wanna wake up dark as a lake
Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?

The idea that the forest moved them doesn't make Koa feel any more confident, but his anxiety is blunted by the playful mischief that shifts across her face like ripples on a pond. "I bet," Koa answers, warm and fond at the idea of mini!Flora ordering the trees around with gentle and firm authority, leaving her brother and anyone else standing open-handed and slack-jawed. Always an imperious queen, he can remember that from their brief flashes of shared childhood. He'd admired her even in those halcyon days, when they'd been young and stupid and pure.

It's easy to pretend, for a minute, that everything is okay. That with the escape from the Wickerwoman they've successfully left the greatest danger behind- but of course they haven't, because the biggest danger they've ever faced is themselves. "I would never!" Koa sniffs, playfully defensive, though his smile falters as she pulls away. With the drain of adrenaline comes reality's return, and even the idyllic environment they've found themselves in isn't enough to keep their differences from settling like silt as the turbid waters still.

Koa takes a step away, his hand reaching up to dig in his hair as he looks around the glade. "As long as we can find our way out," he mumbles, gazing into the trees as though a path might open before him. Though whether that's a path to civilization or away from the conversation they have to return to...

Well, maybe a bit of both.

"Flora..." Koa exhales heavily, his jaw working as he searches for the words he needs. Suddenly the glade feels far too small, the trees oppressive rather than romantic, the song of birds mocking in their carefree joy. He needs to pick up where he left off, to ask about Jack and Kaisel and the crime that's happened, but that's not what comes out. "I hate that I don't know how to talk to you anymore," the Dragoon says instead, frustration tightening his throat, making his voice gruff. "I don't want-- I want us to be--" He breaks off with a frustrated huff, shaking his head like a dog. What does he want them to be? Friends? Less?

More?

"What did you want to talk to me about?" Maybe that will go over better. Or else it'll fully blow them up.

If you're drunk on life, babe, I think it's great
But while in this world I think I'll take my whiskey neat

and all that we intend is scrawled in sand

The way he says her name makes her turn.

It isn't sharp. Not clipped or defensive or laced with authority like it was when he'd been standing straight-backed before. No, this version of her name is softer. Bruised around the edges but somehow still so warm. Full of unsaid things, and gods, Flora can’t tell if those things are merely unspoken or simply unshaped; if they’re buried because he can’t find them, or because he knows he shouldn’t.

She watches him unravel, that strong, certain voice catching and stalling like a blade against bone, and something wilted curls inside her chest. Her gaze drops as she rubs a hand up the opposite arm; his hand had just been there, warm and sure, guiding her like old times, like nothing between them had changed.

But it has. Of course it has, that's the whole reason that they're here.

Flora doesn't tell him to keep going, doesn’t ask him to try and name the silence he'd offered, because if he could, he would have by now. That’s the worst part. Not the fumbling or the silence, but the way she genuinely believes he doesn’t know. And that leaves her stranded, because for all her bravado and glittering grace, Flora doesn't know what he wants from her either, and all the roles she's tried to slip into—of smiling supporter, tear-eyed and full of melancholy, or indifferent queen—don't fit quite right.

She lifts her head slowly, her gaze flickering across the dappled canopy, light spilling through the leaves like sugar over skin. There’s no path to follow. No map through this, and yet here they are, staring at each other like a giant lightbulb is just going to pop on. "I wanted to tell you a secret," she says at last, voice quiet, careful, like she's testing the words before they can do any harm. "One I've wanted to tell you for a long time now."

Her hand slips into the pocket of her shorts, fingers brushing glass. She pulls the vial free—small, unassuming, its liquid shimmer dark and strangely lightless in the glade’s afternoon hush. "But it’s dangerous. And knowing it will get you killed." She doesn't give him time to react, just presses on, words tumbling now with the kind of hopeless momentum that only comes when she’s already halfway off the cliff.

"So...I got this from Ludo," she says, holding the bottle up between them like a surrender. "It erases memories. Just an hour’s worth." Her thumb taps the glass once, lightly. "My plan was to tell you the truth—everything—and then give you this. So you wouldn’t remember what I said, but...maybe you'd feel different anyway. In your body, or...y'know, however that works, so that you and Soh could just...live happily ever after. "

Her laugh is small, sharp with self-deprecation, and her smile as she glances back at Koa is the kind that tilts like a crown about to fall. "I know it's ridiculous." A breath, shaky but genuine. "And now that I’ve said it out loud, it sounds like the worst idea I’ve ever had." And gods, does she have some contenders.

Koa

Don't you just wanna wake up dark as a lake
Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?

I wanted to tell you a secret. Curse Koa's treacherous heart for the way it flip-flops, clenching as if Flora'd reached between his ribs and taken it into her hand. It's traitorous and stupid, and he has to force himself to ignore it, to squash the flame he's carried for her before it has a chance to surge.

But fuck if she isn't making that incredibly difficult with her scalpel-precise words cutting delicate breadcrumbs that lead a trail he's too simple not to follow into the woods. Something she's been wanting to tell him, something that will get him killed? Koa's mind flicks to Jack and Kaisel, an image of the smuggler silhouetted against a skyline slashed by a crimson storm. It has to be about him, and if it's something he'd kill for, and something she wants to tell him...

Greater men have killed for lesser women than the Doubletake before.

Koa's eyes never leave the vial as she unveils her plan. The words wash over him like a tide, leaving salt adhering to his mind even as they draw him to her. It's... yeah, okay, it is ridiculous, especially if one thinks about it for for more than five seconds or so.

But Koa's never been a thinker. And now he has to know.

"Okay." Swallowing, Koa extends his hand for the vial. No further questions. No follow up. He meets her eyes without hesitation, copper gaze gleaming in the light that dapples through the trees. He can't give himself time to consider, because then he'll chicken out, and he has to believe that she's right about this. That whatever it is will stay with him in some way, in his bones, his being, indelibly.

He's got a heart of gold, that Koa, but not the best of brains.

If you're drunk on life, babe, I think it's great
But while in this world I think I'll take my whiskey neat

and all that we intend is scrawled in sand

But Flora doesn’t hand over the vial—not yet. Her fingers tighten around the glass like it’s something precious or flammable or both, and her gaze flickers to Koa’s outstretched hand with a tremble of hesitation before she moves instead. Not away, not far—just a quiet pivot as she turns toward the little rise nestled among the wildflowers and climbs it like it’s a place she’s known forever.

She drops into a cross-legged seat in the grass, the hem of her shorts brushing against clover and goldenroot. Her white tank is a soft contrast to the green, and she curls forward slightly, plucking a few strands of clover between her fingers. Her hands, normally so sure—adorned with rings of poison and glamour—are suddenly all nervous energy: twisting stems, weaving idle patterns, anything to occupy them while her thoughts trip over the cliffs inside her head.

She glances at the sun, narrowing one eye against the brightness. Two fingers raised. One hour.

Then she looks back to Koa—eyes clear, solemn, unguarded in a way they almost never are. "I want to talk about us," she says, and the words fall like stones into the quiet, slow and sinking. "But to do that...I have to talk about Jack." She doesn’t flinch when she says his name, though she does soften. "I know he’s probably the last person you want to hear about. But I can’t explain what happened to us, with us, without explaining him first."

Her braid falters: a daisy slips from the weave and flutters against her knee. Her fingers pause, and then—quietly—Flora lifts her gaze and holds out a hand toward Koa, palm up and open. An invitation, not a demand. A silent plea to sit beside her. To be beside her, if he can stomach it. "Please?" Her voice is gentler now, with none of the glamour or sparkle. "I don’t want to do this from far away."

Koa

Don't you just wanna wake up dark as a lake
Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?

Where Koa is a blunt instrument swinging into action, Flora is precision and caution and grace. Strong fingers close on nothing but air as the Doubletake turns away from him, a flash of confusion pulling his brows together in a frown. He wonders, briefly, if he's failed some test, if this is going to be another situation where he's left feeling bemused and inadequate for reasons he has no way to understand.

But then Flora stops, settling like a faerie princess into a throne of green and gold, the sunlight glancing off her rings as her fingers busy themselves with the flowers. It's an uncharacteristic level of reserve and stillness, and it catches Koa entirely off guard. Already disoriented by the lurching changes in tonal direction this encounter is continuously taking, the young man is helpless to do anything but watch her, mouth dry as he gives up trying to predict what she'll say next.

Although perhaps this time he should have predicted, because for once he would have been right. His heart rises into his throat at I want to talk about us, only to come crashing back down at I have to talk about Jack. "I kinda figured." His lips curl into something like a smile, but it's wry and bitter because even if he knew that the captain would come into this, it doesn't lessen sandpaper sting that his name drags through Koa's mind.

But he doesn't falter, doesn't retreat; he accepts the invitation to settle on the grass, though with far less ease and grace than she. The roots and rocks have made it so that to be comfortable he must be close enough for their knees to brush together, the pair of them side-by-side in a way they never seemed able to sustain. Koa lets his hands splay out onto the ground, clover peeking through his fingers as it reaches for the sun. "Okay," he says for a second time, turning to her with an expression that is boyish and encouraging, vulnerable and afraid. "What's this big scary secret, then? Please don't tell me you have a secret baby or something," he adds, mostly in jesting reference to her own wild narrative about him and Sohalia, though a tiny part of him is now wildly suspicious that this is, in fact, the case.

If you're drunk on life, babe, I think it's great
But while in this world I think I'll take my whiskey neat

and all that we intend is scrawled in sand

As Koa settles beside her, Flora casts a glance over her shoulder, the golden sweep of her hair catching in a sunbeam as her laughter spills soft and musical into the quiet glade. "Gods, no," she breathes, nudging her shoulder against his in playful rebuke. "I promise there’s no secret baby. Can you imagine?" Her nose crinkles, but the lightness in her tone is brittle, like a sugar shell with nothing but ache inside. "Actually, please don't."

The guilt creeps in before she even speaks—cold, winding, coiling beneath her ribs. Jack’s secret isn’t hers to share. She promised she never would, in fact. And even now, it feels like a betrayal to say it aloud, like carving something private out of the air and handing it over to someone who won’t understand what it cost her to keep it this long. But gods, what else is she supposed to do? With Ludo’s potion, and what it might mean for Koa and Sohalia...not to mention the fact Jack had left her and she'd always threatened him that there'd be consequences if he did? It doesn't make it right, but gods it makes it a little easier.

"Jack…" she begins, then pauses. Her voice feels thin, too delicate for what she’s about to say. She meets Koa’s copper stare and forces the words through anyway, each one like glass dragged over her tongue. "Jack is a telepath." The words drop like stones into still water, rippling out with all the weight they carry, and she hates the silence that follows, so she rushes on, words tumbling out too fast, too full: "He can hear your every thought..knows what you're feeling...can see things you aren't even aware of."

Her fingers twitch in the clover, brushing the leaves as if they might ground her. "It’s...impossible to describe, what that’s like, being with someone who can do that. To be seen that fully, that constantly. Every flicker of doubt. Every want. Every thought that never even forms into a full sentence—he already has it. Knows what you’re feeling before you do. And he can give you what you want before you even ask for it."

She looks down, blinking rapidly as tears prick the corners of her eyes. Her breath shakes once, the only warning before she turns toward him again, urgency blooming behind her expression. "The reason we never were," she whispers, "gods, Koa, it was never you."

She reaches for his hand then, tentatively, fingertips brushing against his like petals searching for sun. "You were up against someone who already knew everything I needed," she says, voice low, a tremor riding beneath it. "Every fear I couldn’t name. Every want I couldn’t say out loud and didn't even know existed. He gave it to me before I even asked." Her breath hitches, catching on the words like thorns. "And gods, Koa, it was still nearly you anyway." Her gaze flicks up to his, something tender and aching flickering behind her lashes. "I still—" The sentence curls inward, collapsing beneath the weight of everything it means. "I still fell for you."

A sad smile ghosts across her mouth, too fragile to stay long. It’s not wry this time, but grieving. "You didn’t lose me because you weren’t enough," she whispers, each word pulled from a place in her chest that still bruises when she breathes. "You were perfect. You were everything." Her throat tightens, and though she’s never wanted to measure them against each other—Koa and Jack, heart and shadow—there’s a bitter clarity in the aftermath. Because whatever else might’ve gone wrong between her and the dragoon in the end, she knows Koa would never have left her the way Jack did. And gods, that makes this all hurt so much more to lay out. "There was just no way to compete with someone who lived inside my head."

The words are quieter than breath, and they feel like a betrayal even now—not of Koa, but of everything that came after. Of the choice she made. Of picking the one who read every thought, knew her better than she knew herself, and still let her go.

She turns toward Koa fully then, desperation bright in her seafoam stare. "It’s all I’ve been wanting to say since that day," she murmurs, the weight of it finally cresting over her voice, causing it to tremble and waver. "Just for a minute—just for this hour—I needed you to know. It wasn’t your fault. It never was."

Koa

Don't you just wanna wake up dark as a lake
Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?

He can imagine, actually, though fortunately he doesn't have to for long, as Flora is quick to quell that particular nightmare with a bright laugh and a brittle smile. In the time it takes her to find the words to tell him what's actually going on Koa thinks he could die a hundred times over, but he manages to maintain some level of patience, to meet the tentative aqua gaze with steadiness and calm.

That is until the truth comes out, and, well... fuck. Koa's eyes widen at the revelation; even if he did want to interrupt her, he's too shocked to form coherent words. A telepath- it's something out of a bedtime story, wild and unheard of and rather difficult to wrap his own brain (which suddenly feels profoundly unspecial) around. He allows the rest of Flora's explanation to wash over him, each rivulet of information carving new pathways in the foggy glass that's kept him from understanding what happened to them, why things went so wrong, why Jack. By the end, a picture has begun to emerge, though it's still fractured and jumbled with a myriad of missing parts because honestly, what?

He lets the last words - it wasn't your fault - settle like a stone among the rest, his thoughts coalescing slowly into something almost coherent. At some point Koa's picked up a stray chunk of bark and a small stone; he scratches a jagged line over and over, needing to do something with his hands. "A telepath." When he finally speaks it's in a voice that is oddly disconnected, his brow furrowed as he stares at the wood in his hands, as if an explanation will manifest itself there. "I guess that makes-- no, wait. Sorry. I just... Flora, that's-- the fuck?"

He stands up, then, because he can't keep still, because if he doesn't move he's going to break apart at the seams. Dropping the bark and stone, he begins to pace around the glade. "A telepath? So he - what, he can literally read minds? And he still thought Kai deserved to be nuked halfway to oblivion?" He lets out a sub-hysteric laugh, thrusting his fingers into his hair. "How the fuck is someone who's able to read people's minds still that much of a jackoff?" Pun not intended, but if the shoe fits.

If you're drunk on life, babe, I think it's great
But while in this world I think I'll take my whiskey neat

and all that we intend is scrawled in sand

Flora had reached for Koa's hand with all the quiet grace of a girl trying not to ask too much of a moment—fingers inching forward in the space between words—but he doesn’t see her. Or if he does, he doesn’t take her hand. The distance between them, which she had been so carefully trying to close, remains stubborn and unmoved. So she lets her touch fall away, her fingers curling instead into the clover, threading gently through the little patches of green and purple at her side, as if they might offer her something softer to hold than this sudden silence.

She nods as he speaks, not trusting her voice yet, though his words are like flint against stone, flaring each time with something sharper than disbelief. A telepath, he says, and her lashes lower against the surprise that flickers through her chest—not just from the revelation itself, but from where his mind runs next. Not to her. Not to them. But to Kaisel. Her thoughts often do that too, though she hadn't expected him to come up now. There’s no bitterness in it, not really, but it catches somewhere delicate all the same, a pinprick of quiet hurt that she tucks beneath her tongue and does not let rise.

When she finally speaks, her voice is soft but steady, like the hush of tidewater drawing back from the shore. "Kai wanted a fight." It isn’t an excuse, and she doesn't try to shape it like one. "He came in ready for it. Provoked Jack intentionally with every single word, fully intending to start a fight." Her fingers brush a clover blossom into a gentle spin, grounding herself in the weight of the moment, even as her mind drifts briefly to what Koa won’t remember and what she shouldn’t bother saying. Still, she adds, "If Jack had meant to kill him, Koa, he would have. But he didn’t. He held back. However much it looked like he didn’t, he did."

And then she falls quiet again, gaze still lowered, but not lost. There is more she could say—so much more. She could tell Koa that being a telepath isn't some storybook gift, that Jack’s head has never known quiet, not since he was small. That he grew up with a mother who died too young and a father who broke things just to hear them scream, and that somewhere between the pain and the noise and the endless intrusion of other people’s thoughts, Jack had to carve himself into something cold just to survive, despite living someplace as warm as Torchline. That what looks like cruelty was, for him, a kind of armour. That no one taught him how to be kind. That sometimes she isn’t sure he even knows how.

But she doesn’t say any of it. That history isn’t hers to hand out, no matter how tempting it is to offer it up like a defence. It’s too precious, too personal, and far too easy to twist. So she swallows it down, tucks it away behind her teeth, and lets Koa’s anger sit unchallenged.

She says nothing about who Jack is, or why she stayed. Not because the answers don’t exist, but because they were never the point of this conversation, which...is definitely not going the way she'd thought it would. She had come here to explain the gap that opened up between them, not to excuse someone else’s choices. And though it hurts to feel the shape of what matters most to him now, though it stings in ways she hadn’t quite braced for, she doesn’t recoil from it. Koa wouldn't remember any of this anyway, even if she would.

Koa

Don't you just wanna wake up dark as a lake
Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?

The justification falls on deaf ears, which is just as well. Even if Koa wasn't thoroughly distracted trying to spend every ounce of his limited brain capacity on processing what's going on, there's no reality where he'd be inclined to take Jack's side over Kai's, or to do anything except defend his cousin, idiot though the boy may be. Family loyalty is very high up on Koa's list of character traits, ranking somewhere near such stunning qualities as labradorosity and very good at punch.

He doesn't even pause to argue. His brain, buzzing, moves on quickly, bumbling data point to data point as a picture continues to become clear. Pausing in his pacing, Koa swivels back on his heel toward Flora as another thought occurs to him. "Wait, did you- oh, sorry."

Remembering, belatedly, Flora's request for him to sit beside her, to talk to her like a person, Koa takes a stride back toward her before perching on a protruding root, his foot bouncing anxiously, his body a spring. "But, okay- did you know? When you first started dating? That he could read your mind?" There isn't anger or accusation in his voice; if anything he's indignant on her behalf, because fuck is that some manipulative, messed up shit.

If you're drunk on life, babe, I think it's great
But while in this world I think I'll take my whiskey neat

and all that we intend is scrawled in sand

Flora almost waves him off when he circles back, her fingers half-lifting as if to tell him to keep pacing, to keep moving if it helps—but the gesture dies before it finds shape. She watches him sit instead, leg bouncing like it’s chasing the heartbeat she can feel thrumming through the space between them. Later, she’ll turn this moment over and over again in her head, trying to figure out how it had all gone so sideways, how something so carefully planned could unravel so completely in the open air of the Wildwood. And maybe she’ll wonder—not with bitterness, but with the soft ache of something being let go—if she ever really knew him at all. Or if she just loved the version of him she’d held like a wish between her palms, imagining it into shape because she’d needed someone solid to believe in.

Still, her voice is quiet when it comes, her gaze drifting across the rippling stream and the shadowed roots of the trees that watch them with moss-draped silence. "I mean, he never asked me to be his girlfriend or anything," she murmurs, a small, humourless smile tugging at her mouth. "So I don’t know exactly when it started. But...no, we were definitely something before I ever knew what he was."

Her fingers curl around a nearby flower, pulling it gently toward her, letting it spring back like a bowstring. Her laugh is soft, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. It slips out like seawater from a cracked hull—contained for now, but only just. "When he told me, it felt like getting slapped. Like, a proper open-palm-to-the-face moment. I was furious, and shocked and just..." The clover at her side gets another absent brush of her fingertips, and she exhales slowly through her nose. "It felt like a violation and a manipulation all at once, because it wasn’t just a secret. It was me. Every thought. Every doubt. Every single time I thought I was holding something close, and he already knew."

She glances at Koa then—not sharp, not accusing, but with a flicker of something unguarded and raw in her expression, the kind of look that trembles on the edge of laughter or tears or rage but never quite chooses. "You have no idea," she says, her voice low and steady, “"how fucking stupid you can feel. Thinking you were impressing someone. That you were charming them, pulling it off, playing it just right. Thinking if you could just be a little better, a little smarter or prettier or more mysterious, maybe you’d be enough to keep their attention." Her hand tightens briefly around the clover stem, grounding herself in something green and living as she breathes through the memory. "And then you find out they knew. The whole time. Every thought. Every crack. Every time you second-guessed yourself or wished you were someone else or knew a different way to be. They knew."

Koa

Don't you just wanna wake up dark as a lake
Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?

They were something before she ever found out. Koa's jaw clenches; he rubs his thumb on the hem of his jeans, eyes flicking between Flora's face and her hands as they shift and fidget and move. He's steadying a little, the beat of his heart and tap of his foot subdued to a less borderline manic pace. It's as though the jagged laugh and fraying edges of Flora's composure have an almost inverse effect on Koa, who has always been able to stabilize when others fall apart.

So he lets her talk and makes himself listen, her face reflected in his attentive copper gaze, his own as calm as he can possibly manage with the way his emotions roil. But his heart aches and his anger flares as she spins the story of (as Koa sees it) manipulation and lies. "Flora," Koa murmurs, fingers twitching as he considers reaching for her and ultimately only shakes his head. "Fuck, that's... that's a lot."

But she isn't done, and if he hadn't hated Jack already he certainly would now. Because while Flora is strong and bright as the sun, she is also fragile, that brilliance a mask for the insecurity beneath. Koa knows this, always has, even if he's lacked the emotional intelligence to let that understanding coalesce completely in his mind. But Jack- Jack would have seen it all, known it all, and still he'd made her fight and act and prove herself to him.

It makes Koa sick.

"You are not stupid." This time he doesn't hold himself back; he's off the root and kneeling before her, reaching for the hand that clings to clover and taking it between both of his. "Fuck, I can't even begin to imagine what you went through, how that felt, but Flora- fuck that guy." There's nothing but guileless earnestness as he searches for her eyes, warm and ardent and stubbornly convinced of his own correctness and her need to see it, too. "You should never have to feel like you need to be better, or prettier, or whatever else. You are so fucking incredible exactly as you are, and anyone who doesn't see that is a godsdamned idiot."

If you're drunk on life, babe, I think it's great
But while in this world I think I'll take my whiskey neat

and all that we intend is scrawled in sand

Flora scoffs—soft and breathless, a sound shaped more by exhaustion than humour. "Yeah," she murmurs, a dry kind of agreement curling at the corners of her mouth. It is a lot. And still, he doesn’t even know the half of it.

She doesn’t say that, though, because Koa’s already moving, already kneeling in front of her like a prayer folded in human shape, reaching for the hand that’s still buried in clover. Her fingers slip into his as though they’d never left, as though their palms still remember how to hold each other without instruction. It’s instinctive, warm, and familiar. But it doesn’t spark anything bright in her just now, not like the way it normally would. She’s tired in a way that has nothing to do with the Wicker Woman or the walk or the argument. Flora's tired in her bones, tired in her hope.

Even as Koa’s voice rises with quiet conviction, all full of sunshine and defiance—fuck that guy, and you’re incredible, and never change—her eyes don’t light. They soften. They shimmer at the edges, maybe, but they don’t brighten. It’s a kindness he’s offering, the kind he’s always been good at giving, even when they were young and stupid and trying to fumble their way through love without knowing what it was. But Flora doesn’t need sunshine right now, she just needs him to understand that all of this is her fault. Not his, not even Jack's.

Her thumb brushes lightly over his, and she exhales slowly, her voice gentler now, steadier, like the hush of a tide drawing in. "Thanks," she murmurs, not looking away, but not clinging to the moment either. The softness of his hands in hers is grounding, but it’s not enough to keep her from finding her spine again, not enough to keep the weight of everything else from pushing forward. "But..this wasn’t supposed to be about me," she says at last, the words slow and deliberate, like she’s unfolding a truth she’s been holding too tightly for too long. "At least—not entirely. It was only ever meant to help you understand that you didn’t do anything wrong. That you couldn’t have done anything differently. That...it wasn’t your timing, or something you missed or failed to do. It was never about that."

She stops, just for a second, her mouth pressing into a line, her throat tightening with the effort of keeping herself composed. The wind plays gently in the leaves above them. Somewhere in the distance, a bird calls, oblivious.

"And when this is all done," she continues, voice softer still, "when you don't even remember we talked, I just want you to be able to ahead with Sohalia without any of this dragging behind you." She lets that hang in the air for a beat, not specifying it, assuming he knows; assuming that is the weight she’s helping him set down. The hurt. The self-doubt. The ache of never quite knowing why it hadn’t worked out. Not love; not anything he might still be holding in the deeper parts of himself. She doesn’t think to consider that those might be what lingers. She doesn’t let herself wonder if it’s more than just loose ends he’s trying to tie. Because if she did, she might not be able to finish. And gods—this has to be finished.

Koa

Don't you just wanna wake up dark as a lake
Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?

Flora doesn't brighten. Doesn't flourish and bloom under his touch. Which is understandable, and fair, and fine, because the things she's told him is more than can be brushed away with calloused fingers, is bigger than the little glad that's been their haven on this strangest of days. But still he feels a coil of disappointment, of doubt, of grief for his inability to act as her sanctuary. You don't have to be strong for me, he tries to tell her with his expression, with his breathing, with the way his thumb brushes over her knuckles like a whispered kiss.

Only instead she's the one trying to reassure him, to explain that he is blameless, and Koa isn't sure if he wants to hug her or shake her because to him that doesn't matter, not right now. "Flora-" he starts with the beginning of a smile, tender bemusement in his voice and face. But she presses on, and the thing that comes next is not what he expected, not what he is prepared to discuss or hear.

Koa blinks, reeling back slightly as she comes to the denouement of it all. All of this - the secrecy, the potion, the confession of trauma beneath hushed branches... he'd thought it was leading somewhere else. Suddenly Koa's throat is dry, and he isn't sure where to look. He settles for the flower she'd pulled on earlier, his eyes tracing the petals as though they hold the map for how to navigate this messed up maze they keep coming back to. "That's..." Koa starts, but immediately pauses, licking his lips as he measures his words.

When he finally looks back at her it is with a sad frankness, an open, raw honesty that he's tired of holding back. "That's not why I can't be with Sohalia." Maybe it's the fact that he won't remember, even if she will. Maybe he needs to make this final swing to move on, a last reach for something he's known he can't recover but has never quite managed to let go. "Flora... I told Soh I needed time because even though I care about her so, so much, and I want to make things work with her... It wouldn't be fair for me to be with her." He smiles sadly, the weight of the torch he carries aching in his chest.

"Not when there's a part of me that's still in love with you."

If you're drunk on life, babe, I think it's great
But while in this world I think I'll take my whiskey neat