open ended endings

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

The Sugartide skims across the fractured air like she belongs here, sails taut and humming as Flora pushes farther into the Cordillera than she’s ever dared before. Last time the void frayed at the edges of her courage, thick and rotting as mould; now, with Rae’s lily rooted in defiance, the shadows retreat just enough to grant her passage. The air feels thinner this high, sharp against her cheeks, but it’s clean and unspoiled in a way that her soul feels like it needs as much as her lungs.

She angles the ship toward the plateau, where the mountains suddenly fall away into impossible green. The Infinity Fields stretch before her like a secret quilt stitched from every colour she’s ever known. Blooms as large as blankets ripple with the wind, petals flashing pink, gold, indigo, and shades no artist has ever dared to name. Even a rainbow would look jealous, she thinks, biting her lip around a grin as the ship drifts low enough for her to leap from the deck.

The flowers bend but don’t break beneath her bare feet, cushioning her as if they’d been waiting just for this. Flora kneels, fingers already curled around the stem of Vi’s rose, its white glow soft and steady in her palm. "You’ll like it here," she murmurs, brushing curls from her eyes as she digs a small hollow into the earth. The soil is damp, rich, and eager. Setting the rose into place, she uncorks the flask she’s carried all the way from Torchline, the water within still tasting faintly of salt and sun. She pours it slow, watching as it soaks into the ground and darkens the roots, as if the flower itself sighs into belonging.

She sits back on her heels, the hem of her wildly oversized grey sweater spilling across the grass like it doesn’t belong to her but to someone twice her size. The fabric is thin and soft, clinging faintly to the breeze, and it strikes her as strange to know there’s no one around for miles and miles to see her this way. With a sigh that unravels into the silence, Flora tips herself backward, arms spread, flopping into the field as though she might carve a snow angel into the riot of flowers instead. Petals brush her hair, her jewellery, the curve of her cheeks, and she lets herself sink into their impossible colour, a single rose now rooted among them.

---

Magic: Safe Passage | Can post without the Draig Cordillera without being attacked by dragons. As long as more than 50% of thread participants have this perk, those who don't won't be attacked either.
Type: Grey | Rank: Mastered | Cost: (None)

real big things I still gotta figure out

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

The void infection in the Draig Cordillera has been eliminated!

I'm like a titan that's risin'

A yawn rises from the heap of blankets Kaisel had pulled over himself to fight off the cold while he waited for Flora to get back.

He'd had enough of cryptic letters, unanswered post, and returned mail. He'd read the notes until the papers had grown thin from fingerprints and continual creasing, and it still remained a confusing mess to him. One thing had been abundantly clear though, he had to fix whatever started to gnaw at Flora. She wouldn't tell him where she was at, but Torchline is where she'd be, and he figured if stayed there long enough he'd cross paths with her. Hell, he'd pack up and move there if that's what it took to track her down and make her talk to him face to face. He'd told Soh before, Flora's got no choice about it, she's not going to lose him, even if she's the one trying to do it.

Finding the Sugar Tide had been easy enough. He'd huffed through every room yelling her name and talking to the air like he expected her to be invisible, but he eventually noticed the lack of Spice and discovered the ship had just been empty. So he'd waited, and waited, and waited. He started propped up against a wall expectantly, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, thumb tracing the folds of her letters like a worry stone, except one that did the opposite and fed his nerves instead of soothing them. Eventually being on such high alert and spun up energy wore out and he dozed off. His lean became a slump against the floor, only having half the wherewithal to gather clothes and throws like nesting material as the cold seeped up through the ground. The Sugar Tide's familiarity and gentle rocking had been comforting, lulling him fully to sleep, something that's been on short supply for him as of late, what with all the emptiness in his room and too many thoughts in his head, which is normally the other way around.

He's awake now though, well rested, and still gunning for that conversation.

He throws off all the blankets with a groan, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he sits up and blinks around. This isn't his room? Oh yeah, he's waiting for Flora. SHIT!? What time is it. He leaps up, his backpack forgotten in the pile, the keychain she got him attached but gleaming beneath the buried cloth. He glances out a window, but the most startling thing isn't the time of day, it's the fucking MOUNTAINS????

Still dressed in his gray sweats and a navy shirt, which has an open dragon's mouth over the chest, the 3D kind where the teeth are each a movable piece of stitched-on fabric, he darts through her cabin. His sneakers are quiet over the wood, but his violet windbreaker makes up for it by swishing with every motion. With all the stealth of a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a dog, Kaisle breaks out of the Sugar Tide's lower deck. His eyes widen as he takes in the scenery in full, a sea of a different kind open before him, endlessly green. Within it, a golden halo where Flora is.

He stumbles off the deck as he disembarks, relief and haste abrasive against one another. He's too focused on closing the distance, on finally seeing her, because she'd been right, it had been too long, and even if she's mad or whatever, he's fucking happy to see her again, regardless of the risk that might pose for him. She looks utterly in her element, peaceful in a way he doesn't often see her wear. It almost feels like he shouldn't intrude yet, should wait even longer, but he can't bear to. He crosses the distance, suddenly unhurried, preferring to admire the way she's soaking up the view. When he gets close enough, if his swishing didn't already give him away, he just softly says, "Hey, Ro."

Kaisel

Show you the harder the battle, the harder I fight

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

Spice had vanished hours ago into the high thermals, her pale wings cutting against the clouds as she kept her lonely vigil for dragons. Flora hadn’t minded. The stillness here had been good, the emptiness comforting in its own way, and she’d convinced herself the strange swishing she was hearing was nothing more than the mountains playing tricks with sound. It was easy to believe when she was stretched out among petals big enough to swallow her whole, sweater soft against her skin, the horizon a painted dream.

Then the word comes, and it's not just her name, but that one syllable drawn only ever spoke by Kaisel, familiar as a fingerprint. It strikes her chest harder than any blade, makes her heart stumble into a gallop that shakes her bones. Had he said anything else, the instinct might have been a dagger in her palm, reflex and fury flung at the intruder. Instead, the weapon is only her stare, sharp as she jolts upright.

Her hair is in a careless knot, curls springing loose in every direction, her face stripped bare of any makeup, because, well, she'd been up here alone. The suddenness of his voice, his presence, leaves her disarmed in a way that feels wildly unfair. A thousand things unravel at once in her head: shock that he’s here, the whiplash of being certain she was alone, confusion that knots with the smallest dangerous thread of delight she tries to crush immediately, followed hard by the bruise of hurt that blossoms into anger, her oldest armour.

"Wh—?" The sound cracks from her lips before she can stop it, raw and unsteady. Her eyes dart wide, scanning the endless sweep of flowers as if a second ship might be parked among them, some explanation for the impossibility of him standing there. But there’s nothing, just her, the Sugartide, and him. Her voice steadies only in the sharpness of its edge as she demands, "How the fuck are you here?"

real big things I still gotta figure out

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

Ah, you thought this was going to be a dragon encounter, didn’t you? As luck would have it, this animal is of the much more friendly variety: an alpina!

Nestled amidst the snow, one can only admire the beautiful gleam of their fur. Especially as it approaches you, head down and horns at the ready.

Maybe we lied about the friendliness. Best find an alternate route!

---

You’ve encountered an Alpina. This counts as a common creature encounter for the purposes of levelling, but does not count as a Random Event for levelling or MP. There will be no further admin/re intervention. If you choose to follow this creature, you do so at your own risk, however, just having it in this thread is enough to satisfy your levelling requirements.

Alpinas (common) - Alpine sheep that have magical fur. It never gets dirty and always keeps the wearer the perfect temperature. Though these creatures are not very smart, their curling horns and headbutt-first think-later attitude has knocked many and adventurer off a mountain.

I'm like a titan that's risin'

It feels a bit like a dream, admittedly—falling asleep in one place and waking in another, teleportation of some type. The notion is not helped along when the place is this, fields sprinkled with flowers as far as the eye can see, and Flora at its core. She claims the Greatwood is her home, but it rather seems like it would be here that she'd come to life.

There's the faintest smirk that sparkles up into his eyes at her confusion, immensely satisfied at one of his very few accomplished sneaks, and that it'd be with her. He's long since lost score of all the times she's beat him, and not that he's been without his own sweet victories, but with all their games on and off boards, she's most definitely ahead. It's habit, more than anything, sliding back into the idea that this is something simple and easy like before. "Fell asleep waiting for you on the Sugar Tide," he says with a tip of his head back towards the ship and a breath of a laugh.

It's not quite all there, the ease. He stopped the backward pull before it got all the way, because those letters are still brushing against his skin, and her question has something in it he's normally only heard a shadow of before. Distantly he marks the moving alpina, but he's too focused on the girl. "You look good." Maybe it's because last he'd seen her she'd still been shaken up from the Family, but he means it in the simplest way. She'd said she'd been pretty shit, so he'd expected to find her a bit more than just bare-faced and wind-tossed. "I was worr—" all the air suddenly leaves him as the alpina, which had been idly standing nearby like a fixture of the fields, suddenly charges deadass into his side. He has enough reflex to grab for its horns with his hands, but the brunt of its forehead connects and shoves him.

Kaisel

Show you the harder the battle, the harder I fight

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

Flora only blinks at him at first, uncomprehending. Fell asleep? On her ship? Without her noticing? Her mind snags on the impossibility of it, tugging at loose threads of explanation until her chin tilts skyward, eyes narrowing against the endless blue. No sign of Spice, and in that absence, a thought curls sharp and suspicious: did she know? Did Spice, wicked little thing, decide to keep his secret and watch instead of warning?

But then the world ruptures, horns catching sunlight like curved blades as the alpina barrels from the wildflowers. Its wool gleams impossibly clean, like a cloud given muscle, and it slams into Kaisel with the blunt insistence of a mountain deciding to move. Once, she might have doubled over laughing; might have called it divine justice, karma dressed in fleece, and tossed his own words back at him just to watch his grin flare like summer lightning. Once, the sight of him grappling with a sheep would have been enough to unravel the ache between them.

But she doesn’t live in that once anymore. Every silence he’s left her with has been folded and refolded until it cuts across her fingers. Every letter re-read in her mind until the words had blurred and taken on new meanings. His absence has become a storm she carries, and not even the ridiculousness of a magical sheep can tear through it.

She rises slowly, petals bowing beneath her as a frown roots deep into her expression. No laughter, no teasing, none of the easy levity he once drew from her. Then Spice comes in a streak of white, frost at her throat and fury in her wings, spitting shards of ice until the alpina stumbles off in a bleating retreat. The flowers swallow it whole, closing again as if the interruption had been no more than a ripple in a dream, leaving Flora to stand in the sea of flowers, her heart a knotted tangle of hurt that not even wool, frost, or absurdity can undo.

Flora’s arms cross tightly over her chest, sweater sleeves swallowing her wrists, as her gaze returns back to the dragoon. Her aqua eyes harden, the earlier bewilderment freezing into a sharpness she can actually wield. "What part," she asks, voice low but barbed, "of I don’t want to see you did you interpret as please, stow away on my ship and make yourself comfortable?" Her stare doesn’t waver, not even when her chest clenches around the sight of him standing there; out of place, impossible, and still somehow exactly where her heart had been afraid he’d appear. "Which, weird and creepy to think you were like, what? just under my bed?"

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'

It's not often that Spice has come to his rescue, but he's never been happier to see the pale arrow streaking through the sky, weaponized to his benefit as the alpina rightfully yields to the dragonkind. He's regained his breath and his footing, but one hand rubs absently at the bruise due to form beneath his skin, grimacing slightly as he tries to bury the hurt beneath friction.

It seems it'll be no match against the pain brewing beneath those crossed arms though, her fury palpable now as the confusion gets carted off amongst the wool pronking away. Somehow he keeps standing before the people he cares about the most and in the most diabolical form of torture he can imagine, he must witness every mark of joy crease into rage. He kind of thought it'd be different with her, the way everything else had always been. He thought if he could just get in front of her, just see her, just talk to her, that whatever has been building up would crumble back apart into them. He thought wrong.

"The same part that kept asking you where you were," he says with a steadiness that surprises him, given the quickening pulse that leaps up in response to all the ice she's managing to conjure without Spice. He doesn't shrink from it though, meeting her gaze with a fierce determination to thaw what has grown frozen. "Not exactly comfortable...I was on the floor against the wall. Can't really look all the way left right now." One hand still hangs onto the spot that's bruised, but the other one curls against the back of his neck, pulling on floor-knotted stiffness there. "Not my fault you didn't notice before sailing—" his word catches, because he doesn't actually know where they are, but he drops his alpina hurt and flops a hand out at the hills in gesture of it, "here."

He sighs loudly through his nose, realizing he's getting caght up in details that don't matter, this argument not playful banter to angle for the last word in. "I didn't mean to fall asleep. I wanted to talk to you Flora. Tell me what the hell is going on?" His tone drops lower, near enough to pleading, because he doesn't get what flipped all the sudden.

Kaisel

Show you the harder the battle, the harder I fight

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

Flora wrinkles her nose, the thought of Kai curled against her wall slipping past her notice leaving a sour twist in her stomach. Ordinarily, she’d have seized on it, argued the impossibility, laughed at his nerve, poked holes in every flimsy detail until he was the one floundering. But the ache in her chest is too sharp for even her argumentative nature to overcome. She can’t find her footing in the familiar rhythm of their banter, not when her hurt keeps pressing to the surface, raw and insistent, demanding all of her attention.

Her arms twitch tighter across her chest, the oversized sweater bunching at her elbows until it feels like she’s holding herself in a cage. The motion isn’t graceful; it’s defensive, brittle, the body betraying the hurt she staunchly refuses to admit. "Nothing’s going on," she says, but the words taste sour even as they leave her tongue, just as they had done in the letters she'd sent; a half-truth sharpened into a shield. Her gaze skims him once, fast and cutting, before slipping away again, unwilling to linger where it might soften.

"The things you’ve done.." Her throat works, swallowing back everything she wants to say. Her voice comes out low, flat with effort, but steady enough to keep from breaking. "They made me feel like shit. And I’m not going to let you do it anymore." Her chin tips higher, a fragile mimicry of poise, as if sheer stubbornness might keep her heart from spilling through the cracks. "That’s it. That’s the end."

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'

His 'brows tighten in on each other, a careful assessment of her answer. It's her quick glance away that's the most telling of her bullshit though, the kind he's had to call her on before, just for much more lighthearted reasons. It takes everything in him not to step in to gather her, his instinct to tear away whatever hurt she bears like it's nothing more than a parasite one he's certain won't serve him well right now. It's not comfort she needs, it's some clarity, it'd seem, or maybe he's just so desperate for it he's straining to see its reflection even amongst her.

"What things have I done?" he presses, attention intent upon her even as hers darts around like a bird that's trapped itself among too many windows. He's trying to open them for her before she breaks her neck, but gods if she'd just be still for one second and look. "You mean the not seeing you for a while?" He won't dance around the subtleties she's trying to drawing around with her obstinate chin. "Or is the seeing Soh? Or Caly? Or is it the wish?" So many possibilities, not a single one clear, just a rorschach of outrage blotting a page.

He sucks in a breath, trying to keep the cloud of confusion from breaking into annoyance, the way any puzzle that starts fun can end frustrating when it's failed to make sense for too long. "Flora, I was only talking to Soh to ask her to help you more, because I knew you needed it at the time and...I knew I couldn't give it. Not after what happened at the House of Midnight." He wonders if he'd have been able to slip back behind the line that night if she'd actually been okay, like she told him, and not piecing her skin back into something whole. Maybe he'd have found some other excuse besides comfort and worry to kiss her again though, and that's the part that's kept him scared enough to keep from getting this close for so long.

Kaisel

Show you the harder the battle, the harder I fight

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

Flora's nails bite crescents through her sleeve, little moons pressed into the fabric as if the sweater could hold her together if she just clings hard enough. The flowers seem to lean in like eavesdroppers, all that colour pretending at innocence while her composure slips grain by grain through her fingers. She tries to breathe around it, tries to find the old rhythm where she could turn hurt into humour and make it look like a trick of the light, but the ache refuses to be pretty today and it swells until there’s nowhere left for her to stand that isn’t sharp.

A laugh escapes anyway, thin and winter-cold, the kind that frosts a window rather than opens it. "Not seeing me for a while?" she echoes, tasting the shape of the words as if they might soften on her tongue and knowing they won’t. Her gaze catches his and skitters off almost immediately, a stone skipping once across water before drowning in the flowers. "It isn’t just not seeing me," she says, voice steady only because she forces it to be. "It’s not seeing me after you said you’d be there. After you kissed me and said you’d do it again. After you told me you’d rather take the mess of me than live without me—and then you fucked off to tell Soh you were tagging her in instead, without bothering to tell me anything. All coincidentally while telling Soh about how much you wanted to be with Caly and all your big plans to make that work."

She bites the inside of her lip hard enough to taste iron, chin tipping higher like stubbornness might pass for armour if she holds it still. "You could have given it," she says, softer and more dangerous for it, the words threading out like a current she can’t fight. "You just didn’t want to. You wanted Caly more." The admission lands like something she hates herself for saying, and she flinches from it even as she lets it stand, shoulders tightening beneath the oversized grey as if she can shrug off her own pettiness by naming it first. Of course he wanted Caly more. Of course he chose the brighter, younger version; a triplet born of a goddess where Flora is only a twin born of demigods; a body still unmarked where hers is carved and laced by an alien’s memory. Her hand lifts as if to point to the truth written beneath the knit, falters, and falls again, the sweater suddenly heavy with everything she refuses to say. She doesn’t give him the catalogue he’s asking for; she lets the silence carry it instead, a low tide pulling between them, and surely, it says enough.

He'd had a choice and he'd made it.
The end.

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 fold of her arms is starting to seem less like a barrier she's setting between them and more like an attempt to hold herself together. He can see the way she's digging into more than just the ground with her stubbornness, she's also pressing into herself with all the same desperation of holding back a leak in a boat with nothing more than paper and her palm. This is upset of a greater magnitude than he'd realized over the letters. He thought he'd seen it at its worst when she tried to murder him with spice (not the dragon) that day on the pier, but he'd rather that a hundred times over than this, because at least then she'd been fighting to hold onto something other than her composure.

The laugh lands like a slap, stinging and harsh against him, dragging out a frown. Yeah, okay, she's big mad, but why? His stare persists, focusing on the heart of what she'll be saying amongst the inevitable theatrics, brandishing it like a ghost hunter does their trusty flashlight in the dark. He just doesn't expect to find any ghosts here today, but surprisingly, one drifts up from his past words already, as startling as any phantom. "I—I didn't think that had mattered to you," he can barely get it out around the surprise that's set its hand to his throat. When he'd told her that, he meant every word, but she'd not acknowledged them—the kiss and then the attendant had overshadowed them a bit, but the ease with which she let them fade, and the refusal to even see him much afterwards had seemed indicator enough of how she'd received them.

"Flora, I—" he's fingers flex at his side, like he might physically grab onto the words and set them straight. "I thought you didn't want that. What I said. I mean, you barely even responded, and you stayed further away afterwards. Fuck, Ro, you'd barely even look at me." His voice is low, heavy with all the things that don't make sense weighing it down so it takes effort to get it out. He'd been ready to go all in with her that night, but she'd put distance up like a reminder of the rules they'd laid out. "Which I mean, I get why you wouldn't. We said we'd just be friends and none of that was very friendly." A ragged sigh winds out as a hand ruffles the back of his hair in frustration. He blames himself for being the one who couldn't handle reverting to the way things had been, for being unable to let one night stay one night.

"So...yeah, I asked Soh to be there, since I was making it worse for us. She confirmed you wanted to stay friends and I've been working on that. On not...saying or doing any of that again." Soh had also told him not to create the very distance he did, but he'd taken her advice with a grain of salt because he couldn't tell her why being with Flora would be so complicated. Not without risking Koa in some shape or another, something he wasn't ready to do with Soh. "Which I know is why you practically wouldn't stop telling me to go after Caly. Why you talked to her even when I told you not to, so I had Soh help me with that too." 

It felt like Flora had insisted on it, like she intended for Caly to be a buffer between them, a distraction to keep him from ruining everything between them even further. He liked Caly. She's special to him in her own way, and maybe with enough time he'd have been able to redirect all his feelings to her, but not when everything that kept getting asked of him meant giving up Flora entirely. "I didn't even do that right though," he mutters, bitter with his failure. "Safrin wouldn't help me make something for her unless I always put her first, and I refused to do that...so I wrote a letter instead and had Soh read it over before I sent it." Some big plan.

Kaisel

Show you the harder the battle, the harder I fight

yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about

Flora blinks at him like he’s trying to sell her the sky and call it the ocean, incredulity flaring bright enough to sting. "I kissed you back," she reminds him, the words low and even, as if gentleness might keep them from shaking. "You said you’d do it again and I said I would too." Her teeth find the inside of her cheek until the taste turns metallic, and still the rest pushes forward because it has to. "And then you told me your date with Caly was amazing. What was I supposed to think?" For a moment Flora fidgets, restless in the sea of colour. "Seemed lik either you were fine sleeping with me and kissing me while you were actively trying to date someone else, or whatever it is between us didn’t actually matter to you." The exasperation threads through every syllable, a tight, humming wire she refuses to call hurt, because either way she looked at it cut deep.

As Kai says he’s been working on them being friends, Flora eyes roll before she can stop them, a little flash of silvered disdain beneath her lashes. "You’ve done nothing but make it worse," she says, arms cinching in tighter as if the sweater might keep her stitched. "I told Soh to tell you that. That whatever stupid quest you were doing, I didn’t want it, and I didn’t want you disappearing into it like that was some noble stand-in for a conversation."

Something clicks into place with an awful, hollow sound and she goes still, spine lifting as if a string draws tight between her shoulder blades. That Kai is painting it now as if he only went after Caly because she pointed him that way isn’t the truth she remembers; not with the way his voice had brightened when he talked about her, not with AmAzINg braided through every sentence, not with his affections for her threaded so openly it glinted like sun on water. The implication scrapes her raw and she bristles, heat banding across the bridge of her nose as the flowers seem to hush around her ankles. "At every turn you told me Caly was the one you wanted." The emphasis lands soft but sharp, an undertow tugging at the edges: if Caly was the one, what did that make Flora? Practice, placeholder, or problem? "That was the only reason I even heard from you, was so that you could tell me all about how your latest date had gone."

Then he mentions a letter and her mouth parts, the breath she’s holding slipping out as if someone has cracked the seal on a bottle. Soh hadn’t said a word about a letter? Betrayal burns hot and bright, small and furious as Spice’s frost. Flora tips her chin anyway, arranging her face into something cool and careless, as if she’s known all along. "Right," she says airily, "and what did you put in that letter, huh?" It sounds rhetorical, the kind of question you toss away like a coin into deep water, but her eyes won’t leave his for the answer. That he'd found the time to write to and see Caly only further solidified just how low on the dragoon's priorities she clearly was.

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 doesn't know what to do with her words and the meaning threading through them. Had he really read it wrong, this whole time? "At first maybe, but then you pulled away, and stayed there." His voice crumples at the end, hollowing out around disbelief. If she hadn't meant it that way, then why? He would have razed everything for her then, she kept splashing the torch though.

His gaze narrows slightly, an attempt to put this all into focus, the edges still blurry. "Wha—you asked!" His hands gesture in front of him with the exasperation of it. After turning away deliberately from him, she'd purposefully drawn Caly out like a wall. He hadn't seen it then, but he's thought back on a lot of things lately and that much has become clear now. "Fuck's sake Flora, you told me to bring her to the House of Midnight to use the magic rooms." He shakes his head, holding back a fool's laugh at the absurdity of it now. He should have known then what was happening.

Flint creeps in on the edges of the stare he keeps on her. "You can't be serious." It's nearly a whisper, but it cuts in sharp enough to rise above something so quiet. "Flora, what's between us matters the most to me, that's why I've been trying to fix it!" He might fully lose it if he's accused of not caring about her when it's been the core of every fucked decision he's ever made, each one biting him in the ass lately.

The reality of it is as plain as Flora puts it though, and he grimaces at that truth. "It's a work in progress," he mutters, the way an artist would over being critiqued on a painting they haven't deemed complete. "She was too drunk at the masquerade to tell me anything," he huffs, "that's the last time I talked to her. I'm not gonna stop the quest though, I think it'll help, that's the whole point." He's become less sure of it, but he'll could use whatever help he can get.

For a moment he just lets some quiet stretch inbetween them. On the tail end of her accusations, he can't help but trace the places of her he once considered familiar, but now can barely recognize. Those are her sea-tossed eyes, they must be, but these ones don't glimmer with barely contained mischief. The lips seem the same as the ones he remembers tasting, even though there's nothing clever tucked behind them now, no invitation to their shape. He'd committed her shape to memory time and time again, but not this version, not the one that feels like he's breaking her with every word and anger and sweaters are all that can hold her now. Every attempt to do the right thing had soured, so perhaps, perhaps it's time to yield and do the one thing he's certain is wrong—admitting he can't be her friend. "Because I couldn't have you." It's said softly, the way surrenders usually are when the fighting has gone on too long.

Caly is someone he could maybe learn to love, but Flora is someone he already does, in all the ways he's let himself and in countless ways he's tried not to.

A long, low sigh slips free when it turns to the letter. "I apologized to her, told her I missed her, that I wanted to try again and where to meet me so we could talk about it." He tilts his head faintly, unapologetic with his honesty. He'd gone for Caly completely, in the hopes that he could make it work, that he could find someone to love fully and not just in the quiet before falling asleep. It didn't work though, loving two people. What everyone kept trying to tell him, what he kept insisting hadn't been the case. "She didn't wanna come second though, and I couldn't guarantee I'd put her first. So, it's done." Friendship, again.

"Like I told you in our letters, you're the only person I've told that I love them." Unless she wants to get real technical, then also his parents and probably Koa and Noe but he'll vehemently deny that because, like siblings, you're only supposed to tell your cousins how awful they are while secretly adoring them entirely.

Kaisel

Show you the harder the battle, the harder I fight