you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody
The breath Flora sips in is quiet but sharp, drawn through her teeth as the darkness rushes in—not the soft shadowed kind that wraps like velvet, but something vast and unknowable. A black sea without horizon, her bed the only island in a midnight expanse that stretches endlessly in every direction. She feels suddenly tiny, suddenly unmoored, clutching at the edge of the sheets as though they might tether her to something real.
Where her own mind is a tangle of flowers and crashing surf, gold-threaded thought and aching colour, his is...different. A spider’s web laced in static and glass, vast and layered, every delicate filament sparking with the bite of thoughts too fast to follow. It’s disorienting, dazzling, and more than a little overwhelming—like trying to navigate stars from the wrong end of a telescope. Flora swallows hard and clutches the sheets tighter, eyes wide as the synaptic strands pulse with hints of colour she can’t quite place.
Still, when he asks—think something—she does. She thinks of home, whatever that means now. Of Torchline's docks at dusk, the laughter and music spilling out of the Hanged Man, the pale stretch of sand behind the bar where she and Enzo once danced under moonlight. She thinks of the kiss of salt air and how the water always glows a little brighter than anywhere else.
Where her own mind is a tangle of flowers and crashing surf, gold-threaded thought and aching colour, his is...different. A spider’s web laced in static and glass, vast and layered, every delicate filament sparking with the bite of thoughts too fast to follow. It’s disorienting, dazzling, and more than a little overwhelming—like trying to navigate stars from the wrong end of a telescope. Flora swallows hard and clutches the sheets tighter, eyes wide as the synaptic strands pulse with hints of colour she can’t quite place.
Still, when he asks—think something—she does. She thinks of home, whatever that means now. Of Torchline's docks at dusk, the laughter and music spilling out of the Hanged Man, the pale stretch of sand behind the bar where she and Enzo once danced under moonlight. She thinks of the kiss of salt air and how the water always glows a little brighter than anywhere else.
