you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody
Her presence pulses first as threat—hands and elbows, knees and feet—all lighting up along the filaments like a combat schematic. Flora stills in response, the way one does when startled by their own reflection in an unfamiliar mirror. But then Jack’s touch registers, and his caution gives way to something warmer, tangled and stifled though it is. She feels it like a shift in the current: the webbing around them shudders, ripples with a rush of memory and heat, and Flora is abruptly reminded of how thoroughly he’d felt her pleasure. How easily he’d held it, savoured it. How entirely he’d known it.
A flush rises across her cheeks as gold and scarlet scatter like sunlight through stormglass, and it blooms in her thoughts before she can help it—soft, curling brushstrokes of heat that echo across the room like perfume on air. She smiles without quite meaning to. Of course she knows he wouldn't have said no to power. She’s never expected that of him. And yet...her eyes flick toward the opalescent glimmer of the mageglass threading along the outer walls of his reach, and even as Jack says it’s not her fault, something flickers through her like a pulled stitch. That longing to ask why he’d let her carry the guilt of it alone for so long. Why he hadn’t said a word when she’d thought it was just another thing he barely cared for.
But she doesn’t ask. Instead, she nods slowly, her gaze sweeping out across the vast, glittering, aching stretch of his mind. "I think I understand," she murmurs.
And then she lifts her chin slightly. "This is you," she says, her voice barely more than a breath, her gaze on the synaptic sprawl that glows and pulses like the inside of a star—veined with paranoia, steeped in vigilance, softened here and there by threads of memory and feeling so tightly wound they’ve nearly strangled themselves.
"And this is me." The schematics of Jack's mind breathe and blur, melting like wax into watercolours. The light shifts. Colours swell in like breath drawn through seawater. All of it transforms into a garden where no plant grows where it’s meant to, where vines spill across a half-forgotten path and flowers bloom out of memory rather than seed. In Flora’s mind now, there’s the distant rumble of pain held at bay like a storm offshore—an island cloaked in mist and lightning, Dahlia’s name etched into its heart—but for now she's pushed it away.
What remains is more delicate: the silhouette of Jack’s presence in the centre of it all, painted in deep-sea blue and outlined in hesitant gold. Thin red strands stretch from her own thoughts to where her hand still brushes his, flickering with wavesong and refracted light, like a prism held just under the surface.
Of course he couldn’t give her what she'd needed from him. Not when his world is this, when his magic strings itself through every silence and doorway and wandering mind like a net he can never climb out of. And he wouldn’t, even if he could.
The realisation doesn’t crush her, but it rains devastation around her just the same. A warm, summer shower through the flowering garden of her mind, soaking the roots of things she’d kept scorched and buried. Flora closes her eyes and breathes it in; she'd never thought she was asking Jack for too much when in fact, she'd been asking him for damn near everything.
A flush rises across her cheeks as gold and scarlet scatter like sunlight through stormglass, and it blooms in her thoughts before she can help it—soft, curling brushstrokes of heat that echo across the room like perfume on air. She smiles without quite meaning to. Of course she knows he wouldn't have said no to power. She’s never expected that of him. And yet...her eyes flick toward the opalescent glimmer of the mageglass threading along the outer walls of his reach, and even as Jack says it’s not her fault, something flickers through her like a pulled stitch. That longing to ask why he’d let her carry the guilt of it alone for so long. Why he hadn’t said a word when she’d thought it was just another thing he barely cared for.
But she doesn’t ask. Instead, she nods slowly, her gaze sweeping out across the vast, glittering, aching stretch of his mind. "I think I understand," she murmurs.
And then she lifts her chin slightly. "This is you," she says, her voice barely more than a breath, her gaze on the synaptic sprawl that glows and pulses like the inside of a star—veined with paranoia, steeped in vigilance, softened here and there by threads of memory and feeling so tightly wound they’ve nearly strangled themselves.
"And this is me." The schematics of Jack's mind breathe and blur, melting like wax into watercolours. The light shifts. Colours swell in like breath drawn through seawater. All of it transforms into a garden where no plant grows where it’s meant to, where vines spill across a half-forgotten path and flowers bloom out of memory rather than seed. In Flora’s mind now, there’s the distant rumble of pain held at bay like a storm offshore—an island cloaked in mist and lightning, Dahlia’s name etched into its heart—but for now she's pushed it away.
What remains is more delicate: the silhouette of Jack’s presence in the centre of it all, painted in deep-sea blue and outlined in hesitant gold. Thin red strands stretch from her own thoughts to where her hand still brushes his, flickering with wavesong and refracted light, like a prism held just under the surface.
Of course he couldn’t give her what she'd needed from him. Not when his world is this, when his magic strings itself through every silence and doorway and wandering mind like a net he can never climb out of. And he wouldn’t, even if he could.
The realisation doesn’t crush her, but it rains devastation around her just the same. A warm, summer shower through the flowering garden of her mind, soaking the roots of things she’d kept scorched and buried. Flora closes her eyes and breathes it in; she'd never thought she was asking Jack for too much when in fact, she'd been asking him for damn near everything.
