funny how true colours shine in darkness and secrecy

Koa

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

"I know you would." It's said with the warmth and nostalgia of a day on the beach, of K ♥ F scrawled in sand, bold and emblazoned and flush with youthful love that's destined to be washed away with the turn of the tide. Flora has always been the ocean, capricious yet immutable, wholehearted yet fluid. "I just hate that you have to be alone again. And I hate losing this." He looks at their fingers, interlaced, perhaps for the last time. "This hour. This one perfect, impossible hour where we said the things we never did." Because when it's gone Flora might have closure, but Koa will still be left with that open hole full of dreams and the past and the what if's and if only's.

He doesn't look up as Flora rises, staring at that indentation in the grass, the place where she has given up, taking herself and all the potential of them with her as she goes. Koa's thumb brushes the glass as he picks up the vial. It's stupidly small for something so huge, fitting easily into his palm. Yet it somehow feels heavier than the heartbreak he's carried this past year. "An hour, huh?" Koa asks, his copper eyes reflecting the glow of the golden liquid as he gazes into its depths. "I hope... I hope I keep some part of it. Not to change anything. Just to remember that it happened. That you gave this to me. That we let each other go right."

There's a silence between them. A hush that feels like reverence. Then, finally, he breathes in and nods, more to himself than to her. "To doing better next time," Koa murmurs, flicking the cork out of the flask.

He drinks.

The taste is bitter - sharp at the back of his tongue, earthy and strange - but not unpleasant. Like crushed herbs and salt air and library dust. Like old magic meant to mend things that can't be mended any other way.

For a moment, nothing happens.

And then he blinks, feeling strange and unsteady. Like the world hiccuped. Like the thread snapped and left him blinking at something just out of reach.

He looks around the glade with a puzzled frown, then down at the empty vial in his hand, and then at Flora as understanding dawns, as those last few minutes before the hour started swim up through his hazy memory. "Oh. Is it done, then?" He remembers being angry, but he's not angry. Just tired, and sad, and like he's lost something important, closed the door leading to a room he doesn't remember being inside.

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