yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about
It feels like standing with her toes at the lip of a winter shore, the water numbing first and then tugging, grain by grain, until the sand gives underfoot and she begins to sink. Kaisel speaks of the things that she's done, and she can already feel the machinery of him whirring toward a plan; the way he has always reached for action before attention, for promise before listening. "I meant that you can't change the past," she clarifies softly. Maybe she is trying to make a mind reader of him again; maybe she has forgotten how to speak plainly when the truth is this tender. Either way, the sense of him gearing up for some future spectacle loosens fresh tears down her cheeks. She has never been the type who needed fireworks; her heart has always belonged to the ones who show up, who stay, who learn the shape of the room she’s in and sit there with her until the weather changes rather than forcing the sun out of hiding.
When Kaisel turns to look her way, Flora looks back at him, taking advantage of her invisibility to study the face she once thought she could trace with her eyes closed. The angles are the same, but something essential feels misaligned, as if the two of them have been stretched into shadows of themselves and now overlap without touching. She twists her ring and lets herself appear as he rises, the world drawing her back into focus. The moment feels brittle with future regret, a point she can already see from far ahead where they might both wish they had reached differently, said differently, held differently. This argument has not followed the map she drew for it when she'd thought of it in the shower or before bed, and some stubborn part of her wants to stop him and tell him that there are a thousand small, ordinary ways to go forward, that she'd rather go back to yelling at him than this sense of foreboding, but she doesn't trust herself to say it without her voice breaking.
So she only looks at him, as if memorising, eyes bright and wet and full of a kind of farewell she cannot bring herself to even begin to acknowledge. In the past, she tried to make Jack love her the way she wanted and watched it go nowhere; she won’t try to bend Kaisel into that shape, and she won’t do that to herself again; if he is set on getting it wrong again, she'll be sure not leave her heart in the path of it.
Swiping the tears from her cheeks, Flora pulls her gaze away and lifts two fingers to her mouth, releasing a whistle that cuts clean through the field to call Spice back to her, before turning and heading aboard the Sugartide.
~FIN
When Kaisel turns to look her way, Flora looks back at him, taking advantage of her invisibility to study the face she once thought she could trace with her eyes closed. The angles are the same, but something essential feels misaligned, as if the two of them have been stretched into shadows of themselves and now overlap without touching. She twists her ring and lets herself appear as he rises, the world drawing her back into focus. The moment feels brittle with future regret, a point she can already see from far ahead where they might both wish they had reached differently, said differently, held differently. This argument has not followed the map she drew for it when she'd thought of it in the shower or before bed, and some stubborn part of her wants to stop him and tell him that there are a thousand small, ordinary ways to go forward, that she'd rather go back to yelling at him than this sense of foreboding, but she doesn't trust herself to say it without her voice breaking.
So she only looks at him, as if memorising, eyes bright and wet and full of a kind of farewell she cannot bring herself to even begin to acknowledge. In the past, she tried to make Jack love her the way she wanted and watched it go nowhere; she won’t try to bend Kaisel into that shape, and she won’t do that to herself again; if he is set on getting it wrong again, she'll be sure not leave her heart in the path of it.
Swiping the tears from her cheeks, Flora pulls her gaze away and lifts two fingers to her mouth, releasing a whistle that cuts clean through the field to call Spice back to her, before turning and heading aboard the Sugartide.
~FIN
real big things I still gotta figure out
