I like shiny things, but I'd marry you with paper rings
Spice’s answer to the retreating calves is immediate and unequivocal, a sharp little draconic wail slicing through the thinning chaos like a final slammed door, the sort of sound that clearly translates to and don’t come back!, before the dragon settles again, wings tight and affronted, as the sky finally begins to still.
Flora pushes herself upright with effort that feels far heavier than it should, legs trembling beneath her as the last of the Sugartide’s spin bleeds away, and the adrenaline that has been holding her together drains all at once, leaving her shaking from head to toe. Her hands will not stop trembling even as she curls them into fists and then opens them again, every muscle still locked tight as though bracing for another impact that never comes. The silence that follows is not peace so much as aftermath, ringing and hollow, and in it the damage becomes impossible to ignore. Even in the low, fractured glow of aurora light she can see the splintered boards along the hull, the jagged absence where several feet of the bow have been torn away, the scuffed and cracked deck littered with debris, and the dark, spreading stains where their mugs of cocoa shattered and bled sweetness across the wood.
The sight hits her harder than the collision ever did. This was supposed to be magic. This was supposed to be the night, the one they talked about back when everything between them was still a maybe and a hope, the one she had planned and prepared for with such care and excitement that it had felt like holding a secret too bright to touch for too long. And now the Sugartide is wounded, the moment fractured beyond repair, and all she can see is her own fault threading through it, her insistence on finding the starwhales without pausing to think about what might happen when wonder collides with reality. She had wanted too much, done toio much, reached too far, and the cost of it is written plainly across her ship.
Her gaze lifts to Kaisel, and the devastation wells up so fast it steals the breath right out of her lungs, a sob lodging painfully in her throat as her eyes shine with unshed tears. She takes a single unsteady step toward him, shoulders caving inward as though she is trying to make herself smaller in the face of the wreckage she feels responsible for, and when she speaks her voice is barely more than a whisper, thin and broken around the words. "I’m so sorry."
Flora pushes herself upright with effort that feels far heavier than it should, legs trembling beneath her as the last of the Sugartide’s spin bleeds away, and the adrenaline that has been holding her together drains all at once, leaving her shaking from head to toe. Her hands will not stop trembling even as she curls them into fists and then opens them again, every muscle still locked tight as though bracing for another impact that never comes. The silence that follows is not peace so much as aftermath, ringing and hollow, and in it the damage becomes impossible to ignore. Even in the low, fractured glow of aurora light she can see the splintered boards along the hull, the jagged absence where several feet of the bow have been torn away, the scuffed and cracked deck littered with debris, and the dark, spreading stains where their mugs of cocoa shattered and bled sweetness across the wood.
The sight hits her harder than the collision ever did. This was supposed to be magic. This was supposed to be the night, the one they talked about back when everything between them was still a maybe and a hope, the one she had planned and prepared for with such care and excitement that it had felt like holding a secret too bright to touch for too long. And now the Sugartide is wounded, the moment fractured beyond repair, and all she can see is her own fault threading through it, her insistence on finding the starwhales without pausing to think about what might happen when wonder collides with reality. She had wanted too much, done toio much, reached too far, and the cost of it is written plainly across her ship.
Her gaze lifts to Kaisel, and the devastation wells up so fast it steals the breath right out of her lungs, a sob lodging painfully in her throat as her eyes shine with unshed tears. She takes a single unsteady step toward him, shoulders caving inward as though she is trying to make herself smaller in the face of the wreckage she feels responsible for, and when she speaks her voice is barely more than a whisper, thin and broken around the words. "I’m so sorry."
and I hate accidents except when we went from friends to this
