flora
Flora flinches as she feels the tension that radiates from Kaisel in quiet, razor-fine pulses. It echoes through the silence like thunder before a storm, and she feels herself shrinking without meaning to, trying to make space in her body for everything this moment has become. When he asks if Jack threatened her, something in her chest cinches so tight she almost forgets how to speak, and her mouth works for a moment before the words find her. "Not directly," she says softly, each syllable weighed down like her tongue’s been soaked in salt. "At first, when I was still furious with him about it all, he said that if I was going to tell anyone, to let him know first." Her voice hitches, and she glances down at her lap like the memory is something she has to pull up from her gut. "So that he could go. Disappear. Or worse."
There’s a long pause, long enough for her to taste the iron in the back of her throat, the shame, the quiet horror of having ever believed that this was a reasonable situation she'd found herself in. "He didn’t say he’d kill himself," she adds, eyes distant now, but clear. "But he made it seem like that would be the only way out if the secret ever got out. Like...it would ruin him." Her mouth curves into something brittle and wry. "I don’t think I’d be the only one upset to find out what he could do."
She shrugs, but it’s a small, broken thing. "So I never said anything, or..well I did, but it's complicated. For a while, I didn’t even question it. I was...happy to protect him. Happy to pretend I didn’t care about all the ways it made things complicated. All the times I couldn’t explain why things felt so strange between us, why I couldn't ever explain to anyone else about the highs and lows of it all." A breath escapes her, frayed and dry. "The only other person who knows is Sunjata, but obviously he wasn't the best person to talk about it with."
When Kaisel says that he'd never planned for them to say goodbye again, something cracks inside her; not in a way that hurts, but in a way that frees. It’s like a band pulled too tight for too long finally lets go. Like breath returning to lungs that hadn’t even realized they were starving for it. Because with Jack, everything had rested on her. Her silence, her loyalty, her ability to bend, to shrink, to sparkle, to hold a thousand unspoken things in her chest and pretend it didn’t burn even though he said it didn't. But with Kaisel, it isn’t like that. With Kaisel, the weight is shared, and even if she’ll never stop carrying her part, she can feel him lifting it beside her, not because he has to, but because he chooses to. It floods her limbs with warmth, chasing out the numbness that had quietly settled there since having seen Jack's face again.
She opens her mouth to say me too—to tell him she never wanted goodbye to be part of their story either—but then he’s shifting, and his hand is moving to his pocket, and a new kind of breathlessness catches her entirely off guard. Her heart skips so violently it almost hurts. She doesn’t need to see the box to know what it is, not when the shape of it burns a hole into the moment, and her entire body stills with something between delight and awe, like time itself has snapped taut around them.
He speaks again, and gods, the words marry me wrap around her like the tide rushing back in, like sunlight breaking through stormclouds, like hope so overwhelming she doesn’t know whether to laugh or sob, and then she’s doing both. Her mouth falls open, and the tears that pour down her cheeks now are not born of fear or grief or from the ghost of a man who'd nearly broken her. They are the kind that rise from joy too big to be contained, from the dizzying relief of being seen, chosen, loved, even here, even now. Her breath hitches hard, caught between the trembling of her chest and the wild, impossible brightness blooming behind her ribs. He wants her like this. Puffy-eyed. Hair a mess. Wearing nothing but a tank top and underwear, heartbreak still fresh on her tongue. He’s seen every vulnerable, messy, exhausted edge of her and still, still, he wants forever.
She starts to nod before her mouth can catch up, her head jerking with the force of everything she can’t yet say. But then she finds her voice, hoarse and shaking but true, and the word flies from her like it’s always belonged to him. "Yes," she breathes, and then again, louder now, with laughter in the tears that stream down her cheeks. "Yes." The ring sparkles before her like it already knows its place, like it’s always been hers, and gods help her, she wants it. Not because she needs to be saved, not because she’s running from the past, but because this—this wild, impossible, beautiful love—is hers. Is theirs. And for the first time in her life, Flora doesn’t feel like she’s holding her breath waiting to be abandoned. She feels wanted. Chosen.
Every single thing I touch becomes sick with sadness
'Cause it's all over now, all out to sea
'Cause it's all over now, all out to sea
