yeah I got heartbreak that I reminisce about
Flora glances up at him when he calls it brave again, leaning her head against his shoulder with a softness that contradicts the scoff that almost follows, because she still isn’t willing to wear that word like a medal, not when all she can think about is how close she’d been to splintering something just to feel the crack of it. "At least we know our friends and family are safe," she says instead, the admission quieter and truer than anything about courage, because that's the part that really mattered. That their friends, their family, Torchline, the quiet domestic corners of her life, no longer feel like open targets. She hums into the fierce kiss he presses to her temple, a low vibration of contentment as she turns the wheel and the Sugartide begins to angle away from the Maw, from the place where everything had felt suspended and combustible.
The pod of Encantados below earns a small smile from her as they break the surface in gleaming arcs, playful and unbothered by vows or vendettas, their chiming clicks scattering like silver bells across the water before she glances up at Kai. With her fingers in front of his face, holding them barely apart, she murmurs that she was "thiiiiis close,", stretching the word until it almost loses meaning, because she truly had been, because the image of the Ark’s mast snapping had felt intoxicatingly easy.
At the mention of clauses, her smile flattens into something more exasperated. "If we tell," she says with a sigh that carries the weight of Jack's bitterness toward her, "everyone forgets about me." She gives her head a small shake, then looks at Kaisel with widened eyes for dramatic emphasis. "Everyone except Jack." The absurdity of it hovers there, but she says it casually, because she doesn’t believe for a second that reality will ever bend that way; she has no intention of breaking her word, and neither does he, so the nightmare remains theoretical, a ghost story told for leverage. She shrugs, brushing it off as though it were no more significant than a poorly written addendum. "I added that if he breaks his side, he loses his revivify feather," she continues, turning the wheel a fraction as the Sugartide catches a cleaner current. "Which basically means he’s as good as dead."
The pod of Encantados below earns a small smile from her as they break the surface in gleaming arcs, playful and unbothered by vows or vendettas, their chiming clicks scattering like silver bells across the water before she glances up at Kai. With her fingers in front of his face, holding them barely apart, she murmurs that she was "thiiiiis close,", stretching the word until it almost loses meaning, because she truly had been, because the image of the Ark’s mast snapping had felt intoxicatingly easy.
At the mention of clauses, her smile flattens into something more exasperated. "If we tell," she says with a sigh that carries the weight of Jack's bitterness toward her, "everyone forgets about me." She gives her head a small shake, then looks at Kaisel with widened eyes for dramatic emphasis. "Everyone except Jack." The absurdity of it hovers there, but she says it casually, because she doesn’t believe for a second that reality will ever bend that way; she has no intention of breaking her word, and neither does he, so the nightmare remains theoretical, a ghost story told for leverage. She shrugs, brushing it off as though it were no more significant than a poorly written addendum. "I added that if he breaks his side, he loses his revivify feather," she continues, turning the wheel a fraction as the Sugartide catches a cleaner current. "Which basically means he’s as good as dead."
real big things I still gotta figure out
